The Tower

1. Ascent

The electric lemons from VEB Narva decorating the tree were faulty, flickered on and off, erasing the silhouette of Dresden downstream. Christian took off his mittens, which were damp and covered with little balls of ice on the wool of the palms, and rubbed his almost numb fingers rapidly together, breathed on them — his breath a wisp of mist dispersing across the blackness of the entrance, hewn out of the rock, to the Buchensteig, which led up to Arbogast’s Institutes. The houses of Schillerstrasse disappeared in the dark; a cable ran from the nearest, a half-timbered house with bolted shutters, into the branches of one of the beeches that grew over the passage through the rock, where an Advent star was burning, bright and motionless. Christian, who had crossed the Blue Marvel — Loschwitz suspension bridge — and Körnerplatz, continued on his way out of the city, towards Grundstrasse, and soon reached the cable-car railway. The shutters were down over the windows of the shops he passed — a baker’s, a dairy, a fish shop; half in shadow already, the houses were gloomy and had ashy outlines. He felt as if they were huddling together, seeking protection from something indefinite, as yet unfathomable, that might float up out of the darkness — just as the January moon had floated up out of the darkness over the Elbe when Christian had stopped on the deserted bridge and looked at the river, the thick woollen scarf his mother had knitted pulled tight round his ears and cheeks against the icy-keen wind. The moon had risen slowly, detaching itself from the coldly sluggish mass of the river, which looked like liquid earth, to stand alone over the meadows with their willows wreathed in mist, the boathouse on the Old Town bank of the Elbe and the range of hills disappearing in the direction of Pillnitz. The clock on a distant church tower struck four, which surprised Christian.

He took the path up to the funicular railway, put his travel bag on the bench by the gate that closed off the platform and waited, his mittened hands in the pockets of his military-green parka. The hands of the station clock over the conductor’s shed seemed to move forward very slowly. Apart from him, there was no one waiting for the funicular, and to pass the time he examined the adverts. They hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. One was for the Café Toscana on the Old Town bank of the Elbe, another for Nähter’s, a shop farther along towards Schillerplatz, and a third for the Sibyllenhof Restaurant by the station at the top. In his mind Christian began to go through the fingering and melodic line of the Italian piece that they were going to play at his father’s birthday party. Then he looked into the darkness of the tunnel. A faint light was growing, gradually filling the cavity of the tunnel like water rising in a fountain, and at the same time the noise increased: a slate-like crackling and groaning, the steel-wire guide cable creaked under the load; jolting, the funicular approached, a capsule filled with an undersea glow, and two headlight eyes lit up the line. The hazy outlines of individual passengers could be seen in the carriage with, in the middle, the blurred shadow of the greybeard conductor — he had been on this section for years, up and down, down and up, always alternating, perhaps he closed his eyes to avoid the sight of the all-too-familiar scenes, or to see them with his inner eye and then repress them, to exorcize ghosts. But he could probably see by hearing, every jolt during the journey must have been familiar to him.

Christian picked up his bag, took out a groschen and spent the remaining moments contemplating the coin: the oak leaves beside the crudely cut ten, the tiny, worn year with the A underneath it, the obverse with the hammer, compasses and the wreath of grain, and he thought back to how often they, the children of Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite, had copied the embossed surface of these coins by placing them under a piece of paper and rubbing them with a pencil — Ezzo and Ina had been more skilful at it, and keener than him, back in the days of their childhood dreams of adventurous lives as forgers and robbers, like the heroes in the films at the Tannhäuser Cinema or in the books of Karl May and Jules Verne. The funicular, braking softly, came to a halt, and the doors, graded in height and sloping, released their passengers. The conductor got out, opened the gate and a narrow entrance beside it for the passengers who were going up. The gate had a coin-box attached, and Christian dropped his fare in and pulled down the lever on the side; the ten-pfennig piece slipped out of the rotating disc and joined the others on the bottom. Instead of the groschen, the local children sometimes put in flat stones that had been ground smooth by the Elbe and which they called ‘butties’, or buttons — much to the annoyance of their mothers — who were sorry to lose them, for the little aluminium coins were easy to get while buttons, on the other hand, were difficult to find. The doors were closed; if you wanted to get into the carriage in the winter, you had to pull a cable to open them; they closed as soon as you let go. The conductor had gone into his shed, poured himself a coffee and watched the passengers hurrying off, disappearing like shadows round the corners to Körnerplatz or Pillnitzer Landstrasse.

After a few minutes a weary-sounding voice came from the loudspeaker above the adverts and said something in a Saxon accent that Christian couldn’t understand; but the conductor stood up and carefully closed the door to his shed. Slowly, the round leather change-bag dangling over his well-worn uniform, he went to the driver’s cabin at the front — its many control buttons seemed pointless to Christian, since the funicular was steered by the cable and rollers and was brought to a halt automatically, if the cable should tear, by a sophisticated clasp mechanism. Perhaps the buttons were there for some other reason, perhaps for communication or for psychological purposes: the buttons must have some meaning, a function, and would demand knowledge, guard against monotony and work-weariness; moreover, halfway along, one of the cars had to move onto a siding to allow the other to pass. The cabin door closed behind the conductor with a crash; it was opened with a box spanner and was not connected to the cable for the other doors.

‘The train is about to depart,’ said the voice from the loudspeaker. The carriage remained motionless for a moment, then smoothly started moving, gliding out of the station. Christian turned round and watched the path and platform grow smaller, until all that remained was the oval of the tunnel entrance against the flinty green of the sky; gradually that grew smaller as well, and darkness pressed in from either side. For a short while, before the exit came into view, the only light was provided by the dim tunnel lamps and the headlights. Christian took a book out of his bag; his Uncle Meno had given it to him. He had hardly had time to look at it during the previous week: the pre-Christmas mood had spread round Waldbrunn, and though the lessons weren’t as strict as usual, preparations for the birthday party, and the daily bus journeys home to rehearse the Italian piece with the others, had taken up his time. Christian intended to read the book more thoroughly during the Christmas holidays. It was a fairly fat tome, printed on fibrous paper and bound in coarse linen; he knew the picture on the cover from a facsimile edition of the Manesse Manuscript he had seen in his uncle’s library and at the Tietzes’, in a particularly handsome and well-preserved example — Niklas, Ezzo’s and Reglinde’s father, often read it. The picture showed the legendary figure of Tannhäuser, a man with long red hair in a blue robe with a white cloak, a black cross on his breast; on either side above him were his coat of arms and a winged helmet, both black at the top and yellow below, above stylized tendrils with leaves; ‘Tanhuser’, as his name was written above the plate, had raised his left hand to ward off, or perhaps cautiously greet, someone or something; his right hand was holding his cloak. Christian opened the volume — Old German Poems, selected and edited with notes by Meno Rohde — and returned to the legend he’d been reading on the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. The lamp on the ceiling above him started to make a rasping noise, the page the book was opened at had a pale, grainy look and, with the gentle vibration of the carriage, the letters started to blur before his eyes. He couldn’t concentrate on the story of the Knight of the Golden Spur who had set out with seventy-two ships to free Queen Bride. The lamp went out. He put the book back in his bag, and felt for the barometer, a present for his father that he had collected from the former lodge of the Association of Elbe Boatmen. It was safely packed and cushioned in the bundle of dirty laundry that filled his bag.

In its slow but steady upward climb, occasionally jolted by unevennesses between the rollers, the funicular reached Buchensteig, the path that ran alongside the track, and continued parallel to it for a while, a few metres above the ground. You could see into lighted windows; an outstretched hand could easily have touched the passing carriage. At the top the Sibyllenhof restaurant, which had been closed for several years, came into view beside the second tunnel; its terraces stuck out like school slates that had been forgotten there by giant children years ago. The carriage would head straight towards the restaurant, only turning off into the entrance of the tunnel that led to the station shortly before it reached the bottom terrace. On some journeys Christian had dreamt of bygone banquets in the dark, uninviting rooms: of gentlemen pursuing cultured conversations, wearing starched shirts with jet buttons and watch chains over the pockets of their waistcoats; of flower sellers in pages’ uniforms, called to a table with the hint of a click of the fingers, to present ladies, wearing masses of jewellery which gave off fiery sparks under the bowls of the crystal chandeliers, with a rose; of dances for which the band struck up, the pale violinist with pomaded hair and wearing a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole … The light of the January moon slid over the roofs of the houses that sloped steeply down to Grundstrasse, making the ridges shine and giving the snowy gardens patches of powdery brightness which, with the white highlights of isolated, snow-covered sheds or stacks of wood, merged at the edges with the shadows cast by the bushes and trees.

Christian realized they were above the painter and illustrator Vogelstrom’s house, a grey castle that Meno called ‘Cobweb House’, sparking off in Christian’s mind a vision which, as he looked out of the window, his face close to the cold glass, lurked behind the everyday sobriety of the unapproachable windows and tall trees. In the towering mass of the Loschwitz slopes, on the other side of Grundstrasse, which was partly visible as a pale ribbon winding in the depths, the needles of moonlight were sucked into the darkness in front of the watch towers of East Rome and faded at the bridge, across which soldiers were heading for the checkpoint on Oberer Plan. The garden of Cobweb House was in darkness, sheltered from eyes and events, and Christian could hardly even see the tops of the pear and beech trees, with their dusting of snow and their filigree branches hanging like wisps of smoke over the depths; it flowed into the contours, the narrow cleft between the Buchensteig path and the battlements, like brightness in the cross-hatching on old, unfinished drawings. He saw the fountain, the almost completely overgrown driveway that curved round the weathered stone catfish on the fountain and led up over mossy steps; the beginning of a poem had been chiselled into the panel over the catfish, but the letters were blurred, already half erased. However hard he tried, Christian couldn’t remember how the poem went, but he could clearly picture the broken-off barbels of the catfish, its sightless eyes and the dark covering of moss; he remembered his superstitious fear of the beast, and also of the long-defunct fountain that gave off a graveyard chill when he went to see Vogelstrom with Meno, and his almost childish fear, which was only made greater by the strange conversations that took place between Meno and the gaunt painter in Cobweb House. But it was less the words and topics themselves that had seemed strange than the atmosphere of the house; with his childish understanding, the little that had been comprehensible to the boy of eleven or twelve seemed right and appropriate for the adult world that bent down to him from its heights. He could remember words such as ‘Merigarto’ or ‘Magelone’, words which, in his awakening surmise, seemed more like conjurations than concepts that meant something in the real world, words that touched him in a curious way and that he was never to forget, even though they had seemed less mysterious than the paintings in the gloomy hall of the house: idyllic landscapes, garden scenes with flute-playing fauns and naiads flooded with bright blue light, a Dutch-brown series of ancestors, serious-looking men and women with a flower, a nettle or — he had looked at this for a long time in astonishment — holding a golden snail. These paintings, fading away in the hall, which Vogelstrom and Meno only rarely glanced at as they passed them, seemed to have much more to do with those two words: the one for the island and the other the name of a girl who appeared out of the depths of time and disappeared back into them; he had noted them and repeatedly savoured their long-forgotten euphony in murmured soliloquies. Sound, too, had stayed with him from their conversations, like the babble of a stream from Vogelstrom’s studio, which was so cold in the winter that frost sent out tentacles towards the easels and the lozenge-patterned wallpaper, and the two men, Meno with Vogelstrom’s coat over his shoulders, Vogelstrom himself in several pullovers and shirts, hurried round the room with steaming breath, their voices scarcely distinguishable when they were in the library and Christian was looking at one of the ancestors’ portraits in the hall and listening; now and then there was the sound of cautious laughter, expressions of praise for, or disgust with, the tobacco they happened to be smoking. Sometimes Meno would call out and show him steel or copper engravings in musty-smelling tomes, the painter cautiously turning the pages, and it was probably then that they uttered the strange words that stuck in his ear, words he had never heard before, words like those two magical names.

The lamp above him flickered on again. From above, out of the darkness below the tunnel and the Sibyllenhof, the descending funicular crept towards them, reaching the loop where the track split and one could move out of the way of the other. The driver was a motionless shadow in the passing capsule, which had no passengers, and he replied to the greybeard conductor’s greeting with a brief nod before the carriage continued down and disappeared from view.

Christian remembered that it was in Cobweb House that he had first heard something about Poe; Meno and Vogelstrom had been looking at illustrations to one of Poe’s stories. He particularly remembered one print — Vogelstrom’s needle had etched an elaborate picture of a castle rising up into the darkness of the nocturnal countryside; then one of Prince Prospero and his retinue of a thousand ladies and knights in the castle with the welded bolts on the doors; he saw them again, as he had all those years ago under Vogelstrom’s thin, slim-fingered hand, strolling and chatting, as if the company were alive and playing their merry games, while outside the plague was raging, devastating the land, as if Prospero were passing through the rooms amid the frenzy of a masked ball — music swelled, and the chimes of the ebony clock in the black chamber echoed and faded in the vastness of the castle, and in the six other chambers the people were dancing, for Prince Prospero would not countenance sadness, and the cries of the despairing populace could no longer be heard over the music, the singing and laughter, the barking of the dogs outside the gates.

The carriage was slowing down, coasting the last few metres. Lost in his thoughts and memories, Christian had hardly noticed it enter the upper tunnel, which, with its whitewashed walls, was brighter than the lower one, he had merely glanced automatically, but without really taking anything in, at the upper station with its cheerful bright paint and gracefully curving roof, the red-brick building with the neon sign: Funicular Railway, the machine room and the waiting room where you could examine photographs of earlier models and technical details in a glass display case. The funicular came to a halt, shuddering gently. The doors opened with a clatter. Christian slung his bag over his shoulder and, still immersed in thought, went up the shallow steps of the station towards the exit gate.

The conductor shuffled off in the direction of the waiting room, felt for a button concealed in the wall; there was a buzz, the gate opened and Christian went out. He was home, in the Tower.

2. Mutabor

‘Great that I caught you. I was thinking I’d have to come back again.’

‘Meno! You’ve come to meet me?’

‘Anne has had to find somewhere else for Robert and you to stay tonight. You’re sleeping at my place.’

‘So many guests?’ Christian only asked so that he could hide his delight behind a casual-sounding question. He already knew. The vast amount of baking ingredients that had been procured during the last few weeks and piled up in the larder of Caravel indicated the number of guests they expected for the birthday party — and had convinced him that coming home to stay in Caravel, except to take part in the rehearsals that would take place mainly at the Tietzes’, would be ill-advised; that is, if he didn’t want to irritate Anne, in her nervous state, by hanging about, or risk exposure to her suspicious gaze and end up, once excuses were no longer possible, being sent off to Konsum or Holfix larded with shopping lists, or to face never-ending stacks of dishes in the kitchen.

‘There were at least thirty of us for coffee this afternoon and the official celebrations only start later; more people are sure to be coming then.’

They were walking along Sibyllenleite.

‘And where’s Robert sleeping?’

‘At the Tietzes’.’

So his brother would be spending the night in Evening Star. Christian put his mittens back on and thought of the House with a Thousand Eyes, where he would be spending the night, in a quite different atmosphere from that at home in Caravel.

‘I decided to come and meet you so that you didn’t go home first. Anne has already taken your cello with her to the Felsenburg.’

Christian nodded and looked at his uncle, who had taken his hat off and removed the snowflakes with a few flicks. ‘Since when have you been wearing that?’

‘Anne bought it for me in Exquisit. Said it ought to suit me. A good style too.’ Meno looked at the writing on the sweatband. ‘A delivery arrived from Yugoslavia. Anne said people were queuing all the way back to Thälmannstrasse, at least fifty metres. They didn’t have one for your father.’ He put his hat back on. ‘Did everything work out with the barometer?’

‘As agreed. Two hundred and fifty marks. Lange even cleaned it up and polished it again.’

‘Good. Shall I take your bag?’

‘Oh, it’s not that heavy, but thanks, Meno. Apart from the barometer, it’s only dirty laundry.’

They came to Turmstrasse, the main through-road of the district, and from which it derived its popular name of the ‘Tower’. Meno walked with more measured steps than Christian; he had taken out a briar pipe with a curved stem and a spherical bowl and was filling it from a leather pouch. Christian raised his nose and sniffed, sucking in the vanilla fragrance that mingled with the aroma of figs and cedar-wood. Alois Lange, a former ship’s doctor and Meno’s neighbour in the House with a Thousand Eyes, got a box of the tobacco every year from the deputy chairman of the Copenhagen Nautical Academy, and he gave half to Meno — the ship’s doctor had once saved the deputy chairman’s life and thus, to the annoyance of Lange’s wife, Libussa, there was never a shortage of tobacco in the House with a Thousand Eyes. A match flared up, illuminating Meno’s lean, pale features and bluish five-o’clock shadow; the reflection flickered in his brown eyes, which were warmed by a few flashes of green — they were Anne’s eyes, and those of her other brother, Ulrich, the eyes of the Rohdes; Christian had inherited them too.

‘Did you get through all right? The Eleven was cancelled this morning. It was an hour before the replacement came. The curses at the stop’ — Meno sucked at his pipe to get it going — ‘would have been something for “Look & Listen”. And the Six had a diversion.’ His pipe still wasn’t going, he lit another match.

‘I noticed.’

‘Anne was going to ring you, but the lines didn’t seem to be working or something, I don’t know what was broken again — she couldn’t get through at all.’ His pipe was finally going, and he blew out puff after puff of smoke.

‘Yesterday it snowed like mad higher up, the snow’s more than a metre deep in Zinnwald and Altenberg, I was getting worried the bus wouldn’t go. Near Karsdorf we had to get out and help the driver shovel the snow away. The brushwood barrier in the fields had fallen over, and all the new snow had been blown onto the road.’

Meno nodded and gave his nephew, who was almost as tall as he was and was tramping through the powder snow a little in front, a thoughtful look. ‘How are things at school? Are you managing?’

‘Pretty well so far. People stare at me a bit because I’m from Dresden. Civics is as usual.’

‘And the teacher? Is he dangerous?’

‘Hard to say. He’s also our principal. If you just regurgitate what he says, you’re left in peace. The Russian teacher’s pretty devious. One of the quiet types, very observant, a Party fanatic. There’s something feline about him, he creeps round the corridors and checks on us in the hostel. Today he turned up in white gloves and felt in all the corners to see if they were really clean. I’m sure everyone in the next room missed their bus — he found an apple core under the lockers, and they had to clean the place again.’

‘Is he provocative?’

‘He certainly is.’

‘Be careful. They’re the worst. I know the type. You always have the feeling they can see through you — you can’t look them in the eye, you become nervous, make mistakes. And that’s the mistake.’

‘That’s true, about being seen through. He has such a piercing look, whenever he looks at me I always think he can read my thoughts.’

‘But he can’t. Don’t let tricks like that make you nervous.’

‘ “A wise man walks with his head bowed, humble like the dust.” ’

Meno looked at Christian in surprise.

‘I made a note of it, Meno.’

The snow, criss-crossed with sledge tracks, reflected the sparse light from the lamps; it covered the garden walls, and the roofs of the few cars that were parked by the pavement, with thick caps. On the left, the houses of Holländische Leite appeared, almost all of them belonging to the Baron’s Institute: Baron Ludwig von Arbogast, who in the district was generally called by his inherited title and whose huge premises on Unterer Plan, to which Holländische Leite led, were referred to, half admiringly, half suspiciously, as ‘the Institute’. The Baron was the sponsor of the school Christian had attended until the previous summer, and whenever he had seen the Baron, he recalled a conversation between Meno and his father: how to reconcile Arbogast’s soigné appearance — he wore bespoke suits and carried a stick with a silver handle — with the weathered and grey, but still clearly legible, inscription over the central building of the Institute: FOR SOCIALISM AND PEACE; and ‘baron’, the title that was clearly written on the boards and signposts in the Institute gardens, with the workers’ state. It was a question Christian would have liked to ask his civics teacher.

The lights were still on in the Institute buildings on Turmstrasse. Arbogast’s little observatory, which had not been open to the public for ages, even though a sign in front of it promised a ‘People’s Observatory’, was shielded by a sweet chestnut that stretched its branches far out over the footpath. A sundial with its gnomon was rusting away in the ivy that covered the crumbling plaster. Meno was the person Christian would have thought most likely to have had a look inside the door at the rear of the observatory; he had often observed him when astronomy and astrology cropped up in conversations: his uncle adopted an attitude somewhere between latent amusement and concealed interest and scrutinized the newspaper cuttings and pamphlets the guests had brought, quietly leaning against the wall in a corner, his round-bowled pipe in his mouth, listening to his brother, Ulrich, animatedly discuss astronomy in Far Eastern antiquity.

‘I was reading your book just now.’

Smoke rose in thick clouds from the bowl of his pipe. ‘Strange old things,’ Meno muttered at the crossing of Turmstrasse and Wolfsleite. ‘Hardly anyone knows them any more. The censors, probably, and the Old Man of the Mountain. The book brought me a thumping great letter from him, from East Rome to West Rome, so to speak. Took three days to arrive when all the old man needed to do was to walk across the bridge. But they said he was ill. — Otherwise people tended to look askance at me because of it.’

‘The book doesn’t provide an answer to the question of how the steel was tempered.’

‘Eisenhüttenstadt doesn’t appear in it.’ Meno waved his pipe. ‘Nor does Parsifal represent a clear revolutionary proletarian standpoint, and in general the class-consciousness of the knights leaves much to be desired.’

‘And the Merseburg Charms are much too formalistic?’

‘It’s not quite that bad any longer.’

‘The Lay of Hildebrand, the beginning?’ Christian gave his uncle a pleading look. Meno took another suck at his pipe and began to recite. Fascinated as always, Christian listened to the pleasant timbre of his voice, the stage diction; he was strangely moved by the ancient language and its power, especially the ‘I heard tell / that in single combat / two warriors did meet’ of the beginning and by the ‘sonandfather’ of the fourth line. As they walked on slowly, Meno continued to recite beyond the opening, had already reached the thirteenth line, ‘all great folk I ken in this kingdom’; as he walked on, nodding his head to the rhythm of the lines, he spoke of the wrath of Odoacer, of Theoderic and the torc wrought of the Emperor’s gold that had been given to him by the king, the lord of the Huns, and how father and son fought ‘till their shields were shattered, slashed by their swords’. A light breeze had sprung up, and the trees on either side of the street began to sway, snow drifted down from the branches. They had now reached Wolfsleite, and the broad bulk of Wolfstone lay there like a ship with lights ablaze; in the ‘bassoon’, as the octagonal extension was called, the ‘story-lamp’ was smoking: so they’ll be telling each other stories, Christian thought, and in his mind’s eye he saw his uncle, the toxicologist Hans Hoffmann, explaining monkshood and woody nightshade, which he grew in the ‘bassoon’ himself, to Fabian and Muriel; he thought of Malivor Marroquin, the white-haired Chilean who ran the fancy-dress shop and a photographic studio next door — when he was fourteen, Christian had had to go there to have his photograph taken by Marroquin, for his ID card; quotations from Lenin’s works lined the walls of the staircase that led up to the heavy Ernemann plate camera, and they were mutely scrutinized by the queue of boys and girls with their neatly combed hair; at the top the Chilean shouted, ‘Plizz lukk at liddel gold-finsh, plizz lukk naow’, at which one had to direct one’s gaze at a little red bird that was clipped to the edge of a screen with a clothes peg.

‘There’s a soirée tomorrow,’ Meno said, pointing to Dolphin’s Lair, the house opposite Wolfstone, which looked delicately and flimsily built, with the curve of the roof like an upper lip and the large scroll over the coving of a wall. ‘Soirée’ meant that Frau von Stern had sent out invitations in copperplate script on hand-made paper, invitations to share her memories of the Winter Palace and Dresden Castle, for she had been a lady-in-waiting.

The Italian House was on Wolfsleite as well; Ulrich, Christian’s other Rohde uncle, and his family lived there. Ulrich was a director of one of the state-owned companies; his wife, Barbara, worked as a furrier and ladies’ tailor in the Harmony Salon on Rissleite. Sometimes Christian would go to see the Rohdes, for some more or less valid reason, so that he could have a good look at the staircase and landing, and the art nouveau details in their apartment. No side of the house was like any of the others. The stairwell stuck out at the front, like the bow of a ship, the shape emphasized by four windows, a single one higher up and three a little lower down, as in a gallery. The lone upper window, over which the roof described an elongated curve, was like an oversized keyhole. Christian put his bag down and went in through the double doors, each shaped like the prow of a gondola, to switch the light on. The portico, an Oriental-looking pavilion set in the masonry, was lit by the hall windows, which had been decorated, as in Dolphin’s Lair, with flowers and plants. Dame’s violets wound their way up the storeys as far as the keyhole window, interrupted by a keystone between the floors that was adorned with two facing sandstone spirals. And to the left, on the side of the jutting-out stairwell that faced Turmstrasse, a decrepit oriel was squatting on its corbel; it belonged to the Rohde apartment. In many places, the plaster revealed the bricks that had been eaten away by time and rain.

‘Shall we ring? — No,’ Meno murmured. ‘Come on.’ They continued on their way, Meno head bowed, hands in his coat pockets, hat pulled down over his face.

On Mondleite the elms were stretching out their skeleton branches against the sky. It began to snow. The flakes gusted and drifted across the road, which hardly had enough room for the Ladas, Trabants and Wartburgs that squeezed up against the very edge, here and there shouldering aside the broken, weather-beaten fences, overgrown with brambles. The mantles of the lamps that were still working began to flutter, reminding Christian of the visions he’d had during evening walks of carriages appearing outside the silent houses that had withdrawn into the past, emerging from the nocturnal haziness of Mondleite and Wolfsleite on winter evenings such as this and driving up or away, inaudible in the snow — ladies with ermine muffs got out after a zealous servant had opened the carriage door, the horses snorted and shuffled in their harnesses, scenting oats and sugar, their home stable, and then the gate with the two sandstone balls on the pillars and the spiral lady’s tresses ornament carved on the arch opened, cries rang out, a chambermaid hurried down the steps to take the luggage … Christian started when he heard a barn owl screech. Meno pointed to the oak trees by the House with a Thousand Eyes, which had come into view, half hidden behind the gate and the massive copper beech. It stood at the side of a wider stretch of road, into which Mondleite led, and which, where the oak trees grew, formed a sharp bend between Mondleite and Planetenweg. Meno took out the key, but the house still seemed far away to Christian, inaccessible, woven into the beech tree branches as if in a large coral in the night. The shriek of a barn owl came from the park that fell away steeply from Mondleite and was separated from the garden of the House with a Thousand Eyes by a line of Bhutan pines, whose resinous fragrance mingled with the metallic smell of the snowy air. ‘Here we are, then.’

And Christian thought, Yes, here we are. This is your home. And when I go in, when I cross the threshold, I will be transformed. The Teerwagens across the road seemed to be having a party; a clatter of laughter came from the physicist’s apartment in the house that Christian and Meno called the ‘Elephant’ — massy, yet elegantly proportioned, undulating at the rounded corner of the façade with oyster-like balconies and rusty flowers sitting on its art nouveau railings like large-winged, melancholy moths. Meanwhile, Meno had scraped out his pipe, chewed a few mints, then gone on ahead, down the path of broken sandstone slabs that were bordered by hedges of sweet briar. He opened the door with an ornate key that had been stained with brazing solder. Christian would often see the key in his mind’s eye when he was lying in bed in his boarder’s room in Waldbrunn and think: the House with a Thousand Eyes. As he adjusted his bag over his shoulder, he felt warmed by Meno’s ‘here’: it took in the whole district, the villas all around in the darkness and snow, the gardens and the barn owl still calling in the depths of the park, the copper beech, the names. Meno switched on the hall light; the house seemed to open its eyes. Christian touched the sandstone of the arch; he also touched — a superstition, the origin of which was lost — the wrought-iron flower on the gate, a strangely shaped ornament that could often be seen up here: petals curving out in snail-like whorls round a curving stem which was also encircled by several coils of an elaborate spiral; a plant that, with its aura of beauty and danger, had already fascinated Christian as a child — sometimes he would spend half an hour contemplating the bee lily. The name came from Meno. Christian followed his uncle into the house.

3. The House with a Thousand Eyes

The door, rounded at the top, with wrought-iron hinges, fell shut. Meno didn’t take his coat off. In a vase on the table below the hall mirror, there was a bouquet of roses; Meno carefully wrapped it in paper that was waiting there. ‘From Libussa’s conservatory,’ he said proudly. ‘You just try to get something like that in Dresden at this time of year. Just see what the others have to offer: Centraflor only has funeral wreaths, poinsettias and cyclamen.’ Meno picked up a slim package that was beside the vase.

‘Anne’s brought a few things for you, up in the cabin. What shall we do with the barometer? I promised Anne I’d be there a bit before things start.’

‘Have you any wrapping paper?’

‘In the kitchen.’

‘Then I’ll take some weather all wrapped up with me.’

‘Nicely put, my friend. Before you go, will you please check the stove? Towels are upstairs. You can have a shower if you want, the boiler’s on.’

‘Had one already, back at the hostel.’

‘I’ll leave the key here for you. I’ve also told Libussa, in case there should be a problem.’

Meno went into the living room. Not long after, Christian, who had taken his shoes and parka off, heard the clatter of the stove door and the thump of briquettes. The tongs clanged against the ash-pan, Meno came back. There was a gurgle of water from the kitchen. ‘And don’t give in to Baba if he comes begging, he’s had enough already, the fat beast. Leave him in the hall, the heat will all be gone if the living-room door’s left open, and I don’t want to see a disgusting mess like we had the day before yesterday ever again.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Calmly did his business behind the ten-minute clock. And I was only away for an hour!’

Christian laughed. Meno, checking his appearance and adjusting his tie in the mirror, growled, ‘Such a lazybones. I didn’t feel like laughing, I can tell you. And the stench! … Ah, well. Please bear that in mind.’

‘How are things at work?’

‘Later,’ said Meno at the door and, holding the slim package and the flowers he’d put in a bag, tipped his hat.

Christian took a pair of felt slippers out of the shoe cabinet by the door, started, and quickly looked round. He’d heard a creak, perhaps from the kitchen, perhaps from upstairs, where the cabin was — that was what Meno and the ship’s doctor called the bedroom where Christian was going to sleep. Perhaps the floorboards under the worn runner were moving. Christian waited, but there was nothing more to be heard. He slowly took in the familiar but still astonishing things: the dark-green, slightly faded fabric wallcovering with the plant and salamander motifs in the hall; the oval mirror, whose silvering was tarnished in places and had taken on a leaden tone; the wardrobe by the unseasoned pine stairs — as a child, he’d sometimes hidden there, among cardboard boxes with spare bulbs and work clothes, when he’d been playing ‘cops and robbers’ with Robert and Ezzo; and the hall light with the green clay toucan, which hung from it motionless and could perhaps, with its sad-looking, painted button eyes, see as far as Peru. That was where Alice and Sandor had brought it from years ago — ‘Aunt’ Alice and ‘Uncle’ Sandor, as Christian and Robert called them, although that wasn’t quite correct: Sandor was the cousin of their father, Richard Hoffmann. Christian remembered that he would see them again later that evening — they were visiting from South America; they lived in Quito, the capital of the Andean state of Ecuador; he was looking forward to it; he liked them both. So as not to disturb something for which he had no other name than the ‘spirit of the house’, the djinn with a thousand eyes that were never all asleep at the same time, Christian quietly placed the slippers in front of him on the floor, put them on and went into the living room.

As far as he could tell from a quick look round, nothing had changed since his last visit. Even the fat, cinnamon-coloured tomcat, Chakamankabudibaba, welcomed him in the same way as he had on that evening two weeks ago: blinking one eye, then yawning and showing his claws as he stretched, as if the light suddenly going on had woken him from dreams of murder. He sniffed Christian’s hand and, finding nothing edible in it, rolled over lazily onto his side to let his tummy be scratched. Christian murmured the cat’s full name, at which it made growling noises. Chakamankabudibaba, the name Meno had found in one of Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tales, was not one you could use to call him for a long time in the evening or morning. But since the dignified feline did as he liked, a curt, crisp name, which could be called out repeatedly with no great effort, was no use anyway — if Chakamankabudibaba was hungry or, as now in the winter, wanted to sleep in the warm, he would come, if he wasn’t hungry, he wouldn’t. When Christian turned him over on his back to scratch his expansive tummy, the cat gave a grunt, of disgust, and chattered angrily, but he was far too listless to do anything about it. His four paws remained stuck up in the air, like the legs of a roast goose; the cat graciously stretched his neck and already his eyes were clouding over; he would presumably have fallen asleep in that pharaonic posture if Christian hadn’t given him a little prod so that he sank back onto his side.

The yellow curtain was drawn over the door with the pointed arch. It led out onto a balcony that seemed to dream over the grounds of the House with a Thousand Eyes in the summer, like a fruit on a tall plant bending with motherly pride over the garden blooming all around; then the doors and windows of the room would be left open until it was dark to let the light and odours pour in from the garden. Christian looked at the clock: four forty-six; soon, five sonorous chimes would drift round the room and the whole house. Ever since he was a child, Christian had been fascinated by the strange design of the clock; he’d often stood looking at it as Meno explained the mechanism of the pendulum and the movement: the clock struck every ten minutes, once at ten past, twice at twenty past, three times at half past and so on; six times for the full hour, which struck momentously after a short pause; at midnight or noon, eighteen chimes rang out. But what impressed Christian most was the second dial below the clock face: a brass ring, tarnished in places, with the signs of the zodiac engraved round the edge; a symbol of the sun travelled round the zodiacal circle, indicating sidereal time. Constellations had been embossed on the ring, and the engraver had made the main stars somewhat larger than the others and connected them by needle-point lines. The Serpent-Bearer, the Hair of Berenice, the Northern Crown, the Whale — Christian remembered how enchanted he’d been by the names and their Latin translation when Meno recited them in a low, almost wistful voice, pointing to the engraved signs as he did so — for the first time one evening about ten years ago, the names had trickled into his seven-year-old’s ear like some indeterminate but pleasant substance, and they had given him his first sense that in the adult world, which was also the world of the incomprehensible giant that was standing beside him, a giant who lived in very different regions and whom his mother called Brother dear or Mo, that in the adult world there were very interesting, very special things, secrets; and in his child’s mind something must have happened or, hidden away, have grown and suddenly burst open: since that day, Christian had never forgotten the words, their strange, peculiar sound. Ophiuchus. Coma Berenices, Corona Borealis, Cetus. He quietly repeated the names. The clock struck four fifty. It’ll only take a few minutes to get down there, Christian thought, there’s still plenty of time, the party only starts at six, no need to rush. — He only found out that Meno had been using Latin later, from Ulrich, he thought, or from Niklas, on that evening at the Tietzes’ when they were talking about legends.

He went to the table beside the crammed bookshelves his father had made out of plain boards, examined the books and periodicals piled up on top of each other. Even here there had hardly been any changes since his last visit: an issue of Nature with a newspaper wrapper was still lying beside several specialist biological periodicals, all covered with a fine layer of dust, and a few fairly well-thumbed copies of Weimarer Beiträge. Beside them was that day’s edition of Die Union, the paper of the CDU, neatly folded, the grainy paper smelling of newsprint. Curious, Christian fingered a leather-bound book, opened it and read the title: The Ages of the World, F. W. J. Schelling; the book beside it had the same author and was also bound in leather: Bruno, or On the Natural and the Divine Principle of Things. Christian picked it up; it was a quarto volume, and a cloud of dust rose from the marbled edges when he blew on it. It still wasn’t clean, so Christian took out his handkerchief, but as he was trying to hold both covers, the pages suddenly fanned out and a few pieces of paper escaped; as he bent down to retrieve them, the book fell onto the floor. Chakamankabudibaba shot up as if he’d had an electric shock and looked at him with green eyes. Christian hastily picked up the scattered pieces of paper and put them back in the book. But they might now all be in the wrong place, so he put the volume back on the table and tried to rectify his clumsiness by opening the book at random: when you did that a book would often open at frequently consulted pages. That didn’t seem to be the case here: it was virgin paper, with none of Meno’s usual underlinings or notes in the margins. Despite that, Christian inserted one of the slips of paper, repeated the process, several times opening the book at the page where he had just inserted the first note, but finally he had all the pieces of paper back in. Feeling apprehensive, he replaced the books in their original positions.

The cat had closed its eyes again and put its head back on its paws, just the tip of its tail was slowly curving to and fro, as if there were another cat inside the visible, cinnamon-coloured Chakamankabudibaba, one that was not yet asleep and was watching the young man, who was listening anxiously by the table, with intense concentration. The six bulbs radiating from the cone-shaped lamp spread a canopy of diffuse brightness over the desk and the cat in its chair. In the distant gloom, the books on the shelves that went up to the ceiling, the plants in the corner by the stove, seemed to be looking at Christian, as if even at this late hour they had been called up from an Otherrealm and whoever had called them had forgotten to say the magic word that would allow them to return. The clock too seemed to be looking at him with both its time-circles. There was no sound to be heard, apart from the regular tick-tock, the rattle of the shutters when the wind got under them and the draught in the stove. Christian went into the kitchen and took a pair of work gloves out of the coal box under the oven, checked whether the bolts on the damper and the ash-pan were closed properly and tightened up the screws a little. He could feel the heat of the metal, even through the heavy material of the gloves; he couldn’t touch the tiles around the stove door without having to draw his fingers away immediately. Yet it was still only moderately warm in the living room; the House with a Thousand Eyes was old — the windows didn’t fit tightly any more, there were cracks in the wood, and the heat seeped out into the corridor.

His father had made the desk, as a wedding present for Meno, with all the meticulousness and attention to detail he showed in matters of craftsmanship. The wood still seemed to smell of the forest, even though the desk had been under the large window for seven years and had absorbed the odour of tobacco. Richard had built it across the corner; the desktop was more than three metres long, and he had managed to make it fit both the cramped proportions of the room and the space by the window — to the right was the arched door leading out onto the balcony, to the left a solid larch cupboard that the previous owners had left because it was simply immovable: it wouldn’t go through the door, it had originally had to be lifted in through the window by a crane. Meno had arranged two workplaces on the desk: one for his slide preparations, dissecting instruments, specialist periodicals and microscope; the other for his typewriter and manuscript folders. Christian switched on the table lamp but didn’t touch anything, and he was careful not to get too close to the desk, Meno’s holy of holies. He looked at the photos: the three Rohde children in their parents’ lounge in Bad Schandau; Meno dissecting in the Zoological Institute of Karl-Marx University, Leipzig; as a boy of eleven or twelve, already wearing his hair with a parting, collecting botanical samples with his father, the ethnologist, near Rathen; a photo of Hanna, Meno’s ex-wife. Beside them were piles of letters, newspaper cuttings, writing paper covered in Meno’s fine, flowing, yet difficult-to-read handwriting — for many of the letters he still used the old German script which had not been taught nor generally used for a long time. Christian saw a few books published by Dresdner Edition, for whom Meno worked. It was an imprint of the Berlin Hermes-Verlag and published books the like of which could not be found on the shelves of any of the bookshops Christian knew: leather-bound de-luxe editions, hand-printed on the best-quality paper, of works such as The Divine Comedy, Faust and other classics, most with illustrations. The larger part were earmarked for export to the ‘Non-Socialist Economic Area’. Many of the few remaining copies went to acquaintances and friends of the managing director or to book collectors in the higher reaches of the Party; Christian had never seen one of these books on sale in a Dresden bookshop, and even if he had, they would have been well beyond his means — the copy of The Divine Comedy that Meno possessed cost as much as a doctor’s monthly salary.

For quite a while Christian stood looking at the things on the desk, things he automatically connected with the House with a Thousand Eyes, and with Meno, when he thought of him from far away, during one of the long bus journeys to and from Waldbrunn or at school.

He switched the light off again, stood there for a few minutes in the gloom, listening, and then took Chakamankabudibaba into the kitchen and put him down on the kitchen bench, which annoyed the cat — it wasn’t as cosy there as in the living room next door. Chakamankabudibaba arched his back, meowed plaintively and jumped down to his feeding bowls. The milk in the dish beside the food bowl was sour, and there was a piece of meat floating in it. Christian poured it all down the toilet, washed the dish and filled it. Then he fetched the barometer and wrapped it in the gift paper.

As he went upstairs he suddenly heard voices. Perhaps Libussa, Lange’s wife from Prague, had visitors; but then he recognized the voices of Annemarie Brodhagen and Professor Dathe, the famous director of the East Berlin Zoo — Libussa had switched on the television and was watching Zoos round the World. For a moment Christian felt a twinge of envy: hearing the popular professor with the clear enunciation reminded him that the last episode of Oh, What Tenants — a Danish series in which many of the ‘Olsen gang’ appeared — was on that evening, a series he loved and had grown up with. He frowned as he switched on the stair light — a bronze flower with a bulb in it; the petals were bent.

He didn’t like big celebrations, as his father’s fiftieth birthday that evening would in all probability be; he preferred to be alone. It wasn’t that he was unsociable — his dislike of company was connected with his appearance. If there was one thing Christian felt ashamed of, it was his face, precisely what people looked at when they looked at you. Although his face was basically attractive and expressive, it was covered in acne and he felt horribly embarrassed at the thought of all the people who would give him searching, mocking or even revolted looks. It was precisely that expression, revulsion, which he feared; he had seen it often enough. Someone would turn round, look at him, and, unable to conceal their shock, or even repugnance, would openly show their reaction for a fraction of a second. Then they would control themselves, realize that Christian would presumably feel hurt if they gawped at him like that and quickly select a different expression, one that was as incurious as possible, from the stock of expressions people use when they meet someone they don’t know. But in fact it was precisely this incurious expression that hurt Christian even more; for him it was the admission that the other person had seen his disfigurement and was now ignoring it. Christian usually felt these slights so deeply that he burnt with shame. He tried to divert his thoughts from that as he slowly went up the stairs, but the closer he came to the cabin, where his dark suit and, certainly, his good English shirt would be awaiting him, the more and more uneasy he felt at the prospect of the party: all the questions people were bound to ask, mainly just for form’s sake, about how things were going at school, the well-meant advice that would follow, but above all playing his cello; even though he knew his part well, the mere thought of appearing in public made him uncomfortable.

The lamplight spread out palely over the worn stairs, hardly reaching the lower ones. The disagreeable questions and the attention focused on him were one thing, he thought, as he felt the banister, the irregularities and the grain that had been familiar since childhood. The other was the delicacies he was looking forward to, and not just since his breakfast in the hostel that morning — the same eternal constipating bread made of wheat and rye flour from the Konsum in Waldbrunn, spread with Elbperle mixed-fruit jam, syrup or black pudding — but ever since it had been agreed that the party would be held in the Felsenburg; after the small Erholung, it was the best restaurant for miles around. It wasn’t easy to even get a table in the Felsenburg, never mind to reserve the room for a large birthday gathering — as so often, it had only been made possible through connections: not long ago, the chef had been a patient of Christian’s father’s.

The ten-minute clock struck twenty past five. Professor Dathe’s voice had sunk to a low mumble; perhaps Libussa had only opened the living-room door for a moment, to see who had come into the building or to get something out of the kitchen. Since the new tenants in the top-floor apartment had arrived, the ‘Alois?’ or ‘Herr Rohde?’ that she unfailingly used to shout downstairs, however quietly you opened the door, was no longer to be heard. Christian stopped half-way up the stairs and imagined that he could hear Libussa’s high, rather husky voice, the rolled ‘R’ when she spoke his uncle’s surname, the slightly palatal ‘O’s which caused most visitors who didn’t know her to wonder where she came from. As far as he knew, she had worked as a secretary for the VEB Deutfracht shipping company and had moved to Dresden with her husband many years ago. The two of them could be seen together on some of the photographs on the staircase walls: a tall woman with a bony physique, shoulder-length hair and dark, fragile-looking eyes that seemed too big for her slim, heart-shaped face, and which regarded the observer with an expression somewhere between irritation and weariness; the lean man in the white uniform, with a searching look, hands casually stuck in his pockets and half turning away, so that the bright light of a summer’s day in Rostock harbour, some time in the fifties or sixties, left a patch of dazzling brightness on his shoulder, blending it into the background. In that picture, Christian thought, they looked like lovers who had been caught out, but perhaps they were both standing stiff as a poker because they were trying to fit in with the photographer’s idea of what a snapshot for the work team’s diary or the local section of the Baltic News should look like. On the picture beside it they were laughing, both had rucksacks slung over one shoulder and their hair was already grey; Libussa was pointing with her trekking pole into the vague distance: To Špindlerův Mlýn was written in thin handwriting on the mount; Christian had leant forward a little to decipher it. The edges of the photos were perforated, like postage stamps, and they all had the mildly dusty, shallow exposure that one got with ORWO black-and-white film.

The photos on the opposite wall, on the other hand, were quite different, and they had always aroused Christian’s admiration, and Robert’s and Ezzo’s when they were here: they were familiar with their sepia tones from the UFA film programmes that were hidden in a suitcase in the loft at Caravel — in those you could see film stars, hair precisely parted, surrounded by a faint nimbus, looking up confidently at wild mountainsides; there was no Piz Palü on the stairs, however, no dashing Johannes Heesters, but the Gulf of Salerno; the Naples coast road, the Posillipo; and Genoa harbour with the tall, massively castle-like lighthouse above it. In the past, the second flower lamp at the bottom by the entrance had worked, so that there was good light for looking at the pictures; there must be a fault in the wiring somewhere under the plaster since it still didn’t work with new bulbs. When he had been staying here, Christian had often crept down during the night to look at the photographs with a torch, sometimes with one of the miner’s lamps that were lying unused in the shed. He especially liked the three Italian ones and would marvel as he looked at them again and again, would stand there, as he did now, and let his eye wander over patches of light, houses and ships that seemed to have sprung from the sea. He went up the rest of the stairs to the top, each one creaking with a different, familiar sound. There was a dead bulb in the flat ring of lights on the upper landing as well, and the others flickered when he turned them on briefly, so as not to stumble over the coal boxes beside the Langes’ kitchen and the cabin. A strip of light could be seen under the door to the Langes’ living room; Professor Dathe had fallen silent, and a measured male voice, perhaps an announcer, had taken his place.

It was cold in the cabin; the tall cylindrical stove beside the door was only lukewarm, so Christian went to fetch a few briquettes and put them in. They clattered down the cast-iron shaft, flames shot up. In the bathroom next door, which the Langes, the Stahls and Meno shared — only the top-floor apartment had a small bathroom of its own — he washed his hands and shaved with the chunky Bebo Sher razor he had been given by his father. Then he changed, leaving his bag, still with all his things in it, on the bed where Anne had laid out linen, blankets and pyjamas for him, looked round the room once more and drew the curtain over the bullseye window before going downstairs.

He fetched the bag in which he’d put the barometer, left the kitchen door ajar for Chakamankabudibaba, checked his tie in the mirror. Now it was quiet; he could no longer hear Libussa’s television. He picked up the key and put out the light. As he closed the door, he heard the ten-minute clock strike five times; the chimes seemed to come from far, far away.

4. In the Felsenburg

‘The beautiful, refined Felsenburg, hot and cold running water in every room,’ he read on the enamel sign by the entrance. Brambles and roses cast shadows across the pavement, which had been swept and gritted as far as Vogelsang’s butcher’s shop. In the street the cars were closely parked — Christian had even seen the Opel Kapitän belonging to the director of the Surgical Clinic.

In the foyer, facing the stairs that led up to the rooms, there was a sign on an easel: PRIVATE PARTY — PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB. A bit of a cheek, Christian thought; after all, the Felsenburg did also offer accommodation and even though he knew from what his parents said that there was a direct connection between the goodwill of the restaurant staff, encouraged perhaps by repeatedly rounded-up bills, and the availability of certain tables close to the stove — especially now in winter — or clearly in the waiter’s field of vision, he could still, as he slowly walked towards the restaurant door, put himself in the place of one of the poor people who were staying the night but otherwise weren’t to disturb the private party. So there! But what had they had to eat?

‘Ah, the Herr Doktor’s eldest son, if I’m not mistaken?’ A half-smile flitted across Herr Adeling’s cheeks. ‘Of course you are, you’ve been here before, I remember. But you’ve grown since then, oh yes, tall oaks from little acorns grow, as they say. This way, please, your father’s birthday party has almost commenced.’ Herr Adeling hurried out through the flap in the reception desk and calmly took Christian’s coat. He was wearing classic waiter’s tails and there was a badge on his chest with his name engraved in clear, legible letters. He was against the decline in standards in the catering industry. One of Reglinde’s friends was in training with him and she had told Christian what that meant for the ‘bu-bils en-drusded to my kare’. That he only fell into the Saxon dialect in places where any genuine Saxon venturing out onto the slippery ice of High German would fail hopelessly could perhaps be explained by the fact that Adeling was still, as Reglinde’s friend, full of understanding, had told them, a ‘worr-k in bro-kress’. Because of his centre-parting and manner of speaking, the trainees had nicknamed him ‘Theo Lingen’ — like the film actor, Herr Adeling was also fond of pursing his lips, clasping his hands and, after briefly rocking on his immaculately polished shoes, gliding across the dining room, his head tilted to one side and swinging his arms gracefully. He was, as he said, ‘just one lin-g in the chain’, and for him the PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB sign could well be just one more example of the declining standards in the catering industry.

Christian entered the restaurant as the wall clock at reception was striking six. Herr Adeling followed him and stood by the door, hands clasped. All heads turned at Christian’s appearance and, feeling a blush spread over his face, he tried to make himself smaller. He was annoyed with himself. He had delayed setting off by having a look at Meno’s desk, so that the others wouldn’t have time to stare at him — but because he’d arrived on the dot, that was exactly what was happening and the feeling that the eyes of everyone in the room were on him was torture. Without looking at anyone in particular, head bowed, he nodded a greeting in the general direction of the tables, which were arranged in a rectangle and at which there must have been forty or fifty people sitting. On the right he saw the Tietze family, Meno beside them, Uncle Ulrich with his wife Barbara, Alice and Sandor. Anne was at the head of the table, between his father and the director of the Surgical Clinic. As he squinted, red as a beetroot and frowning in embarrassment, towards those seated at the tables, he also spotted Grandfather Rohde and Emmy, Robert’s and his grandmother on their father’s side. Had there been any possibility of going unseen to the empty seat between Robert and Ezzo at the lower end, of simply and suddenly appearing on the chair without anyone noticing, he would have chosen it without hesitation. He was, therefore, grateful that Professor Müller, the short, portly director, stood up at that moment and tapped his wine glass with a spoon, at which all heads turned towards him. By this time Ezzo had carefully pulled the chair back and Christian, on whose face the blush was gradually fading, sat down with a sigh of relief and, having clearly seen Anne’s look of disapproval, made a great show of leaning over to the side and hanging the bag with the barometer over the back of his chair. As he turned, he saw the mildly ironic expression in Meno’s eyes, for it was only recently that he had told Christian about the behaviour of the ostrich: ‘It sticks its head in the sand and waits — believing no one can see it because it can’t see anything itself. But that,’ Meno had added, ‘is not something for your civics teacher. Comparisons between humans and the animal kingdom are only permitted in limited cases, as sure as I’ve studied biology.’

Professor Müller took a step back and stood there, head bowed so that his double chins bulged out over the collar of his snow-white shirt, meditatively rubbing his cheeks, which were so closely shaven they shone like slabs of lard, and making his thick, black, owl-like eyebrows hop up and down. His cuff, standing out against his midnight-blue suit, slipped back, releasing a tuft of stiff black hair that continued down the back of his hand to the base of his fingers; he wore a signet ring on the little finger of his right hand. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, clearly the notes for a speech, glanced at it briefly and put it back with a weary flap of the hand. It didn’t go right in but stuck, like a blade, several centimetres out of his pocket, so that Müller had to push it down with a delicate but firm tap. He cleared his throat, patted his upper lip with his signet ring.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Goethe himself said that in the life of a man his fiftieth birthday is one of special significance. We take stock, look back on what we have achieved, consider what is still to be done. Our time of storm and stress is over, we have found our place in life. From now on, as my teacher Sauerbruch used to say, there is only one organ we can count on for continued increase: the prostate gland. Exceptions, of course,’ he said, stretching out his hand and waggling his fingers, ‘only serve to prove the rule.’

Laughter from the surgeons: the roar of dominant males; their wives lowered their heads.

‘The ladies will, I hope, forgive me this short excursion into the urogenital tract — I can see I will have to cut out these jokes; for a surgeon the unkindest cut of all.’ He nodded to the group of doctors and patted his upper lip with his signet ring again. ‘You will note, gentlemen, that I am borrowing the principle of covering myself from our beloved colleagues in Internal Medicine.’ A hint of mockery flashed across the faces of some of the doctors. Christian had worked in hospitals as a nursing auxiliary often enough to know about the differences between the two main branches of medicine. Müller became more serious.

‘Born the eldest son of a clockmaker in Glashütte, a small town in the eastern Erzgebirge, Richard Hoffmann grew up during the years of Hitlerite fascism and as a twelve-year-old — he was an auxiliary in an anti-aircraft battery — experienced the Anglo-American air raid on Dresden. On the night of the air raid, he suffered severe burns from phosphorus bombs and had to undergo lengthy treatment in Johannstadt Hospital, the present Medical Academy — in the same clinic, moreover, which he is in charge of today. It was then that his desire to study medicine took shape. Now it is true that such youthful dreams are often not realized. I remember, for example, that twenty years ago’ — he wrinkled his brow and pursed his lips — ‘all the boys suddenly wanted to be astronauts, Gagarin and Vostock and Gherman Titov; not me, I was too old already, although my wife is always telling me that the training in Baikonur, together with anchovy paste out of a tube’ — he looked down at his body and spread his arms in mock incomprehension — ‘would have done me no harm, but I think that is the too one-sided view of a dietary cook.’ Müller’s wife, who was sitting next to Anne, sent embarrassed looks in all directions and blushed sufficiently. Wernstein, one of the junior doctors in the clinic for trauma surgery, leant over with a grin to a colleague and whispered something.

‘Ah,’ Müller cried with an ironic undertone in his voice, stretching out his arm theatrically, ‘at least our junior colleagues do not take the view that I would interpret a relaxation of their attempts to restrain the risorius as disrespect for, or even mockery of, my physical constitution. Very bold, gentlemen. Thank you. And others among us perhaps wanted to be atomic scientists, an Indian chief like Winnetou or, dear ladies, a second Florence Nightingale, but as the years passed, elementary particles and the struggle for the rights of the Apache nation were perhaps no longer so interesting. However, surgery, the youthful dream of the man whose birthday we are celebrating today, retained its interest and since that stay in hospital he never — this I have from his own lips — lost sight of his goal of becoming a surgeon. He attended the high school in Freital, completed an apprenticeship as a fitter and then went to Leipzig to study medicine in the hallowed halls of the alma mater lipsiensis that for some of us was, to use a good old Prussian expression, the seedbed of our medical career. It was there, in the unforgettable anatomical lectures of Kurt Alverdes and later in the Collegium chirurgicum of Herbert Uebermuth, that his decision to become a surgeon was strengthened and confirmed. However, the great clinician Max Burger almost made him reconsider, which would have robbed us of one of the best trauma surgeons we have in the country, when he became aware of Richard Hoffmann’s exceptional talent for diagnosis and suggested that he should do his doctorate under him. Not that our friend was unfaithful, in his heart, to surgery. It was above all the after-effects of his injuries during the air raid on Dresden that made him hesitate; deformities of his right hand made it difficult, at times impossible, for him to clench his hand — and that is, naturally, a fundamental problem for a person who wants to specialize in the surgical field. It was only a second operation, performed by Leni Büchter, a true magician in hand surgery, and the devoted care of a certain Nurse Anne, née Rohde’ — he made a slight bow in the direction of Anne, who looked away — ‘that removed this obstacle and finally secured Richard Hoffmann for our field …’

‘My God,’ Robert whispered to Christian, ‘does he have a fancy way with words! I should get him to go over my German essays, that would certainly be something for Fräulein Schatzmann.’ Fräulein Schatzmann — she expressly insisted on being addressed as ‘Fräulein’, even though she was on the verge of retirement — was the German teacher at the Louis Fürnberg Polytechnic High School Robert attended. Christian had also been one of her pupils before he transferred to the senior high school in Waldbrunn and he could well remember Fräulein Schatzmann’s strict lessons, which were full of tricky grammar exercises and difficult dictations. With a shudder he recalled the Schatzmann ‘ORCHIS’ rule, which she would always write on the blackboard in red chalk, to remind the careless and forgetful pupils whenever there was an essay to be written: Order — Risk — Charm — Interest — Sense; eventually Christian, on some vague suspicion, had looked the word up in his father’s medical dictionary and then, together with other pranksters in the class, had stuck a photo of a naked blonde together with a fairly explicit drawing on the blackboard before the next essay was due … Fräulein Schatzmann’s reaction had been unexpected; in a steady voice she told the class — which was waiting on tenterhooks; some of the girls were giggling, of course, and had flushed bright red, as always — that there were clearly some pupils in 10b who had learnt something in her classes, and to a certain extent had taken the ORCHIS rule to heart … Unfortunately Fräulein Schatzmann had confiscated the picture of the blonde — ‘that, gentlemen, comes under number two of my rule’ — much to the chagrin of Holger Rübesamen, who had swapped it for a high price: two football pictures of Borussia Dortmund …

‘I’m hungry,’ Ezzo whispered. ‘Is this going to go on for long?’ But Müller seemed to have got into his stride, speaking with expansive gestures, stepping back- and forward, sketching things in the air, making his owl-eyebrows hop up and down and patting his lips with his signet ring whenever he got a laugh.

‘When are we on?’ Christian asked.

‘Your mother will give us a sign.’

‘And our instruments?’

‘In the next room.’

‘I can’t see a piano.’

‘There, just behind your uncle.’ Indeed, there was a piano in the corner behind Meno.

‘I haven’t even had a chance to warm up, you were already all seated when I arrived, damn it. I thought there’d be the usual chit-chat to start with and then things would gradually get going …’

‘You can play that at sight, Christian. But remember the sforzato on the A when Robert comes in the second time. I’m starving, and there’s all those lovely things over there …’ Ezzo nodded towards the cold buffet that had been set up along the opposite wall.

‘What? Have you had a look?’

‘Yummy, I can tell you. Loin steaks, cut very thin and fried till they’re crisp, you can see the pattern marks of the grill, and then rice’ — Ezzo pointed furtively at three large dishes with stainless-steel covers — ‘but not Wurzener KuKo stuff, I’m sure it’s from the other side.’

‘You’ve already had a taste?’ Robert, who had leant back a bit, whispered to Ezzo across Christian’s back.

‘Mmm, yes.’

‘You have? Didn’t you say earlier that you had to go to the loo?’

‘Shh, not so loud … I did … But when I came back I discovered the fruit bowl, and there happened to be no one around — look, just an inch to the right of my father and you’ll see it … Can you see it?’

‘The big blue one?’ Christian and Robert whispered with one voice.

‘That’s the one … there are apples and pears in it, proper yellow pears with little bright-green spots and oranges —’

‘Sour green Cuba oranges?’

‘No … Nafal, or something like that. Mandarins and plums and, yes, you’ve got it: bananas! Real bananas!’ There was a tremor in Ezzo’s voice.

‘Hey, Christian, that parcel from the other side we lugged in last week, I bet the old folks have guzzled it all already.’

‘Perhaps Aunt Alice and Uncle Sandor brought that stuff …’

‘It’s a possibility … And what else did you see? Tell me’ — Robert leant back a little more; he’d spoken rather loudly, so Christian put his finger to his lips and hissed ‘Shh!’ at his brother — ‘tell me, did you just look or did you …’

‘No, I didn’t, there wasn’t enough time, just a few grains of rice and then Theo Lingen appeared and glared at me as if I were a criminal, really, Robert.’

‘How are things at the Spesh?’

Ezzo went to the Special School for Music in Mendelssohnallee. ‘Oh, as usual. School’s a bore. Physics is the only subject that’s fun, we’ve got Bräuer, you two must know him.’

‘Why?’

‘Of course you do, Robert, he’s the strict guy who visited us a couple of years ago. The one that looks a bit like Uncle Owl, you know, on kids’ TV, in Pittiplatsch und Schnatterinchen.’

Ezzo smirked. ‘Yes, that’s the one. But he’s great. Does fantastic experiments. Apart from that … Christmas is coming.’

‘And the Wieniawski?’

‘Hellish difficult piece. Don’t make me think about it. On Tuesday it’s my major again, I’ve really got work my arse off.’

‘… my father gave me strength and height, my earnest application, my mother dear my humour bright and Fromme — not only him — my joy in operations …’ Müller declaimed, earning a round of applause. ‘I hope the literary specialists in the audience will forgive my distortion of Goethe’s famous lines; all I can say in my defence is that it is in a good cause. But to come to the point — and what’s the point of birthdays if not presents — we in the clinic, Herr Hoffmann, spent a long time thinking about this. We are all, of course, aware of your love of classical music — when the nurses see a trolley heading for your operating theatre, where you are about to operate to, say, a violin concerto, they say the patient is “going to face the music”.’ He cleared his throat, seeming to expect applause which he then waved down. ‘Since, as your wife was good enough to divulge to me, we will have the opportunity to enjoy a piece of classical music later on, we, that is your colleagues, the nurses and I, have thought of something different. Your love of painting and the fine arts is also well-known in the clinic, so we organized a little collection, the result of which is the object which I now ask these gentlemen to please bring from the adjoining room.’

Two junior doctors went into the side room and returned with a large, slim, carefully tied-up parcel.

‘Dad on the throne of trauma surgery,’ Robert whispered to Christian, ‘and instead of a sceptre he’s holding a scalpel …’

Herr Adeling brought in the easel. By this time Wernstein had unpacked the picture, apart from a last layer of tissue paper, and he placed it on the easel that Herr Adeling, furiously wielding a gigantic duster, had cleared of chalk powder. Wernstein stepped back. Müller thrust out his chin and pursed his lips in a raspberry-coloured pout — a pose, well known to every junior doctor in the Surgical Clinic, with which Professor Müller would conclude the moment of hesitation to which all surgeons are subject before they make the first incision into the still-inviolate skin lying before them, pale in the glare of the spotlight. With solemn tread he made his way over to the easel and, with a vigorous but well-calculated tug, at the same time giving Richard, who had stood up and was beside him, a malicious smile, pulled the tissue paper away from the picture. It wobbled a little, but Herr Adeling, who probably knew the easel well and had followed Müller’s actions with raised eyebrows, had unobtrusively positioned himself behind it and, with a sideways twist with which one avoids giving offence during a fit of coughing, he surreptitiously supported the easel with his left hand, now in a white glove, during Müller’s revelatory tug, while simultaneously covering two dry coughs with his still ungloved right hand before urgent business sent him hurrying off in the direction of the foyer.

‘A watercolour by one of our most important painters, who unfortunately died too young: Kurt Querner. There you are.’

Richard Hoffmann, almost a head taller than Müller, had slumped in on himself, his dark-blue eyes, which Robert had inherited, were staring in disbelief.

‘His Landscape during a Thaw — Professor, that can’t be … so it was you?’

‘Herr Wernstein was so good as to travel to Börnchen for us and acquire this watercolour.’

‘But … I’m flabbergasted. Frau Querner told me that this picture was only to be sold after her death … It meant so much to her husband … And then it wasn’t there any more, we were told it had been sold after all … Anne, come here, our favourite picture.’

‘Our surprise for you.’

‘But’ — in his agitation Richard ran his fingers through his short, sandy hair; it had a blond strand at the crown, which Christian also had in the same place — ‘but Professor, colleagues, that must have cost a fortune! I can’t possibly accept it.’

‘As I said, there was a collection, so it was spread among us. By the way, there is an interesting perspective to the picture when it is seen à contre-jour as you might say …’

‘À contre-jour?’ Taken aback, Richard walked round the picture.

‘For Richard Hoffmann — gratefully, Kurt Querner,’ Müller read out loud. ‘He knew that this was the picture you liked best. You and your wife had “crept round it too often”, as he put it. If he wanted to give it to anyone, it was you, and when Frau Querner heard about our plan, she allowed herself to be persuaded.’

Most of the guests had stood up and were crowding round the picture. As his father shook the hands of his colleagues from the Academy in thanks, addressing each by their first name and hugging them, Christian could see that he was moved.

‘Just accept it, Richard,’ said Weniger, a senior doctor from the Gynaecological Clinic. ‘You can hang it up in your living room, next to that bird in the buff with the magnificent horse’s arse,’ he went on, deliberately falling into a local accent, ‘that’s a kind of landscape too. Pardon my French, Anne.’

The doctors, many of them surgeons or orthopaedists, were amused. The women turned away or put their hand or a handkerchief over their mouth to hide their giggles.

Anne had given Ezzo and Christian a sign. They slipped past the throng round the picture, fetched their instruments from the adjoining room and set up their music stands in front of the piano.

‘Your father’s happy as a sandboy,’ Ezzo whispered to Christian.

‘He’s been after that picture for years, I can tell you.’ Robert sucked calmly at the cane blade of his clarinet. ‘And you can imagine what it was like when he heard it had gone. National mourning, lousy mood, frosty evenings. Well, I can see everything’s hunky-dory for the old man again. I’m sure that means there’ll be another Sunday trip out there or a visit to an art gallery … Oh God, art galleries.’

Reglinde, Ezzo’s eighteen-year-old sister, was already sitting at the piano and had opened her score. She shook her head. ‘You really are crazy. The way you talk!’

‘Just give me an A,’ Robert replied, unmoved, taking the reed out of his mouth and slotting it into the mouthpiece.

‘Did you see it? Even framed!’ Christian, warming up with a few runs on the cello, looked across at the picture; Niklas Tietze, Reglinde and Ezzo’s father, the local GP, emerged from the group round it. He had chosen the Italian piece and was taking the viola part.

‘The money they must have in the Academy!’ Robert muttered. ‘Always assuming they didn’t quietly take it out of the Solidarity Fund or the account of the Society for German — Soviet Friendship. But if I want a new fishing rod, there’s no way it can be afforded. “Go and collect waste paper and bottles, you get ten pfennigs apiece for them at the SERO collection point, and anyway, when we were your age …” ’

‘Hi, you guys, everything OK?’

Christian embraced ‘Uncle’ Niklas, as he was called by the Hoffmann children, like ‘Aunt’ Alice and ‘Uncle’ Sandor, although Niklas Tietze was Richard Hoffmann’s cousin on his mother’s side.

‘We’ll have to play everything presto, Uncle Niklas. Ezzo and I are starving.’

‘Your mother’s baked a fantastic cake. You must have a piece of it afterwards.’

‘But I’m sleeping at Meno’s tonight. — Apple cake?’

‘And a cherry pie — with a marzipan base and meringue topping, very thin and the cherries lovely and sour …’ Niklas sucked his upper lip and gave an appreciative ‘Mmmm …’ He picked up his viola, which Ezzo had brought from the adjoining room, and put it on the piano.

‘Right, Anne will give us the sign any minute now. Then, as agreed: first the fanfare, then “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, then off we go.’ Niklas rosined his bow, played over the open strings and adjusted the tuning slightly while his eyes, behind the immense spectacles he always put on for playing, quickly ran over the notes.

‘Tatata-taa!’ rang out from the instruments as Anne came and sat down next to Reglinde. When they played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, even Herr Adeling, who had reappeared by the door, joined in; as he sang he tapped the tips of his fingers together precisely in time to the music and at the final ‘and so say all of us’ his falsetto even outdid Müller’s trained guttural voice.

Then they played the Italian piece, a suite from the baroque period, originally for flute but Niklas has arranged the flute part for clarinet. Christian was tense. Once more he could feel the eyes of everyone on him. Reglinde had switched on the wall lamp over the piano and, since he was sitting diagonally behind her, the strong light fell on his face, revealing with merciless clarity the very thing he most wanted to hide. During the previous week’s rehearsals, everything had been calm and secure, but playing here, in front of an attentive, though probably well-disposed audience of fifty, was a quite different matter from practising in the Tietzes’ quiet house, where ‘Aunt’ Gudrun had brought sandwiches during the intervals and he and Ezzo had got so high they’d tried to play the piece at double the speed. There were three pairs of eyes that weighed especially heavily on him: his father’s, Meno’s and those of his cousin Ina, Ulrich and Barbara’s pretty nineteen-year-old daughter … He curled up inside himself and kept his eyes focused on the music. He mustn’t let himself be distracted. — Where did she get that dress? Pretty daring, those bare shoulders, he thought, before he stormed up the mountain of semiquavers at the beginning of the courante — Oh yes, the dress she’d made together with Reglinde, pause, legato, da-da-dada … Strange: while during rehearsals his greatest fear had been the fast, technically difficult passages and the slower, more melodious ones had come out better, now the opposite was the case: he was happy when the furioso bars came, he played almost every one securely, as if in a dream, and his heart started to pound at every harmless sequence of minims and crotchets. At a piano passage his bow began to tremble, the note was ‘frayed’, as his cello teacher would have said, which brought him a glance from Ezzo, who, as the best in his class in the Special School, was impeccably positioned and playing with the luscious bowing that had already attracted attention among experts …

‘I can do that too,’ Christian told himself in irritation; he stretched a tenth and slammed his bow down on the string. A trickle of rosin floated down. — Yes! Sounds like a cathedral bell, does my cello … There was a ‘Ping!’ Ezzo and Robert started, which made Robert look odd, as he was in the middle of a cantabile passage, and at the same moment Christian realized that the A-string of his cello was bobbing up and down in a huge corkscrew spiral and he had no time to replace it. Niklas looked at him over the rim of his glasses and improvised while Reglinde, the only one who was completely relaxed, began to reduce the tempo imperceptibly … Christian had never been in such a tight situation. All the passages that, before his misfortune, he could have played fairly comfortably had suddenly turned into technical hurdles. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Ina had her head in her hand and her shoulders were twitching with suppressed laughter. Silly cow! he roared inwardly, and in his fury he swept through a passage at such speed that Ezzo and Niklas looked up in alarm, and even Reglinde, who had her back to him, half turned round. — Yesyesyes! he exulted when he managed to play a passage on the D-string alone, in a position he hadn’t practised for this piece. In the surge of melodies he saw Niklas’s aquiline nose glow redder and redder, and tiny beads of sweat had started to gather on Ezzo’s forehead, just as they had on his waxy-pale, fleshy nose; Ezzo was adjusting his violin on its chin rest much more often than he had during rehearsals and the fiery red violinist’s mark on his neck became visible — both, as Christian knew, unmistakable signs of nervousness. Anne, who was turning the pages for Reglinde, behaved as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t bothered about anything any more — it was bound to end in disaster — and strangely enough, it was just at that point, in the middle of the rather rocking bourrée, that the title of an obscure book from his parents’ library came to mind: The Gallant Blundering in the Labyrinth of Love — the A-string sundering in the labyrinth of music was what his overwrought mind made of it before he set his fingers dancing over the remaining three strings and, remarkably and unexpectedly, everything went well apart from a couple of little slips. Applause.

‘Phew.’ Ezzo nodded, waggled his hand, wiped his brow and fiddled with the nut on his bow. They bowed. Niklas, who was standing behind Christian, gave him a complimentary tap on the shoulder with his bow.

Robert snorted. ‘That looked really funny! I kept telling myself, just keep your eyes on your music, man …’

‘I’d like to see you if one of your keys flew off, but that can never happen with your wind instruments,’ Christian hissed back, putting profound contempt into ‘wind’. The feud between strings and wind was an age-old rivalry that would never be resolved.

‘That was close,’ said Reglinde. ‘When you suddenly accelerated in the allegro, I thought I was never going to get into it. And that on this jangly old piano.’

5. The barometer

Anne took Meno and Christian to one side. ‘I think we should give it to him afterwards, when there’s just the family. I don’t know a lot of the guests very well; I don’t want it made that public. Agreed?’

Richard made a short speech of thanks. His final words brought a grin from Christian and Ezzo: ‘But now, colleagues and friends, eat your fill.’

‘You can rely on that!’ Ezzo chortled, already on the edge of his chair. But still he hesitated — because everyone else was hesitating. Clearly no one had the courage to be the first at the buffet and therefore liable to be suspected of a lack of good manners. Müller, playing delicate trills in the air with the fingers of his right hand, was already jutting out his chin purposefully and pouting his lips when Emmy got up and set off for the buffet with short but nimble steps — forgetting the walking stick that Richard took over to her. ‘Thank you, young man,’ she cried, but the last word was drowned out by the noise of chairs being pushed back. Very few, Christian observed, replaced their chairs at the table — Niklas did, demonstratively taking his time over it, carefully placing his long, slim hands on the exact point of the chair back that precluded any misunderstanding; Niklas even had to lift the chair slightly, the calm and precision of his orderliness in stark contrast to the precipitate and distasteful rush of the others; he even replaced Gudrun’s and Ezzo’s chairs and nodded to Christian, who had also stood up. Then Niklas strolled to the buffet; Ezzo unobtrusively shifted his weight, leaving a gap between himself and Gudrun, who was standing in front of him. If you closed your eyes for a moment, you could still see the thirty-centimetre gap well to the front of the queue, and when you opened them again, the gap was filled by Niklas. Either as the result of a general tendency to observe successful manoeuvres or of an unconscious but necessary part of the atmosphere, the phenomenon was repeated when Müller too left his seat. He moved no more quickly than his position permitted — a position that had, so to speak, vanished into thin air, though not because he was not on official business — and after elegantly and, with an obliging smile, giving his wife his arm, he first headed back to Landscape during a Thaw rather than towards the buffet. Wernstein and another junior doctor at the buffet exchanged glances and the doctor in front, who worked more closely with Müller, took his time moving forward, thus allowing Professor Müller and his wife, Müller patting his lip with his signet ring and bending his ear to his wife, to join the queue … Christian had gone to say hello to his father and wish him a happy birthday and was now standing behind him, pretty near the end of the queue. Adeling and another waiter had taken the lids off the dishes and the room was now filled with enticing aromas. There was the clatter of crockery and cutlery, muted conversation. Weniger, a senior doctor in his late forties with receding hair and red, shovel-like hands, and a slim, grey-haired doctor called Clarens, with glasses and a sparse beard, were standing with Richard discussing medical matters, the main topic being the forthcoming ‘Health Service Day’.

‘When you’re awarded the title of Medical Councillor, my friend, you can open a few more of these foreign bottles for us. We know you — you’ve only sent part of them into battle here, the rest are keeping cool in your cellar. You’ve still got your supplies, you old desert fox.’ Weniger filled his glass to the brim and had difficulty raising it to his lips without spilling some. Clarens laughed. ‘Don’t drink so much, Manfred. Think of the drive home.’

‘Don’t worry, my wife’s driving.’

‘What’s all this about supplies! I haven’t a drop left in the house. I wouldn’t let my friends go thirsty on my fiftieth birthday. But what’s all this about a Medical Councillor? What does it matter anyway? — Or have you heard something?’

‘Oh, come on, Richard, it’s common knowledge. From what one hears you’re going to get a Med Councillor or the Hufeland Medal, Pahl the Hufeland Medal or perhaps even the Fetscher Prize.’

‘Really? One hears that, does one? I don’t.’

‘But my boss did. At the last directors’ conference.’

Richard lowered his voice. ‘Much more important than all this frippery would be if we finally didn’t have to beg for every drip bottle and every lousy bandage! If they could sort out their structural problems so that we could work efficiently! They can keep their gongs, for God’s sake. That’s just a sedative to stick on your chest … If we butter up the directors and the consultants now and then, the rest’ll sort itself out — that’s the way they think!’

‘Not so loud, Richard.’ Weniger had become serious and was looking round nervously. When he caught sight of Christian, his expression brightened. ‘Well done, that sounded just like a concert. How long have you been playing?’

‘For …’ Christian screwed up his eyes as he thought. ‘… for about eight years.’ He felt embarrassed because it wasn’t just his father and the two doctors who were looking at him but all those waiting in the queue, in front and behind.

‘Do you want to take it up professionally? As a cellist?’

‘No. Graduate from high school.’

‘Ah.’ Weniger nodded. ‘Then you can follow in your father’s footsteps?’

‘I’d like to study medicine, yes.’

‘A good decision.’ Weniger pursed his lips and nodded vigorously. ‘And, if I may ask: your grades?’ Before Christian could answer, he made a dismissive gesture. ‘If I had my way — good grades in themselves don’t make a doctor. If I think of some of the young ladies who come to us … Nothing but “A”s for their studies, but no feel for it, fingers like thumbs to put it crudely, and they keel over at the first post m—’

‘Oh, my grades are quite good. Apart from maths …’

‘Oh yes, the medic’s old problem. My God, in maths your father and I were a real pair of duffers. Don’t you worry about that. There is less mathematics in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy … Hmm, it’s all very well for me to talk. Just do your best. But how are things otherwise … a girlfriend?’

Christian, who by now had a plate and cutlery, carefully helped himself to some rice and cleared his throat in embarrassment. ‘Hmm, no, not yet.’

‘Well, that’ll come, you’ll see. And don’t worry about those little pimples on your face, they’ll go of their own accord, and a girl who sees nothing but that’s not worth bothering with, young man.’

‘How’s your lad?’ Clarens asked the medical director from gynaecology. Christian had gone bright red.

‘Matthias? He’s doing his military service at the moment, signals. Spends all day running round the countryside laying telephone lines. But he’s no idea yet what he wants to do afterwards. “Don’t panic, Dad …” is all I get from him whenever I have the temerity to ask a question or drop a hint. At one point he wanted to be a stage technician, then a radio presenter, then a forester … Gesine and I were thinking that was something definite, forester, when he applied for a place at the forestry school in Tharandt last year; but then he withdrew his application. What will be next — who can say? All he knows is what he doesn’t want to do: study medicine. “I don’t want to be rummaging round in the holy of holies like you, Dad,” the brat says that to my face and smirks.’

The laughter was something that Christian found irritating.

‘Come on, Manfred, you’ll need to tuck in after that. Take one of these splendid stuffed peppers …’ Clarens looked at Weniger over the top of his glasses. ‘Oh, I was going to ask you — you know the boss of that car repair shop in Striesen, Mätzold or whatever he’s called …’

‘Pätzold. Yes, what about him?’

‘You performed the abortion on his daughter last year, didn’t you …?’ Clarens leant over to Weniger and murmured something. What Christian could hear sounded like ‘cavity seal’ and ‘carcass’ but he couldn’t imagine what a dead body could have to do with a Moskvitch.

‘… a Friday car, I can tell you. It’s already starting to rust through at the front, where the passenger puts their feet. I told my wife: “Once it goes through you’re really going to have to run fast” … and the brakes, soft as butter. I’d like to know how the Russians manage that. But probably nothing happens over there because there’s only five cars on the road, or they just don’t worry about it … The armour plating on their Volgas is just the same. Oh, this looks good, I’m going to have some of this … So, Manfred, could you set something up with this Pätzold …? You know that departmental head at VEB Vliestextilien, the fabrics company from Chemnitz? Well I’m still treating him. He says the targets in the economic plan have given him a nervous breakdown. I managed to get him a place for a course of treatment in the spa at Bad Gottleuba; at the same time I made it clear to him that a psychiatric clinic needs an incredible amount of dressing material … an incredible amount. Just like a gynaecological clinic. I assume I’d have to send you what you might call a referral form for this, er, patient?’

Weniger stuck his tongue in his cheek as he thought. ‘I’ll give Pätzold a call on Monday. But I can’t promise anything. There’s a problem there, you see — he threw his daughter out when he discovered who the father was. The son of some guy on the Party District Committee. And Pätzold’s had about as much as he can take from them, I can tell you. The guy’s son was in the clinic too. Always the same. Hit the booze then get your oil changed and pull your dipstick out of some stranger in the morning, then have kittens at the result of the pregnancy test and collapse into the capable arms of Nurse Erika … You didn’t hear any of that, Christian.’

The queue moved forward slowly. Adeling was at the other end of the buffet, serving consommé with meatballs; he had his left arm behind his back, the ladle in his white-gloved right hand, and each time before he served the soup, with a smile and a twitch of his nostrils, he briefly closed his eyes in acknowledgement of the guest’s wishes.

Weniger leant forward to Richard and Clarens with a conspiratorial expression. ‘Since the District Committee has cropped up, have you heard this one: The teacher says: “Make a sentence with the two nouns, Party and peace.” Little Fritz puts up his hand. “My father always says: ‘I wish the Party would leave me in peace.’ ” ’

‘Hahaha, very good. But yesterday Nurse Elfriede told me a great one during an operation: Why does Pravda only cost ten pfennigs and Neues Deutschland fifteen? — “I can explain that,” the assistant at the newsagent’s says, “for Neues Deutschland you have to add five pfennigs translation costs.” ’

‘Now then.’ Weniger slapped Richard on the shoulder with his shovel-like hand. ‘You’d better not tell Herr Kohler that one.’

‘An idealist and a schemer,’ Richard replied. ‘And not a bad doctor, either.’

‘The worst are the ones who really believe in what they believe in. And have enough energy for the professional doubters.’ Weniger gestured diagonally upwards with his thumb. ‘Doubtless you laughed.’

‘Wernstein laughed so much the forceps in which he was holding the disinfection swab fell open … But I’ve got another: The General Secretary is on the breakwater in Rostock watching the ships being loaded. He asks the sailors, “Where are you going?” — “To Cuba.” — “And what are you carrying?” — “Machines and vehicles.” — “And what are you coming back with?” — “With oranges.” He asks the sailors on another ship, “Where are you sailing?” — “To Angola.” — “What are you carrying?” — “Machines and vehicles.” — “And what are you coming back with?” — “With bananas.” — And he asks the men on a third ship, “Where are you going? — “To the Soviet Union.” — “What are you carrying?” — “Oranges and bananas.” — “And what are you coming back with?” — “With the train.” ’

Clarens whispered, ‘Listener’s question to Radio Yerevan: “They say a new history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has been published for the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution?” — Answer: “Yes, illustrated even! With cuts by Brezhnev.” ’

‘That’s a good one! We could put it up on the Party Secretary’s noticeboard.’

‘I know one too.’ Having filled his plate with fruit, crisply fried hamburgers and loin steaks, bread and rice, Christian joined in the conversation, his face burning. ‘Brezhnev is visiting the USA. On the second morning President Ford asks him what he dreamt of. — “I dreamt of the Capitol in Washington, there was a red flag flying on it!” — “Strange,” says Ford, “I dreamt of the Kremlin and there was a red flag flying on that too.” — “But of course, you can always see that.” — “Yes, but there was something written on it.” — “What?” — “I don’t know, I can’t read Chinese.” ’

‘Careful,’ Clarens warned. Müller came over, a forced smile on his face and a plate with kebabs and peaches in his left hand. ‘What is it, gentlemen? May I share the joke?’

‘We’ve just heard a new one, Herr Professor,’ Weniger said in a provocative tone. Müller raised his eyebrows.

‘A banana machine has been set up in Berlin, on Alexanderplatz. If you put a banana in, a mark comes out.’

Müller pursed his lips. ‘Hmm, yes. Well, gentlemen, I have to say I don’t think that’s a particularly good joke.’ His eyes narrowed, his lips became thin. ‘Certain circles would be delighted if they knew they’d managed to make so much progress here … And I find it all the more regrettable, Herr Weniger, when I see that you have a banana on your plate …’ Müller’s eyes narrowed to thin slits. ‘We bear a responsibility, gentlemen, and it’s all too easy to join in cheap jokes about our country … But it doesn’t change anything, you know, it doesn’t change anything … And you above all, gentlemen’ — he shook his head disapprovingly — ‘we, we should be aware of our position. With or without bananas … And above all we ought’ — he pronounced it ‘ouought’, softly and drawn out, his head still slightly on one side — ‘to refrain from mockery of a great man whom our Soviet brothers have lost. Don’t you agree?’

Weniger swallowed and looked to one side. ‘Of course, Herr Professor.’

‘I’m glad we are of one mind.’ Müller gave a gracious smile. ‘By the way, Herr Hoffmann, your wife is a quite superb cook. She prepared the steaks and the soufflé together with the restaurant chef, I believe? Excellent, really excellent. I’ve already expressed my appreciation to her and asked her to let my wife in on the secrets of a few recipes, above all the cherry pie at your house this afternoon. Superb!’ He slowly walked back to his seat, chatting to some of the doctors on the way. Weniger and Clarens, pale-faced, watched him go.

‘How on earth can you stand it with him, Richard?’ Weniger hissed through his teeth. ‘The slimy devious bastard.’

‘Manfred.’ Richard raised his hand to calm him down.

‘Oh, leave it. Goes around like Lord Muck. “We had a collection, we bought the picture.” — Shall I tell you something: he didn’t lift a finger. The idea came from your senior nursing officer, and it was Wernstein who put his back into it. That’s how it was. Then the Herr Professor came along once the matter was taking shape and took everything under his aegis.’

‘Forget it,’ said Clarens. ‘We mustn’t let him spoil this splendid meal for us.’

A look of determination flashed across Weniger’s face. ‘I’ve got another one. How can you work out the points of the compass with a banana? Place it on the Wall. The end that gets bitten off is pointing east.’

When everyone was sitting down, Müller proposed a toast. Christian and Ezzo were not the only ones to set about the food ravenously; to get it all together Anne and Richard had had to start months ago, spending a fortune in the Delikat shops. And without his secretary’s brother, who drove special consignments of fruit, including citrus and tropical fruits, to supply Berlin, they would have had to make do with the two sorts of apples that were available in a normal greengrocer’s: brown, too-sour Boskoop and green, too-sweet Golden Delicious. In exchange for the loin steaks, the ground meat for meatballs and hamburgers and the beef for the kebabs from Vogelsang’s, the butcher’s, Richard had had to sacrifice one of the two sets of snow chains Alice and Sandor had given him two years ago. The Felsenburg restaurant had made the least contribution to the buffet: just the kitchen, crockery and premises had been made available for the party.

Most of the guests left around eight. The official part of the birthday celebrations was over. Frau Müller put away the few recipes Anne had written down and attempted a smile that looked to Christian like an attempt at an apology. Adeling and the other waiter brought hats and coats, helped the ladies put them on. The guests who remained took advantage of the break to stretch their legs a bit.

The seating plan was abandoned. Some chairs were moved over to the stove. The surplus crockery and cutlery was taken away, the flowers — with Meno’s roses a red magnet among them — were placed beside the table with the presents.

Outside, Christian helped his father and a couple of junior doctors push Müller’s Opel Kapitän to get it started and out of the snowdrifts. The professor himself was pushing, at the front, on the passenger side. ‘Take your foot off, Edeltraut, take your foot off,’ he shouted as the wheels started to spin.

‘We’re pushing, Herr Professor; you give us the command, Herr Doktor Hoffmann.’

‘You’re learning, Herr Wernstein. Always delegate responsibility,’ Richard replied with a laugh. ‘Right then: heave-ho, one — two — three — and away she goes. Watch out, Christian, you’re standing by the exhaust —’

Müller jumped in and the car slithered off.

‘Hope you have a quiet day at work tomorrow, Manfred. So long, Hans, hope you get home OK. And thanks a lot for everything.’ Richard shook Weniger and Clarens by the hand as their wives said goodbye to Anne. With astonishment the two men realized they were both wearing the same winter coat from VEB Herrenmode.

‘They had them on Tuesday, my wife got it for me.’

‘Mine too, queued for five hours. I wasn’t supposed to get it until Christmas, but my old one was worn out.’

‘How are you two getting home, Hans? Can we give you a lift?’

Delighted, Clarens nodded.

Christian was freezing and went inside. Kurt Rohde, Meno and Niklas were standing in the foyer listening to Herr Adeling: ‘— by Kokoschka, I assure you, I’m certain of that. The chambermaid who used to look after the guests told me herself … She kept a record of her tips in a notebook, with the sums the guests gave, and I saw Herr Professor Kokoschka’s tips, they were some of the biggest. It’s one of the Herr Professor’s easels, yes, he left it to the hotel in memory of the many nights he spent here and naturally we treasure it, yes indeed.’ He looked up, rocked on his heels, the chalk-white napkin over his arm, casting a severe eye over one of the younger of the waiters who were still tidying up or clearing away.

‘Interesting, very interesting what you’ve told us there.’ Niklas had taken out his pipe and was filling it with vanilla tobacco from Meno’s pouch. Matches flared up; Meno had filled his pipe too, a different one this time, a short, broad one made of some purplish-brown wood. Kurt Rohde had lit one of his cheroots. ‘And you’ve never had any problems with it? I mean, I’m sure this easel is very valuable and there are perhaps people interested in it, people who would like to see it somewhere else, rather than here in your hotel …’ Kurt Rohde said, puffing away at his cigar. Adeling raised his eyebrows and gave him a suspicious look. ‘No, we haven’t had any problems so far and we at the Felsenburg Hotel would be very grateful for your discretion in this matter. If you would now excuse me …’ Adeling fluttered off.

‘You played beautifully, my lad. Come here and give me a squeeze, we haven’t said hello properly yet.’ Christian embraced his grandfather, who had taken his cheroot out and was holding it well to one side. Kurt Rohde was shorter than his grandson, and Christian leant down a little so his grandfather could kiss him on the forehead. He furrowed his brow — not because he was uncomfortable at being kissed by his grandfather but so that the pimples would disappear in the furrows. His grandfather’s familiar smell: his hair, combed back straight, still thick and full despite his sixty-nine years and only white at the temples, and the skin under his trimmed beard smelt of eau de Cologne, the coarse material of his suit of tobacco and naphthalene.

‘Christian, Anne would like us to give him the barometer now, once we’re all back inside,’ Meno said between two puffs on his pipe. ‘Would you be so good as to get things ready?’ Christian, sensing that he was in the way, nodded and went back into the restaurant, where Ezzo, Reglinde and Robert were busy at the buffet again, Ezzo and Robert smacking their lips and rolling their eyes with pleasure.

‘Where’s your clock-grandfather?’ Reglinde asked as she chewed.

‘Since he and Emmy got divorced they’ve come to an agreement: he doesn’t want to be where she is and vice versa.’

‘Oh. Have you seen Ina?’

‘Perhaps she’s gone to the loo. Fantastic dress she’s wearing.’

‘We made it at the Harmony. Barbara helped, of course.’

Christian could picture the little furrier’s on Rissleite, the glassed door, the paint peeling from exposure to the elements; it had become a tradition in the spring and summer, when the furs for the winter were delivered, for the children of the district to gather there and ask for the scraps that were left over after the furs had been made up. They collected the scraps and once they had collected enough, their mothers made them into warm jerkins, mittens and caps.

‘Actually, she had intended to wear it the first time for the college of education’s end-of-term ball. Did you see? The doctors on the other side of the table had their eyes popping out.’

Christian shrugged. Reglinde, who was studying to be an organist and choirmaster, told him news from the college for church music, but Christian was only half listening. He was still cold, he put his hands in the pockets of his best suit — Richard had passed it on because it had grown too tight for him — but took them out again when he remembered that it was impolite to stand there like that. He was embarrassed. When he looked at Reglinde for too long, her eyes strayed away from his and ran over his untidily combed, light-brown hair and its cowlicks and, when he smiled, the dimples in his cheeks — his bad skin. She had Gudrun’s high, beautifully domed forehead, also her delicate, translucent though not pale skin with the blue veins visible; her cheeks and mouth came from Niklas. Her natural chestnut ringlets, which she kept short, were not typical of the Tietzes, who, like the Rohdes, all had fairly dark, straight hair. People who didn’t know the family always took Robert for Ezzo’s brother — apart from his eyes, Robert was much closer in appearance to the Rohdes than to Christian.

Reglinde, probably sensing his embarrassment, concluded the conversation and went over to join Ina, who was waving to her from the doorway.

Christian went over to the table with the birthday presents. Meno had not only made a contribution to the cost of the barometer but had also given Richard — so that was what had been in the parcel — a record: Beethoven’s late quartets, by the Amadeus String Quartet. Beside it was the gift from Ulrich Rohde and his family, a book. Christian read the title page: Bier / Braun / Kümmell: Chirurgische Operationslehre, edited by F. Sauerbruch and V. Schmieden, Johann Ambrosius Barth, Leipzig, 1933. He knew the book, a well-preserved antiquarian edition with many coloured illustrations; it had always had a special place in his uncle’s library, for it was the famous edition of a famous book and, on top of that, had handwritten dedications by Sauerbruch and Schmieden; Richard always admired it and held it in his hands with a certain envy when they visited the Italian House. Ulrich Rohde had a large collection of such books.

Grandfather Rohde had given his father an odd present: an egg-shaped stone, about the size of a person’s head, that stood in the hollow of a smoothly polished wooden cube.

‘Careful if you pick it up, it’s sawn through in the middle,’ he suddenly heard Meno say beside him. ‘It’s called a druse or a geode, they’re found like that in the rock. Be careful, it’s valuable.’

Crystals glittering blue, crimson and purple, prisms, such as Christian was familiar with from rock crystal, arranged close together; some as long as his little finger and so precisely formed they seemed shaped by human hand.

‘That’s an amethyst,’ Meno said, the blue and purple reflections of the crystals flitting to and fro across his eyes.

Emmy had contributed to the barometer and Christian had heard about the Tietzes’ present from Ezzo, it was at home in Caravel: one of Niklas’s lovely nickel-plated stethoscopes from St Petersburg.

‘And what are the two of you looking at? My God, Gudrun, and people talk about the impoverished East,’ Barbara broke in, drumming on the table with her gaudily painted fingernails. ‘What d’you think of Ina’s dress? We got her hairstyle from one of Wiener’s magazines, you can forget what’s in ours. Should I arrange an appointment there for you?’

‘I went to the hairdresser’s yesterday, Barbara. To Schnebel’s.’

‘To be perfectly honest, Gudrun, I’m afraid you can tell. Send Reglinde round some time — her measurements are about the same as Ina’s and no one can have anything against more attractive funeral hymns.’

‘The success of a dress is measured by the number of proposals a woman receives, as Eschschloraque says in his latest play. A bit sexist, I mean, for God’s sake, Barbara, but we’re putting it on just at the moment. And Ina is getting to the age when off-the-shoulder is a bit risky.’

Barbara ignored that. She picked up the book on vintage cars, the present from the Wolfstone-Hoffmanns. ‘Richard and his little hobbies … That’s enoeff.’ The English word, though in Saxon pronunciation, was one of Barbara’s favourites. ‘Men need something to keep them busy, otherwise they start getting funny ideas. You remember that, Christian. Did you drop in on Hans on the way here? After all, it is his brother’s fiftieth, to be honest, that’s not the way an English gentleman … enoeff.’

‘Iris called,’ Meno said. ‘They’ve got the measles.’

‘What?!’ Gudrun stepped back in horror. ‘And you only tell me now? The measles! For adults that can … be fatal! I read recently that these viruses are terribly infectious. And they’ll be on that book now!’

‘Muriel assured me she only touched it with gloves on and Hans even disinfected it,’ Meno said to calm her down.

‘Muriel? That little Miss Head-in-the-clouds?!’

Christian thought of his cousin. She was quiet and decisive but certainly didn’t have her head in the clouds. He took the barometer out of the bag and gave it to Anne as she came in with the others. He was keen to see how his father would respond to the present and whether it could hold its own alongside Landscape during a Thaw.

A simultaneous ‘O-oooh’ came from Richard, Emmy and Ezzo, who had elbowed his way to the table.

‘Lord love us!’ said Emmy in her thick Saxon dialect, clapping her hands together. ‘That’s the real McCoy!’

‘Indeed, it is that.’ Richard cautiously stroked the barometer. The mechanism was cased in carved oak with, above it, a thermometer marked in both Réaumur and Celsius scales. ‘Aneroid barometer’ was written in Gothic script on the white face of the capsule, under it the name of the manufacturer: Oscar Bösolt, Dresden. Over the air-pressure indicator was a manually set needle for measuring changes in pressure. The wood, which Lange had oiled and polished up, had a rich gleam. Round the capsule were stylized aquatic plants that, at the lower part, turned into two dolphins crossing their tails, their mouths swallowing the arrow-shaped leaves of the plants. Growing out of these leaves and framing the thermometer in a lyre-like motif were two slim stems that gradually broadened as they rose, again seamlessly turning into two dolphins, the bodies of which, each under a pair of reeds, framed the top of the barometer. In the middle, above the thermometer, was a bird spreading its wings; its body was worm-eaten and one or two pieces of the wooden feathers had broken off.

Meno told them how they had discovered, and eventually managed to buy, the barometer. ‘It belonged to the landlord who runs the bar in the former clubhouse of the Association of Elbe Fishermen. Lange knows him. At first he didn’t want to sell it, even though he’d advertised it. But Lange persuaded him; Christian went to see him today and that’s how we got it.’

‘But — it must have cost a packet, you can’t do that. How much … I mean, how much did you pay? I’ll put something towards it myself, that goes without saying.’

‘We’re not going to tell you. Anne said you’ve always wanted a really nice barometer. Well, there it is.’

‘Meno …’

‘We all chipped in,’ Anne broke in. ‘It’s a present from the family to you. Everyone gave what they could afford and if we hang it up in the living room, on the wall over the television, I thought, we’ll all get something out of it, won’t we?’

Richard embraced Emmy and Meno, kissed Anne, then his two sons, who both made a face — it was embarrassing for them in front of all the others, above all in front of Reglinde and Ina.

‘Well, thank you, thank you, all. Such a beautiful present … Thank you. And I thought I was going to get a pullover or two, a tie or something like that … You’ve all gone to such expense for me …’

‘Come on, everyone, sit down,’ Anne said. Meno carefully packed the barometer in the bag and put it down on the table.

‘A fine piece, delicate work.’ Niklas nodded in appreciation. ‘Now you’ll always know what the climate’s like, Richard.’

‘Landscape during a thaw?’ Sandor asked with a grin; so far he had hardly taken part in the conversation at all.

‘Hm, we shall see.’ Niklas wiped his massive aquiline nose, on which the red mark of the bridge of his glasses could still be seen. ‘We shall see,’ he repeated, nodding and furrowing his brow.

The conversation split up into little groups. Ulrich and Kurt Rohde talked together quietly; Emmy, Barbara and Gudrun were listening to Alice; the two girls had gone into a huddle, whispering and giggling. Adeling, the only waiter left in the room, brought some wine, Radeberger and Wernesgrüner beer, mineral water and glasses; Anne, bowls of biscuits and nuts. Ezzo and Robert were talking football, chatting about some of Dynamo Dresden’s recent matches; Christian was listening to the men, who, as almost always on such occasions, were talking politics. Richard especially was in his element there.

‘When you think about what that Andropov said … Did you read it? It was splashed all over the newspapers … The usual blah-blah, of course. Sandor, Alice, do you fancy a crash course in “How to fill three pages of a newspaper — Berliner size — without saying a single word that means anything”? You have to pick out the juicy bits and make sense of them yourself. I recommend you have a look at our sausage- and cheese-wrapping papers, namely the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten, the Sächsisches Tageblatt and, above all, the Sächsische Zeitung.’

‘Not so loud, Richard,’ said Anne, looking round anxiously.

‘OK, I know. Have you read it?’

‘You couldn’t miss it,’ Niklas growled. ‘I tend to avoid the dreary acres of newsprint, but it did strike me that he intends to continue the course prescribed by the Twenty-Sixth Party Conference.’

‘Did you expect anything else?’

‘No. In the band they’ve made various jokes about it — for example, that he should have said, “Keep going forward on a quite different course …” ’

‘And away from hard liquor. Just look at the guys marching past Brezhnev’s coffin. The puffy faces! All alcoholics, I swear. Twenty-five years on nights. Socialism equals ruined livers, varices of the oesophageal veins.’

Anne grasped Richard’s arm. He lowered his voice so that they all had to lean forward, even though he was speaking clearly.

‘Varices of the oesophageal veins? What’s that?’ Reglinde was trying to change the subject and when Richard started out on a detailed explanation, Christian thought it was stupid to go into it out of politeness, since going into it looked like falling for her diversion.

‘I also took the trouble to read it,’ Meno said. ‘I thought it was interesting that they didn’t say that Comrade Andropov was head of the secret service,’ he went on reflectively.

‘And why should they? Look, it’s self-evident. Brezhnev ruled for a good twenty years. Now he’s dead. Who’s going to be his successor? The one who knows the country best, of course. The head of the secret service.’

‘Be careful, Richard, not so loud, who knows, perhaps even here …’ Anne glanced suspiciously at Adeling, then waved him away when he looked as if he were about take a step towards them. ‘No, it’s nothing, I don’t need anything, thank you.’ She shook her head. ‘But all of you? Perhaps you’d like …?’ She looked round. ‘There’s still ice-cream sundaes.’

‘Oh yes!’ Ezzo and Robert cried simultaneously.

Adeling tapped his fingertips, rocked on his heels and nodded to Anne. He and another waiter brought the ice cream.

‘But tell me, Alice and Sandor,’ Niklas murmured in a conspiratorial voice, lifting his long spoon, on which a piece of Neapolitan ice cream the size of a plum glittered, ‘what about this Helmut Kohl? All we hear is lies.’

‘Yes, he’s … better, wouldn’t we say, Alice?’ Alice blinked in irritation when she heard her name, adjusted her glasses and nodded vaguely in Sandor’s direction. Emmy was talking about her many health problems with such eloquence that Gudrun, Barbara and Alice were spellbound. The men listened attentively as Sandor, in his mid-forties with an olive complexion and a full head of very grey hair that ran across his forehead in a tight wave, told them about the events in the West German parliament that had led to the vote of no confidence in Helmut Schmidt and his fall as chancellor. He and Alice had been living in South America for twenty years, which meant that he sometimes had to search for words when he spoke, and he hardly ever left the pauses between the harsh consonants that the German words ended with; instead he would soften them by adding an ‘eh’ that joined the words together. No one would have taken him, neither from his appearance nor from his accent, for a man who had been born in Dresden.

‘The development-eh-will not suit-eh-your superiors and-eh-I think-eh-that Kohl will make-eh-radical changes to the policy of rapprochement to which the Social Democrats-eh-had committed themselves …’

‘I hope so,’ said Niklas with a meaningful nod. His left hand twitched nervously as he stuck the long spoon into the strawberry layer of the Neapolitan ice cream with his right. ‘It’s about time there was an end to the policy of seeking change by ingratiating themselves that the gentlemen over there pursued and that Brezhnev and his gang just laughed at. The way they went crawling to the Russians and their henchmen was embarrassing to see. Peace was what they wanted to bring, and détente — I ask you!’ Niklas brushed away a few drops of ice cream that his vehemently outraged pronunciation of the ‘ch’ in ‘henchmen’ had sprayed over the table.

‘Wimps, Niklas, wimps the whole lot of them! Middle-class revolutionaries from ’68 who’re still pursuing some daydreams or other but have no idea about the real world … They should come over here and live with us, or in beautiful Moscow, if the reality of socialism is that wonderful. But that’s not what these gentlemen want either, they’re not that blind.’ Richard had flushed red with anger and slapped his forehead several times. ‘They want to recognize the GDR, for God’s sake! We have to accept the division of Germany, they say, it’s a historical fact, they say, and the GDR is a legitimate state like any other! Don’t make me laugh! This state, huh, whose only legitimacy comes from the Russian bayonets holding it up. A state that would collapse at once — at once I tell you — if there were free, genuinely free elections …’

‘Richard, please.’

‘You’re right, Anne. But I do get worked up about it. These doves who’re soft on communism — against those hardliners! Reagan’s got the right idea, he has no illusions, tough talking’s the only thing the Russians understand … force them to keep up the arms race till the country collapses.’

‘But — Richard, the arms race … what if one side cracks up and presses the red button? Is what Reagan is doing right then — even at that price?’ Meno, a reflective look on his face, was poking around in his sundae. Reglinde, Ina, Ezzo and Robert, who were familiar with this kind of discussion from many family gatherings, were talking among themselves without bothering to follow the course of the argument. By this time Emmy had got to her hip operation, though the only one listening now was Gudrun, while Alice was showing the Rohdes, whom she hadn’t seen yet, photos of their four sons and their last holiday.

‘Yesyes, the red button, that’s the argument that’s always used by our hypocritical press. They write that because they’re afraid. They’re well aware that they’re starting to run out of steam. What are the four main enemies of socialism? Spring, summer, autumn and winter. Or why do you think they keep feeling it’s necessary to urge us to increase our productivity … Without competition nothing works, that’s what I’ve always said.’

‘But, Richard, surely you’re not disputing that the more weapons are stockpiled — and they’re here, all those rockets, they’re deployed in our country — the greater the danger of war. When there are no weapons, war is impossible. All your talk can’t make that go away.’

‘Oh, war.’ Richard made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s what I’m talking about, Meno. I don’t think anyone really wants one. They’re not all idiots. Our media always draw a parallel between stockpiling armaments and war. And conversely between disarmament and peace. However, the paradoxical thing about it is — man has clearly been carved from such crooked timber that he’ll use his fingernails to scratch people’s eyes out if he has no other weapons. If, on the other hand, he possesses rockets and knows that the other tribe, over there behind the palisade, also possesses rockets — he’ll calm down and go and till his field. Odd but true.’

‘No, I’m sorry, that’s not true, it’s nonsense, Richard.’ Meno frowned and shook his head. ‘No weapons — no war, and that’s that. Fingernails, to stick to the terminology, could be weapons or, if you like, could be used as such. I would like to emphasize that. But what does surprise me is that you of all people, as a doctor, a surgeon, are speaking in favour of the arms race —’

‘Just a minute. I’m speaking in favour of humanity. And I’m wondering what is the best way of getting out of an inhuman system. These systems have their own laws … Once they’ve been set up and are firmly established, the principles of common sense are turned upside down in them! You don’t get rid of dictators by sucking up to or even hobnobbing with them. For that kind of person there is only one law: the law of force, my friend.’

‘But, I repeat, increasing the stocks of armaments only increases the danger of war breaking out, and where the danger of war is increased, then the danger of something actually happening is increased, you surely won’t deny that … A rocket heading in our direction will put an end to all discussion! Is that what you want — as a doctor?’

Richard was getting worked up. ‘As a man who thinks about politics, my dear brother-in-law! And one who doesn’t switch off his common sense and his observations when he puts on a white coat.’

‘What worries me,’ Ulrich interjected — he was sitting beside Christian and was presumably trying to calm things down a little — ‘is what Chernenko and Andropov said more or less in the middle of their speeches. One can’t beg peace from the imperialists, only defend it by relying on the strong power —’

‘Invincible,’ Niklas broke in raising his ice-cream spoon, ‘invincible power! I underlined it in the Tageblatt.’

‘Right, then. By relying on the invincible power of the Soviet forces. Sounds pretty bellicose. That worries me.’

‘You see. So there you are,’ the triumphant look Richard gave Meno seemed to say. His dish was empty, even though he’d had a large helping of ice cream and spent more time speaking than concentrating on eating it. Christian suspected that in the heat of debate his father hadn’t noticed what he was eating. Richard waved his spoon. ‘And what that means is crystal clear. That Moscow intends to continue to keep us on a short leash and that there will be no relaxation, quite the contrary. I read both speeches very closely. Anyway, Meno, it’s not true that they didn’t say Andropov had been head of the secret service. They did say that, only between the lines. Chernenko said … let me think a moment … yes: Yuri Vladimirovich had experience from his varied activity in domestic and foreign affairs in the field of ideology. In the field of ideology, I ask you, what’s that supposed to mean? Domestic and foreign affairs, if you put the two together I can see three fat Cyrillic letters shining: K, G and B … Moreover Chernenko says that Andropov has done great work in the consolidation of the socialist community and in the maintenance of the security — as a man sensitive to language, Meno, what do you think of the repeated genitives? — of the security of our state. And where do you think he performed that service, certainly not on a collective farm … This Andropov will not deviate one millimetre from official dogma, I can tell you. And Chernenko!’

‘He says that all the members of the Politburo are of the opinion that Yuri Vladimirovich has mastered Brezhnev’s style of leadership well,’ Christian replied. The adults looked at him in astonishment. ‘We went through the article at school, in civics. However,’ he added with a smile, ‘not with your deductions.’

‘We keep those to ourselves, Christian, d’you hear?’ Anne warned him in a low voice.

‘Yes, exactly. Mastered well, that’s what it said. In a word: a hard line! And when I read what else this Andropov said, what was it now, oh yes, something like: “Each one of us knows what an invaluable contribution Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev made to the creation” — to the creation, oh dear me, these abstract nouns always seem to crop up in the rubbish they write, sometimes you get the impression they do it deliberately to discourage people from reading on, and then they put the bit that matters in the last third …’

‘I know what you mean, Richard, it left a nasty taste in my mouth too.’ Niklas gave an outraged nod.

‘ “… to the creation of the healthy moral and political atmosphere that characterizes the life and work of the Party today” … that is the worst kind of cynicism you can get, if you exclude Mielke’s call to the comrades in the Stasi, that really takes the bacon, Chekists, he calls them, Chekists, it makes you feel sick; that’s the justification for the camps …’

The political discussion soon subsided once Anne, realizing that the tension was increasing and Richard was getting more and more worked up, had given Niklas and Meno a sign and changed the subject. Moreover Christian could see that as hostess she was unhappy that the party had split up into three or four groups that were pursuing quite separate conversations. So Alice had to take out her photos again and Sandor had to tell them again about the Galapagos, where they had been on a cruise; Niklas then talked about the Dresden State Orchestra’s tour of West Germany, on which he had been the accompanying doctor.

‘A great success, great success … and all the grub they laid out for us poor starving Zone-dwellers! … further proof for us of what a thoroughly decadent society imperialism is and how magnificent its death-throes are …’ Niklas waved his hand dismissively, and when they asked him what exactly they’d had to eat, his only reply was to close his eyes and give a real Dresden ‘Ooooh’, an expression that combined wonderment and stupefaction with acknowledgement of the limited nature of local catering. ‘But no one’s going to match what you’ve put together this evening that soon, even if it’s the boss of VEB Delikat himself.’

Then Niklas talked about Il Seraglio, which had been performed recently in the Dresden theatre. Here he was in his element, going into detail, vivid detail, imitating the gestures of the Japanese conductor, who, according to the withering verdict of the majority of the orchestra, had no idea about music; he also recounted anecdotes that were going round the theatre. The ice cream and desserts had all been finished; everyone was cheered up by the good food, the company and Niklas’s stories. They left at around eleven.

The left-over food and drink were packed up.

‘I’ll make up a special parcel for Regine and Hansi, they’ll be hungry.’

‘Yes, good idea, Anne. I’ll see to the presents.’ Richard went to the easel. Meno helped Anne and Adeling pack up the food. ‘How are things with Regine?’

‘Not very good, I think. She doesn’t say that, but she doesn’t look well. They’re giving her a lot of hassle, Hansi gets it at school as well.’

‘How long’s she been waiting now?’

‘Since nine this morning. When I left, around five, the call hadn’t come, nor when Richard left. They won’t have managed it since then either, otherwise they would have come.’

‘What should I do with the cold meat? Have you any wrapping paper?’

‘Wait a minute.’ Anne went over to Adeling, who went out and reappeared shortly after with a roll of greaseproof paper.

‘How long is it since Jürgen went?’

‘Two and a half years. Terrible. When I imagine what it would be like if Richard were in Munich or Hamburg, Mo, and I was stuck here all by myself with the children … No, I just don’t want to think about it.’

Outside it was bitterly cold. The air seemed to be grasping their cheeks and the tips of their noses with sandpaper fingers. It had stopped snowing. Canopies of light hung over the crossings, the only places where the street lamps were still on; the pavements lay in darkness, with a touch of faint moonlight here and there; the houses were black blocks with glassy outlines. Meno supported Grandmother Emmy and was carrying most of the presents in a bag; Richard, walking alongside Anne, had the picture, she the barometer, Christian his cello; the Tietzes were far ahead of them, each with some kind of bag containing wrapped-up food over their shoulder.

‘Well, little nurse, who tended me with devoted care?’ said Richard, teasing his wife. ‘Didn’t you blush!’

‘And he bowed to me into the bargain, your well-informed Herr Professor Müller. He could at least have asked you how things were before confusing me — at your birthday party in front of fifty people! — with that Nurse Hannelore.’ Anne shook her head in outrage. ‘I wasn’t even a student nurse at that time and certainly not in Halle.’

‘It was well meant, as a compliment.’

‘Well meant, compliment — you know what you can do with your compliment …’ Angrily Anne kicked a snowball that was lying on the path out of the way.

‘Aren’t you angry! Come here, my little lambkin.’ Richard grabbed her and gave her a kiss.

‘Watch out with the picture … And don’t call me your “little lambkin” — you know very well I can’t stand it. Of course I’m annoyed. I just hope he gets stomach ache from all the cakes he stuffed himself with.’

Anne looked across at the children, who were running in the road and laughing as they threw snowballs at each other. Emmy and Meno were some distance behind, then came Kurt Rohde with Barbara and Ulrich; Alice and Sandor were behind them.

‘There’s one thing I ask of you, Richard: you mustn’t talk so openly when there are so many people present, some of whom we don’t know very well. We know, of course, what the Tietzes’ views are, and Meno’s. But you know that Ulrich is a Party member.’

‘Yes, and why? Because otherwise he wouldn’t have been made managing director. He didn’t join from conviction. He’s got eyes in his head, he’s still in his right senses.’

‘Still. You’ve a tendency to get louder and louder the more you get worked up about a subject. Can you vouch for every one of your colleagues? You see.’

‘Müller showed a dangerous reaction to a joke Manfred made. We were at the buffet, Christian had just told one about Brezhnev and along came Müller to give us a slap on the wrists: that mockery of a great man whom our Soviet brothers had lost was uncalled for and that we should be aware of our position and stuff like that.’

‘You see, that’s just what I mean. And he was standing quite far away, I was watching you. You must think of things like that, Richard, promise me that. You must learn to hold your tongue. You encourage Christian and you know what he’s like, that he takes after you in this respect. The boy’s bound to think: If my father thinks he can get away with it, so can I.’

‘I don’t believe that’s what he thinks. You underestimate him. But you’re right, my feelings keep running away with me. I’m not one of your devious lickspittles and I don’t want to bring up my boys to be like that, goddammit,’ Richard said in a voice strained with fury.

‘Don’t swear. You know, I’m not that worried about Robert. He’s quieter and somehow … more sensible. At school he says the things they want to hear, keeps his thoughts to himself, then comes home and switches over. But Christian … Your boss mustn’t hear that Christian has told a joke about Brezhnev, especially now, when he’s hardly been dead a month and they don’t know whether they’re coming or going and fly off the handle at the least thing … You know all that. And Christian does too. But sometimes I really feel it’s like talking to a brick wall. And then you don’t even know whether that restaurant’s been bugged all over the place …’

‘Oh, you can be sure of that.’

‘So why don’t you behave accordingly, then? I did have a word with you about it only this afternoon, and Christian yesterday! But I can talk till the cows come home, it’s still no use. The boy’s old enough, you say, but when you and your friends encourage him like that … He’s only seventeen, for God’s sake, he must feel it’s a challenge when he listens to you lot … But I think he’s not yet old enough to assess such situations properly.’

‘You’re right, Anne. I should have been more cautious. Oh … all this ducking and diving …’

‘Moaning won’t change it.’

‘That Müller … I saw very clearly that he was boiling with rage and didn’t kick up a big fuss only because he was our guest. Manfred will have to watch out too. I know for a fact that his boss and Müller can’t stand each other, but … A comrade’s a comrade, and when it comes down to it, dog doesn’t eat dog. Oh, Anne, I’ve been living in this state for thirty-three years and I still don’t know when it’s time to keep my mouth shut.’

Anne looked at him, gave his arm a squeeze.

‘That’s why I love you. Come on, then, it’s too late to do anything about it now.’

Richard sensed that she was depressed and wanted to change the subject. ‘Hey, what are we going to do about sleeping arrangements? I thought Sandor and Alice could stay in the Little Room …’

‘My dear, we sorted that out ages ago.’ She shook her head in amusement. ‘You men always think of these things in such good time, don’t you? It’s amazing. If these things were left to you, we’d be in chaos in no time at all. Alice and Sandor are going to have to sleep with Kurt in the children’s room, they can move back into the Little Room tomorrow. Regine and Hansi in the living room, Emmy in the Little Room. Your mother needs to sleep by herself and anyway, you can’t expect her to put up with the hard sofas in the living room; it doesn’t bother Regine and the young lad. And they’ll have the telephone in there, in case the call comes very late. Hey, Robert, Ezzo, stop that, you almost hit us. I don’t want anything to get broken, d’you hear?’

‘Yesyes,’ the two shouted happily, sweeping snow off the top of the walls into each other’s faces.

Christian was thinking about Regine, who was a friend of his parents. Jürgen Neubert, Regine’s husband, had left the country illegally two years ago to go to Munich. Since then they could only meet in Prague, once a year, after great difficulties, Jürgen always afraid of being arrested. Regine had applied for an exit visa, and since then her telephone had been cut off. She had to use Anne and Richard’s line to speak to Jürgen. The call might be put through at four in the morning, you never knew when beforehand, which was why Anne had taken the precaution of making up beds for Regine and her son.

‘Aha,’ Richard murmured outside Caravel, taking the key out of his coat pocket. The light was on in the living room, the windows of which, with their flying buttresses, could be seen from the street. That was the sign that Regine was still waiting for her husband’s call.

6. ‘Prek-fest’

The first light of day was crouching at the window when Christian woke. He listened. Everything was quiet in the house, but he knew that Meno liked to get up early and spend lauds — as, like the monks, he called the hour between five and six — at work or meditating in the gradually waning darkness of the living room, which was still reasonably warm from the previous evening. In the summer Meno would sit on the little balcony watching the return of the garden, the branches and flowers being outlined in the flush of dawn, Lange’s pear trees still dark, the pears still not released from the twilight; watching and perhaps listening as he, Christian, was listening now. The rusty tick of Meno’s Russian 3ap alarm clock, the faint green glow of the fluorescent lines under the numbers and on the hands. It was shortly after seven. Christian got up and put on the dressing gown Anne had laid out for him. The stove had gone out during the night; the room was so cold his breath came out like a cloud of smoke and there were ice patterns on the window. The light was on in the bathroom, and he heard Libussa singing one of her Czech folk songs; when she sang, her voice sounded like a little girl’s. On the landing it was even colder than in the cabin, there was a glitter of frost on the coal box. He hurried back into the room, swung his arms round, did knee bends, then some shadow boxing with an invisible opponent who, in his mind’s eye, took on the features of his Russian teacher, and then, after a blow full in the face, the puffy red face of his civics teacher, a jab, a straight right, a straight left, a right hook and then one to those thick, always slightly parted lips with the curve of the red-veined jug-like nose above them — there was a knock at the door. ‘Krishan,’ he heard Libussa shout, ‘the bathroom’s free now, breakfast’ — she pronounced it ‘prek-fest’ — ‘is in the conservatory, d’you hear.’

Kri-shan. That was what Libussa called him; he liked it. The civics teacher had burst under the force of his punches. Panting, Christian flung open the window. It had continued to snow during the night; the garden, which fell away steeply below the window, lay under a thick white blanket, and the summerhouse, where Meno often used to work, sometimes even sleep in the warmer seasons, looked as if it were covered in icing; the sandstone balustrade on either side, which separated the upper garden from the lower, wilder part, just peeked out of the snow; a stone eagle was perched on the balustrade and its wings, delicately carved and elegantly outspread, seemed to be carrying a pile of folded white towels. Fresh animal tracks criss-crossed the snow. A flock of crows was busying itself about the huge stack of wood that Meno, the ship’s doctor and Meno’s next-door neighbour, the engineer Dr Stahl, had piled up the previous autumn. In front of the rhododendrons, which covered the left-hand side of the balustrade almost completely, several bird feeders were hanging from some clothes poles; countless birds were fluttering round and squabbling. He closed the window and went to the bathroom.

At weekends they had a communal breakfast in the House with a Thousand Eyes. It was Libussa, who was very sociable, who had introduced the custom. They took it in turns to provide rolls, butter, milk and jam; in the summer they often had breakfast in the garden, in the lower part, at a table in the middle of a wild, romantic tangle of bushes, out of sight of prying eyes; a weathered set of steps led down to it.

A jet of boiling hot water shot into the tub with the lion feet. There were fine cracks in the enamel. There were traces of black mould in the joins between the tiles, on the ceiling with the layers of peeling paint, on the wood of the windowsill, which had been leached grey by soapy water; the mould was an intruder in all the houses Christian knew up there, and it was impossible to eradicate entirely, no matter how much time people spent airing rooms, brushing on fungicides or painting white lead or spar varnish over it

Soon the bathtub was steaming. He refilled the boiler with water, thinking about the conservatory. Whenever Christian said anything about the conservatory, or about the House with a Thousand Eyes — in the school hostel after they’d finished their homework for the evening and the three of them were sitting in the lounge together and it was difficult to stay out of the exchange of information, the ‘who-are-you-then?’ and ‘where-do-you-come-from-then?’ — the response would be disbelieving looks, sometimes unconcealed doubt. He quickly sensed their scepticism and would change the subject before he got onto the details that really sounded fantastic and magical, didn’t mention Caravel, East Rome, Meno’s name for the house where he lived and where there was a room that could be reached both through the Langes’ apartment and by a spiral staircase that was hidden behind the salamander wallpaper in the hall, with chessboard tiles and light coming in through a sloping overhead window that the Langes, like the original owners, used as a conservatory. — ‘Oh come on now, with the shortage of accommodation, you don’t seriously expect us to believe that. Hasn’t your ship’s doctor had someone allocated to one of his rooms?’ Christian could hear his fellow boarders in Waldbrunn say as he got out of the bath and went back to the cabin, dressing as quickly as he could, the cold was so biting. — He hasn’t, but my uncle has. He shares the lower apartment with an engineer and his family; my uncle has one large room and two smaller ones. It’s an old villa, built by a soap manufacturer around the turn of the century; one family lived in the whole house then, and there were a few attic rooms for the maids. He would have had no idea that he would be expropriated one day — otherwise he might have made better arrangements to suit the Communal Housing Department. ‘Well now, isn’t he a little mocker, our Dresdener?’ It was Jens Ansorge who said that. The son of the general practitioner from Altenberg, he was in 11/2, Christian’s class, and sat right at the front of the row by the window; a little shorter than Christian, his hair blow-dried into a slightly dishevelled style, he had spoken with a conspiratorial grin and tugged at his large beak of a nose with relish. That meant: Don’t try to fool me, OK? Sometimes Jens watched him during classes; they both sat at the front, though Christian was alone in the row by the door, and he could feel Jens’s blue eyes, openly scrutinizing and challenging, going over his face, the clothes he was wearing, the Swiss walking boots that had been handed down to him by his father.

Christian was already on the stairs. He intended to go to the conservatory by the concealed door, but Libussa was just coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been warming up some rolls — the odour filled the hall. ‘Just come right in, Krishan, and help me carry the things into the conservatory. You know where everything is, the salt’s on the right in the wall cupboard.’ Libussa, holding the basket of rolls, her hair gathered in a bun, nodded to him. ‘The door’s open, but close it behind you or we’ll lose all the heat.’

Christian picked up the tea tray. The Langes’ apartment smelt of vanilla tobacco; the smoke seemed to have seeped right into the yellowing wallpaper and faded curtains that were hung over the doors for extra insulation. Christian lowered his head to go through the wooden-bead curtain into a little vestibule in which were a shoe tidy, key hooks, a hat rack on which were several of Libussa’s large hatboxes. The ship’s doctor, who was just coming out of the living-room door with the ash pan in his hand, blinked behind his horn-rimmed glasses when he saw Christian, but not in surprise at seeing him in their apartment, for he immediately said, in his tobacco-smoky voice, ‘Did it go well, did it go well, was your father happy with it?’ He said ‘fadder’, almost swallowing the ‘r’ — Lange came from Rostock. ‘Very happy, even.’ Christian then wished him a slightly embarrassed good morning, for Lange was in a rather strange get-up: striped pyjama trousers and a tweed jacket with a cigar peeping out of the breast pocket. ‘Right then, let’s get on with it, my son.’ Muttering to himself, he looked for a key on the hooks, the goatee on his chin and upper lip — which had retained its light-brown colour, in contrast to the rather tangled hair on his head — bobbing up and down as he did so.

The teacups were steaming; they were also heavy and the ball of his hand was touching the hot teapot; despite that, Christian didn’t go straight into the conservatory but cast greedy eyes on the pictures on the walls, mostly photographs of the ships on which Lange had been the doctor: the Oldenburg, a proud and tall full-rigged ship — when Christian asked about it Lange would growl, ‘She were a good ship’ in his Low German dialect, jutting out his chin and puffing smoke from a pipe that was curved like an upside-down question mark; passenger ships of the Hamburg — America Line; then, during the war, destroyers, menacing grey iron hulks. Harbours, the Torres Straits, the rocky coast of Patagonia, taken from a ship of the Laeisz shipping company’s nitrate line; a U-boat crew in the Second World War, the submarine surfaced beside a battleship, its sailors waving, the hatches open, the crew fallen in on deck, pennants, illustrated with the number of gross register tons they had sunk, fluttered above the bearded faces, and the captain was saluting, his hand raised casually and, as it seemed to Christian, slightly sceptically to his hat with its armed-forces eagle hanging askew. Scapa Flow — Captain-Lieutenant Prien salutes Rear Admiral Dönitz CUB — ‘Commander of the U-Boats,’ Lange had replied to Christian’s question about the abbreviation, and he stroked his thin beard, going on in his Low German, ‘An’ I knew Prien as well. ’e were the great hero back then. A German U-boat sinks the Royal Oak in Scapa Flow. Reception in the Reich chancellery, the Knight’s Cross, red carpet an’ all that. An’ then? Lost at sea for Führer, Folk and Fadderland. All lost at sea, my son. The seventh from t’left, on the big tub, that’s me.’

Beside the photos were sailors’ knots, carefully drawn by Lange on black cardboard and framed: bowline, clove hitch, carrick bend and bunting hitch. The ship’s doctor had taught him some of them — they were useful for fishing. The television, a Raduga, reflected the growing light and seemed to be staring at him. The stove gaped wide, the surround was spattered with ash — Libussa would go round later with the vacuum cleaner and wipe the bottles on the shelf beside the stove in which Lange’s ships dreamt of long voyages. Christian went into the conservatory.

‘Good morning, young man.’ The engineer turned up the right corner of his lip; it was perhaps intended to seem cool and detached, but to Christian it just looked funny since Stahl had a moon-face and just a few strands of hair on his head, which he combed straight back and plastered down with hair lotion. To make up for it, his eyebrows and the hair on his chest, sticking out like wool from his lumberjack shirt, were all the more bushy. Lange often used to tease him: Gerhart Stahl, he would say, was like a Soviet actor who played a sunflower-seed vendor on the runway of Baku airport in a TV series. A sly clown and an inventive rogue, he would always shake his head dubiously and waggle his eyebrows when the Moscow celebrities, who were returning from their summer holiday, took off in an Ilyushin — ‘I do not waggle my eyebrows,’ the engineer would object irritatedly. Dr Gerhart Stahl didn’t like the Soviet actor because he didn’t like the Soviet Union.

‘Slept well.’ It was a statement, not a question. He crushed Christian’s hand in his engineer’s paw, then leant down to the oil radiator and turned the control knob. Although the tall windows were no longer perfectly insulated and the conservatory was fairly big — there was plenty of room in it for the breakfast table, and they could sit round it without the palm trees in the tubs getting in the way — it was noticeably warmer there than in the Langes’ living room. The conservatory had a stove of its own, and the ship’s doctor would stoke it up before going to bed; it continued to heat the conservatory until after breakfast, by which time the stoves in the other rooms were going.

‘What a lovely prek-fest!’ Libussa clapped her hands together with joy. ‘Krishan, Gerhart, let me remind you of that before you start eating like horses. We can thank God that at least we can get enough rolls and bread in this country. When I think back to the war …’ She went round filling their second cups with hot milk that she got from a collective farm beyond Bühlau, on the Schönfeld plateau; very little fat had been taken out of the cow’s milk — it was more like white soup than milk and Christian found it nauseating; but Libussa thought he didn’t have enough muscle, and that he was at the stage that would decide ‘whether he would turn into a man or a pencil’. Therefore she refused to be put off by his expression and filled his cup.

‘Thanks again for the roses, Libussa.’ Meno, who had switched on Radio Dresden, bent over a tub with Maréchal Niel roses. ‘All the wives were envious of them and insisted I give them the address of the market garden. Did I perhaps get the flowers from the Rose Gorge or from Arbogast’s greenhouses? How did I manage to bribe the grower?’

The ship’s doctor came in. He’d put on a dressing gown and was carrying Chakamankabudibaba, who blinked in the light, arched his back and climbed into a basket that was next to a magnificent sago palm. Lange and Stahl rubbed their hands expectantly and licked their lips. There was the smell of tea, coffee, freshly made cocoa, there were preserved quinces and cherries, plum jam and forest honey, and beside the basket of rolls covered with a cloth was one of Libussa’s specialities: apricots that had been dried to make a kind of firm pastry and cut into thin strips that Christian (who kept squinting over at the plate, bringing a grin from Stahl, whose chair was much closer to the delicacy) thought would do a lot more to promote his growth and physical development than hot cow’s milk. Libussa and her husband put their hands together for grace: ‘By Thy hands we all are fed, give us, Lord, our daily bread.’ Radio Dresden was broadcasting a poem by a senior functionary of the Writers’ Association who had fought valiantly for socialism. Meno listened, a pained look on his face, while Christian and the others, unmoved, helped themselves to what was on the table. The poem was about ideals, a bright future, Lenin and Marx, about heroic deeds on the building site of tomorrow, about shaping communism and ‘About you, comrade, blithely breakfasting, / free of the cares of those / on guard!’ Stahl paused as he was cutting his roll open. ‘Tell me, Meno, do you have to read that kind of stuff every day? O blithely breakfasting book-editor …’

‘Theodor Fontane?’ the ship’s doctor suggested, pursing his lips as he looked for his Heilpunkt digestion tablets. Meno still had the pained look on his face. The engineer put his knife down and, his elbow on the table, rested his chin on his hand to listen, chortling now and then, the sides of his nostrils quivering. Seizing the opportunity, Christian speared two slices of apricot with his fork.

‘That’s what those in East Rome like to hear. If it was up to them, writers would only produce that kind of stuff.’

‘Do they have to broadcast it? So many verses from blithely breakfasting bureaucrats per month? For once they could’ — Stahl looked round, searching — ‘celebrate something quite ordinary in their verse. We have to do it! Four fuel engineers fashion fire from faeces. Celebrate the common things, comrade.’

Meno laughed, picked up his roll and examined it for a while, a glint of mockery in his eye. He stood up, stretched out his hand with the roll in a histrionic gesture:

‘Thee will I sing, O thoroughbred Dresdner bread roll,

Splendidly chubby-cheeked promoter of gluttony.

But, tell us, cam’st thou from Elysium’s Konsum?

Did Bunn, the baker, take thee out of a state-owned oven?

Cam’st thou from Wachendorf’s cosily floured emporium?

Or from Walther’s or George’s baskets, morose in the dawn’s early light?

But tell me, O dough-born culinary marvel from Dresden,

How should the bard’s greedy-gluttonous mouth name thee,

He whose longing lips laud thee in lustful lines?

Pert and pliant as a young girl’s bosom thou lurest

To taste thee, but is it merely a taste thou wilt grant

When the bard’s one desire is to sink

His teeth into thee as deep as a ravenous wolf,

To tear, with beastly maw and howling, juicy lumps

Out of thy flavoursome flanks — O how!

How shall I name thee, freshly baked, toothsome bagpipe,

Taste-buds tickler, O Dresdner dulcimer,

Manna of the muses, who suffer in silence

The oven’s hellish heat, thou acme of Saxon genius,

O bread roll?’

Their laughter broke off abruptly as applause came from the door to the spiral staircase and the hall. They all turned their heads. The two young men who lowered their hands and slowly put them in their trouser pockets looked by no means unsure of themselves. The flush on their cheeks seemed to come from participation in the amusement rather than from embarrassment, and Christian, who kept looking back and forth between the twins and those sitting round the table, would never have managed the lack of inhibition with which they, giggling and praising the condition of the plants on either side, sauntered towards them. They were identical twins, and they added to their confusing similarity of appearance by wearing the same clothes: white, fine-gauge, cable-stitch roll-neck pullovers, rather worn jeans and trainers.

‘This is a private room, Herr … Kaminski?’ Stahl was the first to recover from his surprise and pointed round the conservatory with his knife, which had a little blob of butter on the tip.

‘That is correct, Kaminski is our name. And to distinguish between us, I’m René and this is Timo.’ The closer of the two jerked his chin in the direction of his brother, whose cheerful expression turned into an inviting smile at the words ‘distinguish between’, which his brother had accompanied with an explanatory, but not mocking gesture. No one returned the smile or interpreted it as the invitation to a friendly response, as it might have been intended; Libussa and her husband sat there, stiff and silent; Meno, who was still standing, blinked in irritation then, after an exchange of looks with the ship’s doctor, sat down as Kaminski, perhaps in order to get over the oppressive silence, came towards him. The news was on the radio now; Christian heard the ten-minute clock chime in Meno’s living room. Chakamankabudibaba had woken up and was eyeing the two brothers suspiciously; their blond hair, combed this way and that over several cowlicks, was struck by the irruption of light and looked like frothy sunshine.

‘Oh, you’ve got two more chairs, that is nice.’ The twin whose name had been given as Timo pointed to two folded garden chairs that were leaning against the tub of roses. Stahl cleared his throat and dropped his knife on his plate with a clatter. The bafflement on Lange’s face had given way to outrage. ‘This is a private room, as Herr Stahl said, and I cannot remember having invited you to join us for breakfast. Would you be good enough to explain your behaviour, gentlemen? You are in the apartment of Alois and Libussa Lange and I am not aware that the Communal Housing Department has made any new decrees or amendments —’ The ship’s doctor broke off as Kaminski quickly raised his hand. ‘New decrees or amendments are not necessary, Herr Lange. At least not insofar as you are referring to existing tenancy agreements.’

‘This is home invasion!’ thundered the engineer. Timo Kaminski had unfolded the chairs and placed them on the chessboard floor under the sago palm. His brother took out a packet of Jewel cigarettes, sniffed the air and asked, with a suggestion of a bow in Libussa’s direction, whether he might smoke. She nodded, speechless with surprise, as it seemed to Christian. Kaminski flicked his lighter, lit the cigarette, drew on it with relish. ‘No, it is not a case of home invasion, Herr Stahl. The concept doesn’t apply here … We are the new tenants in the attic apartment in this building. We were very pleased to be allocated that apartment … You know the difficult housing situation. And then we are assigned the attic apartment in a quiet house on a slope with excellent views … Can you not imagine our delight? And can you not imagine that in such a case one does not simply move in, as into any old accommodation, but makes enquiries about the conditions here, finds out as much information as one can in city departments, in documents at the land registry, and about you as well, of course, our future neighbours? That is right and proper, is it not? We’re not moving just anywhere but here, into this district above Dresden, to Mondleite, into the former property of a manufacturer of fine soaps whose renown, in his day, had spread far and wide beyond the confines of the country …’

The ship’s doctor interrupted him: ‘What do you want?’

‘Us? Nothing at all. Except to introduce ourselves, make ourselves known in the hope that we will be on good terms with our neighbours.’

‘And for that you break into someone else’s apartment, into our conservatory? What kind of behaviour is that?’ Libussa shook her head in indignation.

‘Breaking into someone else’s apartment?’ René and Timo, who had already sat down and spent the conversation pushing back the cuticle of his fingernails with a knife, looked at each other in astonishment. ‘Breaking in? Home invasion? My dear neighbours — is that how you respond to our attempt to be friendly, to introduce ourselves? That isn’t very fair. It doesn’t show goodwill. As I said, we have gathered information, my dear Frau Lange. And in no lease, no document in the land registry, in no tenancy agreement does it say that this conservatory belongs to your apartment and is thus for your own private use. It is not written down anywhere and that is a fact. You don’t need to go and check now,’ René said, raising his hands as Lange stood up. ‘But if you don’t believe me — well, go and check in your documents. You will see that I am right. And that means this conservatory belongs to all of us who live in this beautiful house, that is to you, Dr Stahl, and your family, to you, Herr Rohde, to the Langes and to us, since we now live here — and for that reason, then, prohibitions, claims of established rights and so on have no relevance. No more than those misleading expressions you used previously and which we beg you not to repeat. As good neighbours.’

7. East Rome

Snow, snow was falling on Dresden, on the Mondleite where Meno, as he came back from his walk in the dark, could see the shadows of the inhabitants in the lit windows, the worried face of Teerwagen, a physicist in the Barkhausen Building at the Technical University, who waved to him from the balcony; snow was falling on the district, was caught on the branches of the trees, lay there like strips of candy floss, transforming the rhododendrons into white bells, piling up on the footpaths, covering the tracks of birds, deer and cats in the front gardens with a sheet of fresh, glistening damask, burying in a few hours the cars, which had been laboriously scraped clear, in thickly spun layers, huge cocoons in which shapeless organisms slept through their metamorphosis.

On Monday morning Meno got up earlier than usual, yet he could hear the engineer already bustling about in the kitchen.

‘Morning, Gerhart.’

‘Morning. Baba’s back outside. I’ve already given him something.’

‘Can I have a bath?’

‘It’s free. The boiler will take a few minutes.’

‘Did Sabine ring?’ The House with a Thousand Eyes had a telephone; Lange had finally had a line allocated after waiting for fifteen years. The tenants used it communally.

‘Her train should arrive at Neustadt Station at half five. Nine-hour delay because of snow drifts. I’ll go and collect her, that’s why I’m up already. The Eleven’s still not going, but should I try with the car in this weather? What d’you think?’

‘They were gritting Bautzener Strasse yesterday, it should be fairly clear by now.’

‘But the stuff is so corrosive, it’ll absolutely ruin the bodywork.’

Stahl went to the refrigerator, took out bread and butter, started to butter a few slices. ‘Sylvia will be really tired. And hungry. After Berlin there was nothing to eat in the buffet.’

‘Give both of them my best wishes.’

After his morning wash Meno went to his living room to look through the papers for the Old Man of the Mountain again. Christian had lost his place markers in the Schelling books but hadn’t mentioned it, presumably confident that he, Meno, immersed in thought, self-absorbed and dreamy, as he probably appeared to most people, wouldn’t notice. Oh but he did! His father had encouraged him to observe things precisely; he had often gone walking with him in the hills of ‘Saxon Switzerland’ and his father had always subjected botanical or zoological finds to detailed scrutiny; he hadn’t been satisfied with a quick glance but tried to bring out the specific characteristics of any living thing, whether plant or animal, ordinary dandelion or rare lady’s slipper, to familiarize Meno with it. Precise observation, quiet, devoted faithfulness to the large- and small-scale phenomena of nature, daily routine and yet tireless seeking, digging, the capacity for amazement. Meno thought of his university teachers — Falkenhausen: choleric, obsessive attention to detail, running round the institute in Jena, white coat fluttering out behind him, by day wearing a magician’s blue bow tie with white spots, by night sleepless in his pyjamas and dressing gown; he had a room in the basement of the institute, where he lived surrounded by snakes, white mice and spiders, making coffee in Erlenmeyer flasks, frying eggs for supper in platinum crucibles which were iridescent with the remains of chemicals, setting off firecrackers, left over from New Year celebrations, to counter the oppressive silence of all the stuffed and prepared animals in the nocturnal corridors of the institute; Otto Haube in the Leipzig Institute, which had two massive stone bears by the entrance and labyrinthine staircases and laboratories where alchemists would have felt at home; Haube, who had escaped from the concentration camps in the Third Reich and wanted to develop a socialist zoology — before the beginning of the term, he sent all the students out into the fields round Leipzig to help in the fight against the Colorado beetle, which had been dropped there by the imperialist class enemy — but who could also, after hours of an inquisition-like viva, suddenly push his spectacles up onto his scholar’s forehead with the duelling scars and, faced with a fruit-fly that the candidate, as a last resort, had had to make out of modelling clay, quote Goethe: ‘Nature and art, they seem to shun each other’. It wasn’t easy with either of these teachers, they were merciless in their fight against imprecision, and Haube, the socialist zoologist, once even had an assistant transferred because he had twice, in a short space of time, recorded imprecise data, saying he had no sense of the dignity of his work, that was what he, Haube, had been forced to conclude from the results of these experiments, which had been carried out inadequately out of sheer laziness, whereas a scientist expressed his love in the strictest precision. Such assistants were no use either to him or to socialism.

Meno picked up the manuscript the Old Man of the Mountain had submitted to Dresdner Edition. There were going to be problems with the book, that was clear to Meno; that was clear to Josef Redlich, Meno’s superior at Dresdner Edition; that was clear to the managing director of the firm, Heinz Schiffner, who read a few pages, raised his ice-grey bushy eyebrows and slowly lowered them, closed the book and shook his head sadly; and that was clear to the Old Man of the Mountain himself. A tale about a mine into which the ‘hero’ descended, enticed into the depths by the siren song of a silver bell. Problems less of an artistic than of an ideological nature; the old story Meno had become sick of hearing over the last few years. Editor’s report, external report from an editor not employed by the publishing company with a recommendation for publication, Yes or No, together with the grounds for the decision, then the whole lot went to the censor and, if he was unsure, which had been happening more and more recently, the dossier went to the Minister for Books or even higher. A time-consuming process, injurious to one’s self-respect. He wondered how the Old Man of the Mountain dealt with it, and whether one of the reasons that had prompted him to try Dresdner Edition was precisely these problems with the censors and the hope that he could avoid them in a branch of Hermes-Verlag that was outside Berlin. That would be a mistake, as he would have to make clear to the old man; after all, he had been in the business long enough not to harbour any illusions. Meno knew that it was a delicate mission he was about to undertake. Schiffner didn’t like these conversations with his authors and would send his editor, Meno, in his stead. Meno felt that there was something dishonest, perhaps even obscene, in these conversations — he’d once mentioned this to Schiffner, but the only result had been an outburst of rage from his boss, which to him seemed to suggest a guilty conscience. You explained to the author which passages would, in all probability, be objected to and then left it to him to decide whether, and to what extent, he was prepared to accept censorship, that is self-censorship. Some called that fair dealing; but on top of the humiliation that the manuscript would not be printed as it had been written came the humiliation that the author had to mutilate it himself, bit by bit. That meant he was left without the opportunity to defend himself against certain criticisms — he had given the book the shape in which it had appeared himself. This was standard practice with all publishers, but it gave Meno palpitations, and he felt sorry for the authors, and not just because he was an author himself. It was taking away part of their dignity. Meno hated these conversations just as much as Schiffner did, but Schiffner was his boss. He hated them above all when the authors themselves — and this did happen — had no problem with the practice, when, on the contrary, they were grateful that the publisher was so cooperative and discussed desired changes of an ideological nature with them.

Meno thought of Lührer. With the most unconcerned expression, he would pick up the red pencil and cross out whole paragraphs of his text, which wasn’t badly written at all, would change the interpretation of a character with two or three sharp cuts, would turn a pensioner non grata into an acceptable policeman, an undesirable allusion to our Polish brothers into a pat on the back for Bulgaria; he knew the most important people in the Ministry of Culture who were responsible for publishing, knew their characteristics, preferences and little foibles, and took them into account in his writing. What he didn’t know was the ‘state of the weather’: the guidelines of the binding ideology that could change from week to week, sometimes from day to day. What was acceptable, what was no longer acceptable and, even more important, what would soon be acceptable. Lührer would rewrite his manuscript according to the way the managing director or Meno interpreted the prevailing mood; recently he had even gone over to working from the outset with variants that would fit in with the most common, the most likely developments, such as had been seen often enough since the sixties and seventies. Meno would sit there with this man, who once, long before the Bitterfeld writers’ conference in 1959, had written some outstanding stories and been one of the most talented writers of the East, saying nothing and staring into space while Lührer talked about the compromises ‘Schiller and his comrades’ had had to accept to get their works performed and printed at all. Eventually they would drop the topic of literature and examine the entrails of various Party Conference resolutions, commentaries on them and circulars from the secretaries of the different levels of the Writers’ Association. Perhaps it would be different with the Old Man of the Mountain, perhaps he would be confronted with a fit of rage and a plain refusal to distort his manuscript until it fitted in with some kind of ideological concept. Perhaps. Meno was looking forward to the meeting with a kind of sporting thrill of anticipation. He was acquainted with the Old Man of the Mountain as an author, in fact very well. But as far as this side of literary work was concerned, he didn’t know him at all. In a somewhat excited and apprehensive state, Meno shut the briefcase in which he had put the papers and books and stood up. The clock was striking half past six as he left the house.

When the wind freshened, blowing the snow along in thick clouds, Meno had to hold on to his hat. The park was swathed in fine crystalline veils; icicles were hanging from the branches of the copper beech beside the House with a Thousand Eyes, the massive trunk looking as if it were made of black glass in the half-light. By the park, where Mondleite turned off, a pair of headlights were edging their way closer. Meno saw that they belonged to a dustcart that was approaching cautiously, slithering on the street, which was slippery under the layer of new snow; the men jumped down from the top and, swearing, trundled the dustbins, so full the lids wouldn’t close, to the lorry and stuck them in the clips, at which the bins were tipped up by the hydraulic mechanism and shaken several times to empty them. Meno turned onto Planetenweg. The street lamps were swinging and cast their metallic white light in swaying cones onto the roadway, on which gravel, grit, ash and frozen snow had been crushed to a grey pulp. Professor Teerwagen was at the wheel of his Wartburg, turning the key in the ignition — the engine kept making pained whirring noises but didn’t start — while Frau Teerwagen was busily brushing the snow off the bonnet and scraping the ice off the windows. There was a light on in the garage of Dr Kühnast, a chemist in the pharmaceutical factory; the sound of a hairdryer could be heard, Kühnast was probably using it to defrost the windscreen of his Škoda. Teerwagen’s Wartburg gave a howl, he was clearly revving up in order to try and knock some sense into the stubborn vehicle. The houses on either side were dark and silent. On Querleite, which connected Planetenweg with Turmstrasse and Wolfsleite, the characteristic winter-morning sounds could be heard: the scrape of wooden snow shovels on garden paths and pavement, the shovels being knocked to clear them at irregular intervals, the rasp of the clumps of snow that had fallen off being cleared away. Herr Unthan, the blind man who ran the communal baths in the house called Veronica, was carrying in coal. Meno turned up his coat collar and walked more quickly. It had become appreciably colder overnight; the thermometer in Libussa’s conservatory had gone down to zero. He waggled his fingers in his pockets, the tips stinging in the frost despite his good leather gloves — Richard had received a ‘quota’ through a grateful patient and passed them on to friends and relatives.

Meno thought back to the birthday party. All the doctors and their wives, with their more or less self-confident bearing and loud voices, had disturbed him. Discussions in which the Hoffmanns, Rohdes and Tietzes were involved would quickly grow more and more heated, threatening to turn into pulse-raising declarations of principle … There was a strange ferocity at work there, an absolute sense of being right came through in those discussions, giving them a sharpness outsiders must find disconcerting, though sometimes, once they had a sense for it and could stand back, pretty funny as well … Meno smiled and gleefully kicked away a ball of snow. The way Richard and Niklas waved their arms about, making grand gestures and shouting, their faces red as beetroots: ‘Gilels is a better pianist than Richter!’ — ‘No! Richter’s better!’ — ‘No!! How can you say that?’ Meno gave a quiet laugh: at that point the gesturing hand, as was only logical, would turn to the forehead and tap it, which usually led to a further entrenchment: ‘Gilels! In-du-bit-ably! Just come over and listen to this, surely you can’t seriously maintain …’ — ‘Well come on then! Now we’ll see that your o-pin-ion is lack-ing all found-a-tion!! I tell you …’ Niklas didn’t get worked up about all this hot air and was astonishingly good at dealing with it; Richard …

But Meno, who had turned into Turmstrasse, didn’t hear any more of what the opponents in his imaginary dialogue had to say. He started back in alarm — a silhouette appeared out of the driving snow and bounded towards him in furious leaps. It was a black dog the size of a calf, and it halted abruptly about three feet in front of him, slithered clumsily closer in flurries of snow Meno didn’t dare brush off his coat, and started to howl. He clutched his briefcase and, in order to try and assess the moment a possible attack might come, stared the beast in the eyes, which had a green glitter and looked as big as saucers when they were struck by the light of a street lamp. He looked all round. A few windows lit up in the Anton Semionovich Makarenko teacher training college where Mondleite crossed Turmstrasse; a whistle sounded, broke in the icy-cold air and continued a fourth lower, a kind of ‘heigh-ho’; the door of the college for cadet teachers opened and a bunch of sullen-looking students in brown army tracksuits with yellow and red stripes down the sleeves appeared and were ordered out into the street for their morning exercise by a man in a bobble hat. But he wasn’t responsible for the whistle; the ‘heigh-ho’ fourth sounded once more but from a man in black with a fedora whom Meno recognized as Arbogast. ‘Kastshey,’ the Baron shouted in an indignant voice, the whistle still in his hand. In the other he was holding a stick with a silver gryphon handle clenched under his arm. ‘Kastshey, heel.’ The dog flattened its ears, blinked and ducked out of the way. ‘Good morning.’ The Baron raised his hat a few centimetres above his high, emaciated-looking skull and sketched a smile that was perhaps intended to be soothing or friendly but was oddly crooked, almost like a mask on his pale face. ‘Heel,’ he repeated in a strict voice. Kastshey whimpered when the Baron gave him a tap on the head. ‘Was he a nuisance? He’s still very young and inexperienced, and almost completely untrained. Do forgive the annoyance.’ The Baron adjusted his steel spectacles. ‘By the way … I’ve read your study …’ He hesitated and his smile broadened. ‘What do you call it? I presume it’s not a novel? … of our friend Arachne. A very good piece of work, I like to see monographs like that …’ He hesitated again, put the whistle in his pocket. ‘I’ve long been fascinated by spiders. Would I be right in assuming this book is part of a more extensive work?’ The dog was sitting up on its hind legs and following the conversation attentively, panting now and then with its pink tongue hanging out. ‘Probably,’ Meno replied, nonplussed and not with great presence of mind, as it seemed to him. To be asked in the street, by a person with whom he wasn’t very well acquainted, about an article that had been published in an out-of-the-way scientific periodical, and a few months ago at that, seemed as strange as it was pleasing. Apart from the editorial committee, which had spent some time undecided as to whether it wasn’t more suited to a literary magazine, no one seemed to have noticed its publication. ‘Yes, probably,’ he said reflectively, ‘I’ve got some more material.’ Arbogast nodded, looked up again at the sky, which seemed to consist entirely of falling shrouds of snow, dirty grey in the dawn light. ‘We will invite you some time, I think. Do you know the Urania Society?’

Meno said yes.

‘It will be at one of their meetings. We will contact you. Two Mondleite, isn’t it?’ Again the smile appeared and again Meno had the impression it was a foreign body hanging on Arbogast’s waxen features. ‘Or do you have a telephone?’

‘Only one that is used by all the tenants.’

‘Then we’ll write. We have nothing free for the rest of this year or next January, if I have remembered aright. But there should be something in February and certainly in March.’ Arbogast waved his stick up and down and clicked his tongue at Kastshey, who shook himself vigorously, sending out a whirling spray of white that plastered Arbogast’s face and spectacles with patches of snow. Then Kastshey dashed off. The Baron waved his stick angrily at his departing rear and left Meno without saying goodbye.

Our friend Arachne? An odd choice of words, and Meno, who was walking on, confused but also pleased by the meeting, would have spent a long time thinking it over had a squad of soldiers not appeared out of the snowstorm when he was level with Arbogast’s observatory. A corporal with a thick Saxon accent was in charge. ‘Right wheel! — March!’ The squad turned off the street onto the path that led to the bridge, followed by the bored and arrogant look of a first lieutenant. A few cars, which Meno only noticed now, were held up behind the soldiers. The soft snow absorbed the echoes of the noises, the voice of the corporal and the tread of the boots seemed to be packed in cotton wool.

‘Detachment — halt!’ the first lieutenant ordered. ‘Get the men to repeat the manoeuvre, Comrade Corporal. That wasn’t a precise right wheel. That was as slack as an old tart’s tits.’

More cars joined the queue, pedestrians too who had come out of Sibyllenleite and Fichtenleite and were on their way to work. They waited in silence as the squad performed an about-turn, stamping across the whole width of Turmstrasse as they did so. Meno watched them. Some of them waited with their chins jutting out aggressively, watching the soldiers’ manoeuvre out of eyes screwed up into narrow slits. Most, however, stood there with heads bowed, hands buried in their coat pockets, making patterns in the snow with the toes of their shoes. The driver of the car at the front of the queue looked at his watch irritatedly several times, drummed with his fingers on the steering wheel. One of the cars behind sounded its horn impatiently. The lieutenant broke off the manoeuvre again and strolled, clapping his hands together behind his back, as if undecided what to do, towards the car whose horn had sounded. A brief exchange could be heard, imperious on the part of the lieutenant, abashed on that of the driver. The lieutenant returned, putting a notebook back into the inside pocket of his coat, nodded to the corporal, at which the squad continued the right wheel. When the soldiers set off down the path to the bridge, the traffic jam was released. Intimidated by the behaviour of the lieutenant, whom he would meet again at the control point at the end of the path, Meno checked the papers in his briefcase again: ID card, invitation from the old man, certified hectographic copy of the contract. He had a quick look around — anyone setting off along the path to the bridge was going to East Rome and there was very little that was regarded as more suspicious in the district than a visit ‘over there’, as they would say, their scorn expressed in the avoidance of its real name. People had no great opinion of that district, or of anything connected with it — in general people avoided Grauleite; it was on the corner of Fichtenleite and Turmstrasse and it was where the barracks for the guards stood — they were called ‘the Greys’ after the street name; there also, hidden behind some trees, was a concrete bunker with tall directional antennae on it. People said they oversaw all those who marched along Grauleite, they saw through all those who walked along Grauleite.

Three-metre-high walls ran along either side of the path to the bridge. After twenty metres there was a gate, the surrounds of which reached as high as the walls, and, beside it, a red-and-white-striped sentry box; the guard had shouldered his Kalashnikov as soon as Meno appeared and shouted, demanding to know what Meno wanted and to see his identity card. Then he pressed a bell push in the sentry box and the door opened.

‘Who are you going to visit?’ The lieutenant gave Meno, who was standing at the window of the checkpoint holding his hat, an appraising look and, with a casual gesture, took off his gloves.

‘I have an appointment with Herr Georg Altberg, eight o’clock.’ Altberg was the real name of the Old Man of the Mountain, but hardly anyone in the literary world in Dresden used it when they talked about him among themselves. Meno was surprised at how strange the name sounded, unfamiliar and oddly unsuitable. The lieutenant stretched out a hand for a binder that he was given by a corporal who was sitting at a telephone table below a board with light diodes. Rumour had it that the binder listed every one of the inhabitants of East Rome, with their name, address, function and photo, making them easy for the duty officer to identify, so that no unauthorized person could slip in. The lieutenant ran his finger down the page and showed something to the corporal, probably a telephone number, since the latter immediately drew one of the beige phones to him, dialled and handed the receiver to the lieutenant, who, after a short exchange, nodded and pushed Meno’s identity card back out on the little turntable. ‘That’s in order, you may pass. Make out a permit for him Comrade Corporal. How long will your visit last?’ the officer asked, turning to Meno.

‘I can’t say at the moment, it’s a business meeting.’

‘Take a one-third form,’ the lieutenant ordered. The corporal took a form out of a pigeonhole that was full of neatly ordered papers, inserted it with a carbon and a sheet of paper in the typewriter and started to hack out the permit, letter by letter, on the machine beside the red telephone, which was on the far right, below the light-diode board. There were one-eighth, one-quarter, one-third, one-half and full permits; they were for fractions of twenty-four hours. As far as Meno knew, only residents had unlimited permits. He waited. The two-finger system of the corporal, a well-fed, sandy-haired lad with peasant’s hands, did not seem very efficient. If he mistyped a letter the whole process would begin again, and he would be given another chance to watch the typist’s tongue gradually make his cheek bulge and the lieutenant twitch slightly every time the corporal hit a key. The officer was standing there quietly, sipping coffee out of a plastic mug, and observing Meno. The corporal then began to fiddle with the light-diode board. Behind him were a shelf with keys, a sealed cabinet, a portrait of Brezhnev with a black ribbon across the upper left corner. On the table beside the lieutenant was Snow Crystal, a volume of short stories by Georg Altberg.

‘Signature, one-third permit, eight-hour stay.’ The corporal rotated the form and a ballpoint pen through the window. ‘In the box under “Permit-holder”.’ Meno put his hat back on, picked up the pen but was so agitated that his signature came out as a scrawl. He folded the carbon copy and put it in his briefcase with his identity card. The barrier beyond the checkpoint was raised.

At the other end of the bridge a few soldiers were engaged in shovelling snow and knocking off ice. Meno pulled his hat down tighter and kept his coat collar up by fastening the button to the loop on the lapel; there was a bitter, raw wind, constantly blowing snow over the studded cast-iron plates on which he was walking, playing with the bare bulbs that hung down from the wires between the railings, which were well over six-foot high, plucking at the steel hawsers that secured the arch between the slopes as if they were harp strings, and producing a dark, singing sound, now and then shot through with a violent crack, as when ice breaks.

The milky early light over the point where the valley opened out in the direction of Körnerplatz and the Elbe had risen as far as the flanks of East Rome, casting a reddish glow over the ridge, which was saw-toothed with the tips of spruce trees; the citadel of the suspension railway towered up from it like an ancient triumphal arch. The light also revealed the funicular, where the cars were just going through the manoeuvre at the loop half-way up, the queue of cars on Grundstrasse below, Vogelstrom’s house, gardens covered with snow and the black blobs of the wood-stacks. Dirty grey smoke came from the chimneys on most roofs; torn away by the wind, the fumes drifted through the air like scraps of dishcloth. Now and then the fog would open up and Meno could see the queue of cars creeping slowly towards Körnerplatz, a 61 bus wheezing as it struggled up the road, could make out the ice brush bristling with jagged prongs into which the White Nun over the wheel of the disused copper mill had frozen. Was anyone watching him from below? Recognizing him from his hat or his build? The railings were high and the bridge itself was over sixty feet above the ground, so it seemed unlikely. However, he still started to walk faster. The soldiers stood to attention and saluted as he passed. That alarmed him. Did he look like someone from East Rome, like an influential functionary with his briefcase, hat and coat? Had they recognized him? It wasn’t the first time he had been there, though his last visit had been almost two years ago — when he and Hanna had got divorced. If the soldiers had been recruits then and had been called up again as reservists, they might remember him. Or did they salute everyone who came across the bridge — just in case and out of fear of the vanity of some important or self-important man? Reflecting on this, Meno passed through the second checkpoint. A captain waved him through without asking to see his identity card. Perhaps the lieutenant had informed him and the captain, knowing him to be reliably alert, had decided he didn’t need to bother with a second check. Still, Meno was surprised. This laxity was something new. Even when he’d gone out with Hanna and they’d come back over the bridge, they had had to submit to two checks, and neither of the two officers had ever been put off by Hanna’s maiden name, under which she appeared in the binder and was careful to state. At that time the bridge had been the sole access to East Rome — the suspension railway had been out of use for months because of a structural defect — and it was only when Barsano himself, First Secretary of the local Party organization, had been double-checked every time he went across the bridge that the repairs to the suspension railway were carried out at undreamt-of speed.

Meno was on Oberer Plan. The railway clock over the checkpoint clicked onto a quarter to eight. It wasn’t far to Oktoberweg, where the Old Man of the Mountain lived. The snowflakes were falling less thickly; the wind had eased off; the flags on the poles to the right of the checkpoint flapped sluggishly: the red flag with the hammer and sickle, the black-red-and-gold flag with the hammer and compasses in a wreath of grain, a white one with stylized portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Guards were standing by the flagpoles, staring straight ahead, presenting their Kalashnikovs; the expression on their faces was impassive and yet, as he knew, they were watching his every move. He could feel the captain’s eyes behind the reflective glass of the window that looked out onto the square. He turned right, into Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse, sticking close to the railings beyond which Oberer Plan fell away steeply, allowing a view of the lower parts of East Rome. Coal Island was wreathed in haze; a railway line ran along beside Majakowskiweg and its House of Culture; a squad of soldiers was busy shovelling snow off the track; clouds of steam were already coming out of the tunnel at the bottom of Majakowskiweg; in a few moments the narrow-gauge train would emerge from the cavity, give two brief whistles, presumably for the switchman at the little thermal power station on German-Titow-Weg, cross the valley in a curve and disappear into the other tunnel, which was not visible from Meno’s viewpoint. The driver was leaning out of the window; he straightened his railwayman’s cap and pulled his head back in as he passed the soldiers, who were now standing beside the track, smoking and leaning on their shovels. A man was squatting down on the tender, his face smeared with ashes and wearing a fur chapka with the earmuffs tied under his chin; smiling, his teeth gleaming, his hands in shapeless mittens that made them look like bears’ paws, he waved up to Meno. He felt uncomfortable about it and glanced at the soldiers, who had noticed the gesture and were now staring up at him as well; he stepped back a little, not only to get away from observation but also because at that moment the engine was right underneath him, and he would otherwise have been standing in the thick cloud of steam full of particles of soot from the smokestack. So it was still the same: the ‘Black Mathilda’, as the train was called, supplied the power station and the households of East Rome with coal — a separate line that came from Coal Island for that district alone, from a mine that had officially been closed down but was secretly still in operation, as Hanna’s father had once told him. It was the same driver as well; he’d recognized his walrus moustache.

Nadezhda-Krupskaja-Strasse wound its way gently up to the top of the steep ridge. Yew hedges, trimmed into vertical walls, screened a row of two-storey detached houses, all with the same light-grey roughcast, each with a garage and, on the garden fence, a letter box in the form of a cuckoo clock decorated with sprigs of fir and little ‘year’s-end-winged-figures’ — as they supposedly said up here instead of ‘angels’, Meno recalled with a snort of laughter. Beside the neatly cleared and gritted garden paths each property had a Douglas fir, and each tree had one bird feeder and one fat-ball hanging from it; peering out of the snow round the trunk were garden gnomes, the three versions with pipe, with wheelbarrow and with spade — that gnome was balancing on the spade with both feet and a roguish smile on its face. There were two flags over the front door of each house: on the right the flag of the GDR, on the left that of the Great Socialist October Revolution. This had not changed either, was familiar to him from his time with Hanna. It was something else that was new. He stopped for a moment and listened. Muted, many-voiced barking could be heard, turning after a few seconds into loud howls. He had noticed the noise earlier, as he was watching the soldiers from Oberer Plan; the arrival of the narrow-gauge train had drowned it out. It sounded like the barking of young dogs, but he couldn’t be sure. When he reached the top of the ridge, he had a view of almost the whole of the district: the House of Culture with, in front of it, the massive sculpture of Upright Fighters for Socialism brandishing their granite fists in the morning light; the avenue, paved with sandstone flags and lined with traffic cones, leading from the House of Culture to Engelsweg, a dead end with chestnut trees in which there was an HO supermarket, a chemist’s, a florist’s and an electrical store — for the East Rome housewives to do their shopping — and a men’s and a ladies’ hairdresser. The two chimneys on Gagarinweg belonged to the Friedrich Wolf Hospital and the Ivan V. Michurin restaurant complex, both of which were for the exclusive use of East Rome. Rising up from the wooded range of hills on the other side of the valley were the box-shaped storeys of Block A, a restricted area within the restricted area of East Rome; there, in the spacious bunkers protected by a company of guards, were the apartments of the top nomenklatura. The barking came from a kind of sports field below Block A, something he had not seen before. What, at his first, cursory glance, he could have taken for a teeming mass of black leeches turned out, when he had gone a little farther to a place where he had a better view, to be a cluster of black dogs, which, from that distance, looked no bigger than puppies. But the men beside them, wrapped up in protective clothing, armed with truncheons and blowing commands on referee’s whistles, were no bigger than children — it was just the perspective that made everything look smaller; the dogs’ hindquarters came up to the men’s hips. He would have liked to have had a pair of binoculars. But it was unthinkable to stand up here looking round East Rome with binoculars. In no time at all a squad in uniform would have appeared beside him, or a car would have detached itself from the shadow under one of the trees; he would have been asked what he was doing there, would have been invited to a shorter or longer interrogation in Block B, which, like the thermal power station, could not be seen from that viewpoint. The binoculars would have been confiscated; the two duty officers would have been reprimanded for not having noticed such a hostile, negative piece of equipment and impounded it. Laxity had appeared there too. He was surprised that they had not demanded to inspect his briefcase at either checkpoint. Was that no longer necessary? Had they developed technology that made such crude methods unnecessary? Meno went on. Even without binoculars he was still being observed — he had spent too long staring at the dog-training field, a suspicious individual with a hat, coat collar turned up and a briefcase; it was uncertain whether the powers-that-be would react to his little bit of spying, but he certainly had no desire for closer acquaintance with Block B, nor for encounters with unknown men at work or at home. As he made his way to the Old Man of the Mountain, he took with him in his memory the runs that radiated out from the training field in all directions, the barbed-wire fences round it and the kennels underneath, the wooden puppets with arms spread wide into which the dogs — they seemed to be of the same breed as Kastshey — leaping up, sank their teeth, the climbing walls with the window slits that had been cut out of the scratched and splintered wood six feet above the ground. The dogs could reach them easily.

On the dot of eight he was at the garden gate of 8 Oktoberweg and rang the cracked bell that was held on with sticking plaster.

8. Picture postcards

The nights, Christian felt, were far too short. He had just hit the stop button on his alarm clock to switch off its rattle, that burst of machine-gun fire in the world of a beautiful dream; but then there was the cold of the room in the grey half-light of dawn, the sound of Falk Truschler’s unmoved snoring in the lower bunk across from him — when would he learn to be on time? Never, Frau Stesny, the manager of the hostel, had said — the bed, table, a few chairs appeared, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s ecstatic face on the black-and-white calendar that the girls and the boarders from the twelfth year in the room next door envied him for. From the other side! Jens Ansorge had assumed a crooked grin and waved his index finger. Schnürchel won’t like that at all. And indeed, during his round of the rooms Schnürchel, the Russian teacher, had demanded the calendar be removed. Christian left it there and only took it down on Saturdays, before Schnürchel came sneaking along to stick his face, chafed raw from his razor, into matters that, unfortunately, did concern him. It was Verena above all who was interested in the calendar and even more in the musicians whose pictures were on it. Verena the unapproachable, the mocker, the beauty. Christian had dreamt of her. Perhaps it was her hair, its colour the brown of instruments, that was what he had first noticed about her in the summer work-week that the future pupils at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School had had to complete; perhaps her eyes, darkly shining like the cherries on the gnarled tree in the garden of his clock-grandfather in Glashütte when they were overripe and their skins would burst open in the next shower of rain. It was probably a movement, however; she had dried her hair in the school library, where half of the boys were housed during the work camp; that afternoon he had been there by himself, lying on his camp bed; she had come in and asked if she might use the socket, the one over in the girls’ accommodation wasn’t working; and then, through the whine of the dryer, she’d wanted to know why he was lying there in the murky room, shutting himself off from all the things the others were doing. He lowered the book he was pretending to read, it was Goethe’s Elective Affinities and he found it deadly boring but it was far above the stuff the others read — if they read at all — and left no doubts as to its quality. She stared at him; he stared back, confused by her finely drawn, dark-red lips that were swelling into a provocative pout under his gaze, by the index finger with which she scratched her neck, by the fingernail blackened by a hammer blow that missed its target. The girls had been in the schoolyard repairing the desks, while the voice of Tamara Danz of the Silly rock group was bellowing out from the radio that Herr Stabenow, the boyish physics teacher, had set up by the flagpoles; suddenly the cry of pain and all the boys, apart from himself and Siegbert Füger, dashed over to Verena, who was sobbing. ‘Too dumb even to knock in a nail, these women,’ Siegbert had said, wrinkling his nose. ‘And look at them all running. And her, she’s going to make some man’s life a misery, I can tell you. Much too pretty. And sure to be as conceited as they come. My mother always says: “You can’t build a house with jewels, my lad.” And my mother knows what’s what.’

Christian peered down at Falk again. He was still snoring, though now he’d pulled his pillow over his ears.

He’d been struck by her at the very first meeting of the future pupils of the senior high school. The pupils had come with their parents. The Dacia with the Waldbrunn numberplate had parked beside the Lada from Dresden; Richard had noticed the first-aid kit on the rear shelf and the doctor’s special parking badge on the dashboard of the Dacia and immediately started a chat with his colleague: ‘Hoffmann.’ — ‘Winkler.’ — ‘Pleased to meet you.’ — ‘The pleasure’s all mine.’ — ‘Blahblah.’ — ‘Blahblahblah.’ Verena had waited, scrutinized the Dresden numberplate, the paved corner with the flagpoles and bust of Maxim Gorki, then cast Christian a quick glance so that Robert, with a grin, whispered, ‘Just look at that peach, man’, in his ear. The multipurpose room in the basement had been set up for the meeting. There was a piano, a Marx — Engels — Lenin poster in front of a lectern draped in red cloth, a table behind it, at which a few teachers were talking to each other, ignoring the chatter of voices. Most of the pupils knew each other already. Christian felt as if they were all looking him over, for he seemed to be the only one no one knew. When he came in there was just one seat left, by the entrance; sitting there was like being on show, which didn’t seem to bother Robert in the least, he just brazenly chewed his chewing gum and cast his eyes over the girls. Christian, on the other hand, was embarrassed; his acne had to choose that day of all days to blossom like a willow in spring. Verena’s family had sat in the back row, under the high tilt windows, so that Christian could observe Verena. She greeted some of the others in a friendly but, as it seemed to him, distant manner. The babble of voices gradually subsided. Furtive glances. Christian lowered his head and didn’t dare look at anything apart from his fingernails, his new watch or Baumann, the white-haired maths teacher who, from the lectern far away at the front, was giving an introduction to socialist education for young people; as he spoke, his apple-cheeked face seemed strangely roguish — as if he himself didn’t believe everything he was saying. But Christian sensed that one should trust that friendly appearance less than the flash of his clear and sharp rimless spectacles … Christian suspected he would never be in the good books of that archetypal schoolteacher with the flashing spectacles. His ability at maths was too awful. The dark-haired girl by the windows at the back, he thought, would definitely be good at maths, she would definitely be good at everything in school. A swot, no question.

‘So why do you shut yourself off from everything?’ the swot had asked on that afternoon during the summer work camp, in the school library, the hair dryer in her hand; only she and he in the room. ‘I suppose everything we poor benighted village kids do is too boring or too ordinary for a boy from the big city of Dresden?’ He wanted to make a quick-witted reply, but nothing occurred to him and that made him even more furious when immediately afterwards Verena, without waiting for an answer, shrugged her shoulders and went out.

A boy from the big city. How they’d secretly — and sometimes less secretly — mocked him, made remarks about his strange habits. He didn’t go for a shower with the others but always arranged things so that he was by himself; nothing in the world would have persuaded him to display his puberty-stricken skin to others; he didn’t go with them to the swimming pool in Freital and he preferred to pursue his own thoughts or dreams rather than seek out the company of the other boys. He only sensed something like understanding from Jens Ansorge and Siegbert Füger; at least they left him in peace. He had been pleased when he learnt he was to share a room in the boarders’ house with them. Even though he didn’t go with them when they went into the town, he did also look round Waldbrunn, by himself and in the evening, when he could be reasonably sure he wouldn’t meet the other pupils. Waldbrunn, the administrative centre of the eastern Erzgebirge; the F170 motorway wound its way above the school, descended into the river valley of the Rote Bergfrau, cut through the central district as it headed for the ridge of the Erzgebirge and the Czech border, which it reached just after Zinnwald. Simple, low houses, church and castle, each with a tower; in the distance, when you came by bus from Dresden, drove over Windhaushügel and down into Waldbrunn and the new housing appeared on the right, you could see the gleam of the Kaltwasser, the reservoir that dammed the second Waldbrunn river, the Wilde Bergfrau. To the left of the motorway was a potato field, during the work camp they’d picked potatoes, they got ten pfennigs a basket, hard work, they were picking the potatoes on piecework, their backs ached from all the bending and he, the boy from the big city, had been one of the worst, even a lot of the girls had managed more baskets than he did. In the evening of the two potato-picking days, he had crept into his camp bed completely exhausted; he’d had to put up with a few teasing, sarcastic, even contemptuous remarks. From the beginning he felt there was a gap between himself and the other pupils of that senior high school.

He had a collection of postcards that he would often look at in the evening, by the light of his reading lamp. They were sepia and coloured views of distant places with exotic-sounding names that stimulated his imagination: Smyrna, Nice. You could see the white horses of the Mediterranean as it broke on the Promenade des Anglais, a clay pot with an agave on the left, on the right edge the row of fashionable hotels along the Promenade lined with palm trees. ‘Salerno, Piazza M^o Luciani’ on a photograph that at the edges merged into the yellowing white of the postcard; as if wiped away by the erasing fingers of time. However, the ones that led to the profoundest daydreams, farthest removed from reality, were a series of views of Constantinople that he had been allowed to select from duplicates in Herr Malthakus’s stamp and picture postcard shop in Dresden. A leaden blue sea: ‘Vue de l’Amirauté sur la Corne d’Or’; ‘Vue de Beycos, côte d’Asie (Bosphore)’; ‘Salut de Constantinople’; ‘Le Selamlik. Revue militaire’ with a crowd of black, cube-shaped carriages dotted with the red fezzes of the crowd. Those were the places where one ought to be, to live. When he looked at the cards Christian dreamt, dreamt of adventures, of conversations between pirates overheard in harbour taverns that would enable him to save beautiful women who had been abducted. Constantinople. Salerno. The Bosphorus. And ‘la Corne d’Or’ was the Golden Horn. That was where heroes lived, that was where adventure was. And what did he have? Waldbrunn. He would walk round the little town but with the best will in the world he couldn’t find any sailing ships such as there were on the pictures of Constantinople, the fairy-tale city. No muezzin called from the dark, bastion-like church on the market square and Herr Luther, in blackened sandstone on which the pigeons perched and left white theses, proclaimed, ‘A safe stronghold our God is still’ in chiselled letters. None of the women queuing at the butcher’s or the baker’s on the market square were anything like Princess Fatima, who, in gratitude for her rescue from the hands of the negro Zurga, would marry the adventurer Almansor — that was Christian’s alias in the Orient. But to get married: Christian, standing on the bridge over the Wilde Bergfrau as it foamed over smooth round stones the size of footballs, shook his head. He would never get married, never, never, as long as he lived. An adventurer had adventures, a hero was solitary; with Fatima he had an affair that, as in the films he saw at the cinema, ended in the sunset, wild, painful and sadly beautiful. He looked across at the tannery: in the past the Wilde Bergfrau had powered it with its steely clear water; now it housed a museum. In the autumn he had enjoyed following the course of the Wilde Bergfrau, had thrown red maple leaves into it and, head bowed and hands clasped behind his back, watched them bobbing up and down; had Verena seen him like that, a glint of mockery at his poses would have crept into her eyes again. It seems that in the big city people mature earlier, she would have cried, as she had on the afternoon when their unit had gone to the cinema at the end of the street that ran along the bank of the Wilde Bergfrau, beyond the castle that now housed the local Party headquarters. Her eyes had flashed and she had rolled her hair round her index finger, and he, in his fury, had thought: You don’t understand, you silly Waldbrunn goose; I’ve just come from Constantinople and not from your east Erzgebirge dump with its paved marketplace and ten hunchback houses round it; it’s the flutter of Sinbad’s sails I can hear, not that of the wings of the few provincial Trabbis puttering past us. If you only knew that Sinbads don’t drive Trabbis.

9. Everyday life with Asclepius. The sorrow of a houseman

‘Knife.’

The operating-theatre nurse handed Wernstein the scalpel.

‘Adjust light, please.’

Richard was enjoying himself: he had handed this operation over to Wernstein and taken the role of assistant himself and now he was actually treating him as a junior physician. If you’re going to do something, you might as well do it properly. He reached up and focused the light of the lamp on the operating area that was framed in green cloths. ‘There you are, sir.’

Wernstein cut open the fascia. He didn’t respond to the joke; his tension was evident as he tried to widen the cut with his finger. The houseman, Herr Grefe, who was standing at the other side of the operating table holding the retractors, grinned behind his mask; the movement of his mouth that stretched the material of his mask and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes indicated it.

‘I bet you anything you won’t manage the fascia with just your finger.’

‘We’ll see.’ Wernstein took a deep breath, asked the anaesthetist to add the antibiotic drop by drop.

‘Which fascia are we actually talking about here?’

Grefe, whom Richard had asked, started. ‘Fascia … er … the fascia …’

‘Lata,’ Wernstein said after a while. ‘The fascia lata. But that’s not the entire truth. What I’m trying to force apart here with my fingers but am never going to manage to open like a can of beans is … the tractus iliotibialis. Where did you do your preliminary study?’

‘In Leipzig.’

‘There’s a motto over the entrance to the anatomical lecture theatre there.’

You had to know that if you were working under Dr Hoffmann. The anaesthetist, who was just looking over the edge of the guard cloth, smirked.

‘Anatomia — clavis et clavus medicinae.’

‘The key and the rudder of medicine,’ Nurse Elfriede, who handed the operator the instruments, translated in a dry voice. ‘Young man, for the last fifteen years all Leipzig students have been asked that question in this operating theatre.’

‘Are you suggesting I’m starting to bore you?’

Nurse Elfriede rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll give Dr Wernstein the scissors rather than answer that. You know that you’re our guiding light, Dr Hoffmann.’

Muttering, Wernstein got down to work and started to cut open the fibrous tissue. — How difficult he finds it to admit I was right. Now he’s sawing away at it after all. But, dammit, I was just the same. Smiling to himself, Richard staunched the flow of blood. At the same time he was irritated by the houseman. These young people, they came to an operation and had no idea! If we’d dared do that in the old days … He thought of a few of the surgeons under whom he’d developed his technique, eruptive characters inclined to outbursts of rage if things didn’t go precisely the way they expected; most of them came from the operating bunkers and field hospitals of the war, from the mills of unimaginable carnage. With Grosse the assistants had to prepare everything; once they’d finished he would make his way, godlike, eyes half closed, unapproachable, as if in a trance, gently waving his hands still moist from disinfection, to the operating table, have someone help him into his gown and gloves before silently holding out his hand for the scalpel that the operating-theatre nurse placed in it with due reverence. Woe to any assistant who was unable to answer one of the questions he would suddenly fire off into the silence. The boss wouldn’t look at him again, his career with him was over.

‘Thread.’ Richard tied off a bleeding vessel. With decisively made cuts Wernstein deepened the incision, felt for the fracture. His every movement, the elegance and assurance with which he handled the instruments, his finely gauged sense of when it was necessary to proceed with caution and when he could work more purposefully, his feeling for the hidden dangers of an operation, for all the deviations from operational and anatomical theory when, suddenly reduced to a blind man in a pitch-dark tunnel, you had to rely on instinct alone — all that spoke of the talent, intuition and outstanding technical ability of a born surgeon. Richard had always been surprised at how varied things could be in his profession. As a student he had assumed there was no difference between one doctor and another, more specifically between one surgeon and another. Everything was done according to the textbooks and surgery seemed to be something like ticking off boxes in a catalogue: every patient was a human being and what the human being the surgeon was interested in was could be seen in the meticulous drawings in Spalteholz’s and Waldeyer’s handbooks of anatomy. That’s where the problem lies, these are the anatomical conditions, off we go. Practice had taught him otherwise. There were surgeons who worked incredibly slowly, who were afraid of every vessel, every little mucous membrane and, as they operated, transmitted this sense of fear to all those around them and who yet, for all their caution, had no better, sometimes even worse results than their apparently more casual colleagues. Richard remembered Albertsheim, his fellow assistant with Uebermuth in Leipzig. Albertsheim, whom they called Guarneri, for when he had a good day his intuition and his speed combined with perfect technique were as astonishing as a Guarneri violin. At such times Albertsheim would reach heights that Richard never reached, and presumably never would reach, and that had drawn cries of admiration even from Uebermuth. If he had a bad day, however, he operated ‘like a drayman’ and it was said that on his bad days Guarneri had also made ‘drayman’s violins’, which had led to the nickname, which didn’t even annoy Albertsheim — on the contrary, he cultivated his artist’s pose. On the other hand he had never managed to develop even an average feel for diagnosis, he could hardly distinguish crepitations in the lung from a pleural effusion, the slightly metallic rasp over a tubercular cavity from the wheeze of an asthmatic lung. But those were clinical skills, they were the business of the Internal Medicine specialist, of whom he would speak, like many a surgeon, with mild condescension — as if clinical knowledge were superfluous for a surgeon. Nor was he interested in further developments. ‘Great surgeons make great incisions,’ Albertsheim had said, mocking Richard, who had his doubts about this absolute principle of these surgical monarchs, since he had found that great incisions can also cause great infections. Wernstein was not like that. What was it Albert Fromme, the first rector of the Medical Academy, had said? A surgeon has the heart of a lion and the hands of a woman. And now the houseman was moving the retractors of his own accord. Wernstein and Richard looked up simultaneously.

‘It’s the operating surgeon who moves the retractors, not you,’ Wernstein growled indignantly. ‘Now I can’t see anything. You must tell us if you can’t hold them any longer.’

Richard felt angry. The young man was far away from them in age and training, and certainly they ought to remain matter-of-fact, treat him like a colleague, but … The truth was, he couldn’t stand this houseman. He knew that that was connected with the fact that Grefe was the son of Müller’s sister and the Professor had, in an embarrassingly formal conversation, ‘asked’ Richard to send a houseman who had already been given the post to another clinic. True, Grefe could do nothing about these machinations, probably didn’t even know about them; one had to try to remain objective. And the lack of specialist knowledge would sort itself out. If he was honest, as a houseman he himself had paid more attention to the nurses than to surgery; moreover the idea of housemen was for them to acquire practical experience. Despite that, the pedagogue inside him broke through: ‘What characterizes pertrochanteric fractures?’ Again Grefe started to hum and haw. ‘I … er … I’ve only been with you for two days …’

‘But you did a degree in surgery; did you skip trauma surgery?’

‘Should I get them to put a little music on, Dr Hoffmann?’

Nurse Elfriede was well acquainted with her senior traumatologist’s angry outbursts. But he didn’t feel like music. This fellow might perhaps tell his uncle that the trauma surgeons were listening to music during an operation again, which, for his uncle, was an expression of a casual attitude and the Professor had no time for ‘bohemian’ surgeons. ‘That’s for Herr Wernstein to decide, he’s performing the operation. Let me have the retractors.’ He took the retractors out of Grefe’s hands and with a curt nod ordered him to come round to his side. ‘Be careful you don’t touch the image intensifier and make yourself unsterile. Let him feel it,’ he said to Wernstein, using the familiar ‘du’ without thinking, as if he were an equal colleague. ‘Can you feel the fracture?’ Grefe poked about in the wound.

‘The fracture line is between the greater and the lesser trochanter, almost directly on the neck of the femur. You do know where we’re operating here?’

‘Oh, yes, I’ve got it now. Basically at the hip joint, I thought?’

Wernstein had stepped back and was waiting, hands dripping with blood raised.

‘Good. We’ll change over again. In grown-ups at what angle are the femur and the neck of the femur to each other?’

Grefe, who was back on the other side and raised the retractors, gave the wrong angle.

‘Fractures of the neck of the femur — how are they classified and why?’

His knowledge was sketchy.

‘Five wrong answers to my questions, Herr Grefe. We have a rule here. For each wrong answer the person asked has to cut a hundred swabs or fold a hundred compresses. That’s five hundred swabs for you. Report to the duty operating-theatre sister after we’ve finished.’

That hit home. Wernstein was continuing his preparations in silence. Richard’s anger subsided as quickly as it had arisen. He sensed that he had reacted too harshly and that he was punishing Grefe for his uncle’s methods. Now he felt sorry for the young guy. You’re doing just the same as the communists! he told himself. That reminded him that in Grefe’s file he had discovered a request to be accepted as a member of the Socialist Unity Party … So what, he decided. If something was to be made of them, you had to be hard on them. The plus side was that Sister Elfriede had 500 more swabs in her sterilization unit, swabs that the run-down socialist economy couldn’t manage to manufacture. If he wants to join the Party that determines all our lives, he should get to know the kind of world that it has produced.

‘Spherical cutter,’ Wernstein demanded, reamed the bone. ‘A Lezius nail on the handle grip. — Who was Lezius?’ This time it was Wernstein who asked. But Grefe knew the answer and proudly gave a little lecture. There was no addition to his 500 swabs.

After the operation Richard went to the Academy Administration. He took the route through the hospital. Wernstein had taken just three-quarters of an hour to perform the operation on the patient, a woman of sixty who had slipped while cleaning the stairs and broken her femur as she fell. The atmosphere in the clinic was something that had been familiar to Richard since he had started to study medicine, when, after his apprenticeship as a fitter, he had got to know the work of the hospital from the bottom upwards, first of all as a nursing auxiliary, then during the university vacations, as a student and a professor’s assistant: the morning rounds had finished in the wards on the north side, nurses were rushing to and fro, doctors were bent over patients’ notes or X-rays. ‘Morning, Dr Hoffmann.’ — ‘Morning, Nurse Gertrud.’ — ‘Morning, Dr Hoffmann.’ — ‘Morning, Nurse Renate.’ Familiar faces, some he had known for twenty years; he knew the people behind their routine masks, knew about their major and minor worries that you didn’t hear about during the day, in the hectic rush of the wards, but during night shifts when the city was asleep and the acute cases had been settled for the night. Nurse Renate, who, even after twenty-two years, still trembled like a schoolgirl when faced with the senior nurse and whose first husband had died in this ward, the surgical cancer ward. Richard sidestepped a mop that a nursing auxiliary was swinging across the PVC floor-covering in vigorous semicircles. The smell of disinfectant — Wofasept — how familiar it was; how it brought everything back: the nurses with their blood-pressure gauges and intravenous-drip stands, the clatter of scissors and glass syringes in kidney dishes which were just being put into the sterilizer in the ward he was passing. He went into the vestibule. Food carts clattered by the lifts, a haze of voices came from the swing doors of South I, Müller’s powerful, precisely articulating voice: the consultant was doing his round of the private ward. Richard hurried out past the bust of Carl Thiersch. He had actually intended, before going over to Administration, to look in at his own ward to check on things, but he would probably have run into the gaggle of doctors, and he wasn’t in the mood for that, especially not for an encounter with Müller. Wernstein had done North II and Trautson, Richard’s fellow senior doctor, North III, together with Dreyssiger, who had been on duty and would see the outpatients. He could rely on Wernstein and anyway, when he’d done the round of North II today everything had been in order. With Dreyssiger you had to be more careful; he was good as a scientist, and as a teacher the students liked him; but in general the senior nurse knew better than he what was going on in his ward, North III, as the young houseman Richard would have liked to have kept often did as well.

He left the clinic and set off for the old Academy section where the Administration building was. The air, fresh after the snow, did him good, he took deep breaths. He had an uneasy feeling about the meeting he was about to attend. The eternal struggles for dressings, swabs, drip-feed bottles, plaster. Trifles. On the one hand. On the other, Administration had asked him to hand in his Christmas lecture to be checked. He had deliberately not brought it with him. How had Wernstein put it just now? We’ll see. Although he was freezing, he didn’t regret having taken this route and not the one through the subterranean tunnel system that appealed to his old sense of adventure and that he had known like the back of his hand since his days as a nursing auxiliary, but he preferred not to breathe its air, which was stale with the smell of cigarettes and rats’ urine, after an operation. A few electric carts were bumping along the Academy road; far ahead, by the porter at the kiosk beside the Augsburger Strasse entrance, which was flanked by frosted-glass cubes with the red cross, patients were queuing for newspapers. A few doctors were coming from Radiology, which was in sight of the massive block of the Surgical Clinic. Richard went across the park, past the Dermatology Clinic and the equipment store, where thermophores were being loaded. Taking cover behind a hedge, he did a few jump squats to warm up.

10. Veins of ore. The Old Man of the Mountain

‘Dear Herr Rohde, I can’t get our discussion out of my mind. I became agitated and you, or so it seemed to me, remained unimpressed in a way that disturbed me because I am familiar with it from situations that make me seem powerless and the person facing me fairly powerful. You had to reject my pieces, you said, and left it to me to read, between the lines and behind the reason that was clear to both of us, a different one, less edifying for the modicum of author’s vanity that remains to me, for you did not state it expressly and, on the one hand, I don’t know you well enough to see your restraint as other than reserve, on the other you are an author yourself; and an author who, as far as I am aware, works precisely, so you know how, at this sensitive stage — the book is finished but not yet out — one weighs every word. I would like to tell you again, this time in writing, what your ability to listen at our meeting instigated (I apologize that that turned it largely into a monologue); it is important to me that it should not remain in the transient medium of the spoken word. A story that I, rather presumptuously, do not call my own for the sole reason that, with variations, it applies to so many people of my age. — No. I must break off. Please excuse me. I will not continue this letter … I’m so tired, I find all this so exhausting … Yet I will still post this letter to you; I know that sounds confused but, to be honest, I hope you will visit me again … Do you really consider the book a failure?’

Meno lowered the letter. He thought. The Old Man of the Mountain had not had a fit of anger, Meno hadn’t noticed the agitation he mentioned or it had arisen after he’d left. On the contrary, the old man had nodded and put on a dreamy smile which had given his face with the high, Slav cheekbones a mischievous touch; the parchment-pale skin, creased with many wrinkles, had even started to glow as if the old man had not merely expected but had hoped for Meno’s restraint. Yes, Meno thought, it was as if he had hoped for Schiffner’s shake of the head — like an accolade, an honour. ‘You … don’t regret that a year’s work has been for nothing?’

‘Well, Herr Rohde … no. Of course I suspected it might happen, you know that, your words, so carefully chosen to break it to me gently, tell me that … And now you’re wondering why I’m laughing? Because once again I’ve noticed how much vanity there still is inside me. How the rejection rankles, despite the tactfulness with which you step delicately round it, how it gnaws at me and festers. Festers, yes, that’s the right word. It was three years’ work, by the way, hard work; I’m pretty exhausted. And then I have to laugh. Just laugh. At myself, at my face, that’s staring at you, at my head, that looks as if it’s made out of papier mâché, a real rag-and-bone ghost’s head fit only for the puppet-theatre, with fluffy bits of wool instead of hair — don’t you think?’

‘Please, Herr Altberg, I’m …’

‘Yes, yes, I know, you’re sorry. Incidentally, so am I. I can imagine how hard it must be to have to come and tell me … Who enjoys being a bearer of bad tidings, eh? But I’m forgetting my duties as host. Would you like coffee or tea?’

‘Now I am able to continue the letter. I don’t want to send it as it is. I’ve had a temperature, I had to stay in bed when it was at its worst. Dr Fernau, my GP, will make a house call, but after that he won’t come again if it’s under forty degrees. Mere trifles, he says, up to that limit the body can help itself. I was tired and exhausted, had to think a lot. Now I’ve more or less recovered and I don’t want to give up that soon. Your questions have brought so many things back to mind …

‘Am I outside, with no one to watch over me? In a landscape of deep snow? For I dig my hands into the white and see myself sink to my knees trying to match my father, who lifts up the ball and carefully places it on top of the other one, giving the snow-woman a torso; with a large wooden comb she made herself, my sister has already traced the pleats in her skirt, now she’s waiting for the third ball, mine, to fix straw hair into it, make the eyes with little lumps of coal, stick a carrot nose in and cover it with a battered pot that’s usually in the shed and full of bulbs in the summer. The enamel has split off in several places, the patches look like black islands, which makes me say: Gundel, we’ll sail to the South Sea in it. With no one to watch over us. No one to keep a watch on us. But Father’s standing beside me, my face is still stinging from the smack he gave me, because it won’t do that I, the son of the district pharmacist Hubert Altberg, do not have the strength to lift a measly little ball of snow up onto two others. His big red hand. On the back of his hand dry skin from freckles, tufts of sandy hair on his fingers, thick; Father’s fist (just catch a sniff of that, one tap and you’re done for, eh?) looks as if it’s got fur on. Education with cats: he throws the kittens in the rainwater barrel behind the house — either they manage to scramble out of the water, which is so good for the flowers in the beds in the front garden, or they’re sucked down into the depths, in which soft shadows play for minutes on end. The kitten that managed it is grasped by the scruff of the neck and held over the water again; Father looks seriously at the struggling paws, seems to be wondering whether my sister and I, who have to stay by the barrel, understand what he’s telling us; finally he swings his arm out to the side (but not always; sometimes he throws the kitten back in and holds it under water with his thumb until the end), opens his fist over the ground and only then may we pick the cat up and rub it dry.’

Meno was impressed by Altberg’s ability to transform his look. The thousands of wrinkles and creases seemed to be there for the sole purpose of producing every possible facial expression with the precision of a woodcut; the light in the spacious study, which cast imperious shadows, only served to intensify that impression. A piece of acting? That was not how it seemed to Meno; every emotion that appeared on the old man’s face seemed to be genuinely there at that moment and every one was unmistakable. Essences of emotion: at those words he could see in his mind’s eye the walnut pharmacy cabinets beside which the old man had walked up and down, the brown and white phials with their many-coloured contents, labels with rounded corners and ornate inscriptions in iron-gall ink, the precision balance on a shelf above the desk. The old man threw the manuscript into a drawer, muttering something in a tone of contempt rather than resignation that alarmed Meno. The housekeeper came, bringing coffee, hot milk and a basket with biscuits, reproachfully held out to Altberg a scarf that he wound round his neck with an expression of disgust, took a china mortar and pestle off a shelf, ground tablets. ‘Your medicine, you haven’t taken it again,’ the housekeeper said in a voice weary of reminding him, of her fruitless struggle with the old man’s obstinacy. He grimaced, waved her away, went over to the window, slurped the milk after having tipped the contents of the mortar into his cup.

‘I’m not supposed to get up yet, that’s why she was so short with you. My doctor has forbidden it. She’s his ally and begrudges me the pleasure of having a visitor,’ the old man croaked with a conspiratorial expression. ‘But you can only believe half of what doctors say and if they write something down you should be extra suspicious.’ He laughed quietly to himself. ‘It was my father who said that, the owner of the Sertürn Pharmacy in Buchholz, a little town in the Riesengebirge. Unreadable prescriptions, outrageous potions! “Quacks with degrees the lot of them!” was his stock phrase. Of course, it was partly jealousy. Fernau sounded my lungs, tapped me on the chest and back: “You’ve got pneumonia, Altberg, you should be in bed, right? You’re wheezing like an old alarm clock.” And I said, “Yes, sir, Major Doctor, sir!” ’

‘A tactful man,’ Meno remarked.

‘He knows how to treat me, that’s all. His gruff manner cheers me up. Moreover I imagine a gruff doctor can deal with illnesses better, but that’s probably an old wives’ tale, but I tell myself: he’s not taking the illness seriously, so it can’t be serious. Oh, look.’ The old man pointed out of the window to a bird table standing alone on the steep downslope of the garden where the snow, perhaps from the power station, perhaps from Black Mathilda, had traces of soot here and there.

‘Sparrows, inevitably,’ said Meno. ‘Hawfinches. A pair of goldfinches.’

‘And there a crossbill, if I’m not mistaken!’ Altberg was pleased. ‘They’ve become rare. Next to the chaffinch, do you see? But let’s sit down.’

‘I will pick the smooth yarrow … And Grandmother’s gestures, her wood-pulp voice: You shall have some soldiers, my lad, hussars in dolman and jerkin with mother-of-pearl buttons and braiding, drawn swords and horses from the Puszta, and during the night the wind will tell you stories of the rivers, of the Neisse in the country round Glatz as it winds its way through our Silesia, and it will tell you about a girl, my lad, who is waiting for you and whose picture you carry in your hussar’s coat, and when the smoke comes from the great Silesian Railway her eyes will not be sad. The train, the fiery horse with smoking nostrils and blazing red hair behind the tender, will carry me off, on a winter’s morning like that the air is soapy, the snow wheezes under your feet, a rickety zinc-white suit of armour and the knight inside it is breathing heavily, as if he were combing hessian when he takes a breath. Yarrow, yarrow … And sage and arnica — that the old women in the little town call mountain wolverley — meadow kerses and devil’s spoons, horsetail for cleaning silver and the Aesculapian snake in the glass cylinder, Rübezahl, the spirit of the Sudeten Mountains, smiles down from an enamel advertising sign promising healing power from the Riesengebirge and when the doorbell has stopped ringing after the butcher’s wife has left, there are no more customers in the shop and Father is stomping upstairs, puffing and panting, with the sausages that he’s been given in exchange for Glauber’s salt, an infusion of bittersweet, a specific to lower blood pressure and Altberg’s Genuine Digestive Herb Mixture, patent pending in Breslau, the light in the room pauses, has to get used to the silence again, has to peek out of its hiding places in the medicine cabinets, phials, chemical ampoules, has to grow again, to unfold on the writing engraved in the frosted glass of the shop window before it starts to flirt with the wall mirror, with the brass banister going up to the living quarters, before it gets sleepy again and stretches out on the polished mahogany on which Father checks prescriptions and puts them together; then it starts to trickle out of the clouds on the ceiling on which a Silesian heaven, as Aunt Irmelin derisively puts it, has been painted. The driver grasps the cord of the steam whistle.’

‘You despise me, don’t you?’ The old man raised his hands in a protective gesture when Meno made a movement. ‘You won’t admit it, of course. But when you’re by yourself, what then? You’ll take an image of me away from here, of Altberg’s doleful countenance and his hundred pathetic paste pots, with the contents of which he sticks feathers on his paper birds, and of that there’ — he pointed to a manuscript on the desk, a jumbled heap of interleaved sheets of paper and photos all stuck together; but the gesture could also have been directed at the sketches hanging beside the desk, tangled lines full of cryptic symbols, numbers and arrows in different colours. That must be the mountain project, Altberg’s magnum opus. ‘This thing,’ he murmured, ‘that I’ve been hacking away at for eight years and it still refuses to take shape. Ten days for one page, and every page has to be of the same glass on which even the hardest and most malevolent reader’s eye cannot leave a scratch. But you … You’ll go home and despise me, secretly, perhaps without even realizing yourself that you despise me … An old man who still believes in a just society — after the events you have read about in the manuscript your publishing house has rejected! A perfect fool, yes? As to your rejection — I know Schiffner. An honest man, a publisher of the old school and that means one who knows how to find a way; but he’s also a bit self-important and timorous … Self-importance and fear, that, by the way, is the typical German mixture. Expressed in externalities: sentimentality and the barracks yard … they love songs and munitions do the Germans … Well, I’m a dead man, Rohde, I’m not fooling myself. But the thing that I’ve believed in is alive … What do they think of us over there?’ the old man asked, abruptly and with an eager expression, leaving it to Meno to interpret ‘over there’ as the district to which the funicular railway went. ‘Not very much,’ Meno said after some hesitation. ‘They don’t like East Rome. Anyone who lives here is despised by those over there, without exception.’

‘So I’m right.’

‘I don’t despise you.’

‘But you will! Times change and we are asleep … Didn’t the gnomes smile at you as you came up the street?’

‘I too believe in the improvement of mankind, Herr Altberg … That it is possible to build a society in which everyone can live a decent life.’

‘But that is not this society, Herr Rohde!’ the old man said in a voice that made Meno shudder.

‘Rübezahl’s helpers come steaming out of the engine’s chimney, on the window ice-patterns form that my breath makes transparent, makes disappear so that I see the marketplace of Buchholz gradually float out of sight; on a hillside the train goes past the valley in which the town lies, the church tower with its weathercock and fire bell, the Hagreiter House of the Rebenzoll brothers, the richest merchants in the town, with its arched façade and half-timbered upper storey on which a fresco painter from Obersalzbrunn has painted hunting scenes; his father’s pharmacy with its turret and the statue of Friedrich Sertürner holding a snake and a balance, then comes the bend and Buchholz is memory; the flood-sprite is booming, the ebb-sprite is looming, the sand-sprite entombing, I can hear Grandmother whisper as she soothingly strokes my fevered brow; the snow-sprite … The train stopped on the open line, a man in uniform got on the train, held up a lantern and ordered us out, one suitcase per boy, “Off the train, at the double, cases on the sleigh”; we were to follow him. Snow slipped off the branches of the spruce trees, hobgoblins were crouching in nests of shadow, pointing malicious fingers at us, the uniformed man strode on ahead of us at a speed we could hardly keep up with, on the left a gorge opened up, a menacing eye with lashes of bizarre branches; I was the last in the line, not daring to turn round, Woodwose would have given me a wolf’s foul form, Banshee howl till I was lost in the storm; how I started as a heavy bird flew off with a clatter of wings. The Löschburg came in sight, the former robber baron’s lair in the Eulengebirge, now a school and educational establishment for “useful future recruits for the state service”, as it was called and where Father had decided I should go, Aunt Irmelin could sigh and Gundel weep as much as they liked: Georg has to be broken, it will be for his own good, one day he’ll thank me for it and you’ll see that I was right. He dreams too much, and anyone who dreams too much will end up as food for the crows. — A room in which a hundred pupils sleep. An iron bedstead, a bedside table, a locker, unlocked because, the principal tells us at roll-call: Anyone who steals from a comrade should be cast out of the community of the school and from the community of the German nation. Obedience, Order, Honesty, Loyalty are demanded by an inscription in the refectory, where at six in the morning we say prayers with our breath steaming in the cold before we eat nettle soup and a crust of bread. We, ten-year-old boys with cropped hair, had the honour of being selected, from among all those in Silesia, for the Löschburg, the brightest minds in the country, as Father said; I see his name scratched on my desk. Stand up when answering, thumbs on your trouser seams, sit down when required to, sleep to order, lists of Latin vocabulary, a smack with the cane on the palm of your hand for every word you forget. Motto: pain makes you remember. The boy in the bed and desk beside mine, he’s called Georg like me, is bold enough to contradict the teacher; a month’s detention in the castle with lessons to catch up on makes him hold his tongue and sends me, who also have to undergo the punishment, into despair, to the sick-bay, full of hatred, fear and introspection. I had done something, as the rector announced at punishment roll-call, that was worse than Georg’s contradiction: I had supported him, I was loyal to the deviant, not to the school; I had not obeyed the undisputed authority of the teacher, expressed in the silver braid on his epaulettes, where we, the pupils, only had a cloth number. I get a month in the detention cell instead of being expelled because Father goes to see the principal and agrees with him that I need a firm hand. I avoid being expelled. I get a thrashing with a cane soaked in water and am allowed back in the dormitory where Arthur, my personal servant — whom I, like the other pupils with their servants, never address by anything other than by his first name — will once more empty my chamber pot and washbasin for me, who have returned to join the young elite of the future model German state, to join those whose resistance to the silver braid will consist in gaining it.’

‘By the way, I’ve read your piece about spiders. Arbogast was good enough to make a hectograph copy for me. I assume he’s invited you to one of our Urania meetings? He intended to do that, he said so in the accompanying letter.’

‘I ran into him this morning and, indeed, he did invite me.’

‘What do you think of him?’ At this question the Old Man of the Mountain gave Meno a quick, cold glance.

‘I don’t know him and I don’t think one should draw any half-baked psychological conclusions from the fact that he sets store by his “von”, has a walking stick with a silver gryphon handle and an untrained dog. They’re just labels.’

‘And that, you think, is the same as the Spreewald pickled gherkins the label on the jar promises us, without the piece of paper telling us how they taste! A good answer. A cautious answer.’ The Old Man of the Mountain laughed quietly. ‘You don’t trust me. You secretly despise me and react like a fox that has scented the hunter.’

‘What you are insinuating is not the case, Herr Altberg,’ Meno replied indignantly. ‘Why should I despise you? What would make me do that? Please believe me.’

‘I know that earlier on you said you consider a better society possible … the fair social order in which people can be happy. Égalité, Fraternité … the ideals of 1789, in other words the socialist kingdom of heaven. It comes from Paris, as we see. In Antiquity hope was an evil … Égalité, hmm. Soon it’ll be the year of people who are more equal than all the rest.’

‘You read Orwell?’ Meno said with a faint smile. ‘If you’re trying to test me —’

‘It would be a poor testing technique to quote the class enemy first of all in order to lure you out of your reserve; as it happens I’ve had a sniff of that as well. You have a sense of humour, Herr Rohde, I like that. Humour is an unmistakable sign …’ Of what? Meno didn’t ask when the old man broke off abruptly.

‘1940, the official letter with swastika and stamp. Romanticism and bureaucracy, there’s nothing worse, Herr Rohde. Conscription papers for those born in 1922, of which I am one. Report to the barracks; I was delighted to do it, I was an unconditional supporter of National Socialism, blond, blue-eyed and six foot tall, I had nothing to fear from it, I belonged to the race of the chosen ones, that was setting out to conquer the world … and would conquer the world, for me there was no doubt about that. And that was quite right for the others were inferior; it had been hammered into us that they did not share our beliefs, our values: decency, loyalty unto death, honour. I was part of it, a hussar a hussar thou shalt be with dolman and sabre and sword-knot, the villages will burn, but thou but thou, my little Guards officer …’

The old man walked up and down in front of Meno, giving him reflective, searching looks. He sat down at the desk and opened the manuscript. Then he started to talk, with many a ‘well then’ and ‘act-u-al-ly’ (‘act-u-al-ly you should never say act-u-al-ly, no, not ever’) and, something at which Meno was quietly amused, ‘No, that ain’t it, nope’ with a nod whenever he was trying to remember a line from a ‘book poem’. ‘Wrong quotation … here I am trying to spice up my account and, to stick to the image, have picked out cardamom instead of salt again, you must forgive a man who lives like a monk as far as culinary matters are concerned.’ As he spoke he twisted his mouth in a wide grin. His housekeeper brought a tray with a bottle of Nordhäuser schnapps, frosted with the cold. Meno said no thanks, Altberg filled both glasses with trembling hand.

‘Let’s go.’

‘But you’re an ill man, Herr Altberg.’

‘Just a failure, Herr Rohde, just a failure.’

They got out at Neustadt Station, stood there in the station forecourt watching the pigeons and the trains. Perhaps Altberg was hoping the noises would accept him even if the ground wouldn’t; he pressed the soles of his shoes into it, perhaps to trigger off recognition or at least a greeting in the putty-grey humps, cracked like elephant skin. Perhaps. Soldiers walked past, travellers with the weary, hostile memories they had of the uniforms and of those they seemed to mark: Meno sensed that in the eyes of these other people the uniform and those wearing it were not — perhaps: could not be — two different things. ‘But how proudly the colours fade,’ said Altberg; Altberg said, ‘D’you know, Herr Rohde, I sometimes used to think that, in order to be less alien, I ought to find something even more alien, and that could only be a place where, from the memories of somewhere I’d travelled through in one of my daydreams, I’d often wished I could be. You will know it, but walk with me for a while.’

Meno took the letter about the Old German Poems from the shelf beside the ten-minute clock, put some more coal in the stove, read both letters once more before sitting down at his typewriter.

11. Moss-green flowers

— The very fragility of the vestibule, Meno wrote, frightened me, we waited, even though the worn banister still seemed to be the same, the foot scraper, the grating with the steel slats that spring round, the sign above it Please wipe your feet; the damp patches on the walls, the high door shielded with dulled white lacquer.Suddenly you seemed changed to me. P. Dienemann, Succrs. I read but, while I was listening to you, I had nothing to say to someone good enough to hide their own name behind a philosophy of life going by the name of Succrs. White-haired, cigar-puffing Herr Leukroth certainly did have a taste for it: a few photos over his daughter’s desk showed the antiquarian bookshop on König-Johann-Strasse before the air raid, showed letters with Dienemann’s letterhead that had gone round the world under exotic postmarks and returned, showed a signed portrait of Gerhart Hauptmann, the writer from Obersalzbrunn, that you kept on looking at. Perhaps Leukroth would even have hung over the Local History section a ‘Dresden Succrs.’ sign, as you insisted on calling it, handwritten, of course, in the iron-gall ink that was rusting through the index cards on which his staff (just for his sake?) kept track of their stock. For the present, sir, I thought I heard the voice of Herr Leukroth say, is nothing yet. And I saw him shaking his head as he took the books of the old man in the beret, who had gone in through the door marked No Entrance in front of me and now, at the remarks of the old man chewing on his cigar as he roughly leafed backwards and forwards through them, hunched his shoulders or, rather, let them slump, like a collapsing soufflé, in resignation. What do you say, young man? Herr Leukroth grouched to you, making a dog-ear in a page that had been given a dismissive wave. — Right then. — So. You can take ’em home again, Dresden, Herr Leukroth declared, can manage without your presence. At this the old man shook his head, muttered Ye gods and turned to leave. One moment, Herr Leukroth, waist-high on a ladder, gestured, tell me, do you really want to lug those all the way home? For five marks you can leave them here with me, books to books, since you’re here already. And with trembling fingers (he had Parkinson’s disease) he took a coin from a jar of five-mark pieces with a strip of adhesive tape on it on which Taxi Money was typed. Behind cotton curtains with a pattern of moss-green flowers cans of food were sleeping, pyramids of floor polish towered up, writing paper from the VEB Weissenborn paper factory was turning yellow and slumbering away on one side were cardboard boxes full of handmade, deckle-edge Königstein paper which Herr Leukroth printed owls on and sent, covered in his Parkinson’s handwriting, with Christmas greetings to good customers; you showed me examples on which was written To be prepared is everything, Your antiquarian bookshop P. Dienemann Succrs. Herr Leukroth revealed to me one day that the assistant in the chiffon blouse with a paper rose on the collar (always a similar one, never the same), who wrings her hands with a careworn look, is in the habit of coming to the shop by taxi every morning and he is in the habit of leaving by taxi. The five-mark piece (the beret-hatted gentleman gladly clenched it in his fist) gave most of his clients the feeling they had got away with something again; it was a heavy, handsome coin, minted to celebrate the XX th birthday of the Republic and, like the twenty-pfennig piece, was not made of aluminium. You and I, Herr Altberg, were still in the vestibule, the matt-white lacquered door in front of me, beneath my feet the foot scraper that didn’t have any steel slats, instead there was a coconut mat that was covered with a floorcloth in the damp season and steamed all day long when the bookshop was open. Please wipe your feet carefully. The carefully was carefully underlined. Fräulein Leukroth, the daughter of the current owner, would certainly be sitting at her desk in the corridor between the two rooms of the bookshop, writing, now and then dipping her steel nib into a little pot of iron-gall ink from VEB Barock and carefully wiping off the superfluous drops on the glass rim. I suspected she was in contact with important minds of the past, for the scratch of her pen on the paper, which was yellowing at the edges, and the ink would be bound to seem familiar to the souls of the dead, residing perhaps somewhere in the wide expanses of the void, more probably, however, here, in the steps between and inside the books, and have the power to call them up; it must be possible to get them to leave the heavens above Dresden and swirl back down into King Solomon’s bottle, and then all that would be needed would be a cotton curtain, with a pattern of moss-green flowers (Fräulein Leukroth had a dress of the same material), over the light from the window for the soberly effective conjuration; in the twilight and the night, when the woodcut Book Fool in the corner of the adjacent room would come to life and, together with his employees, take over the bookshop, Fräulein Leukroth would, so I thought, have no choice but to disappear with the ghosts that had been conjured up. That was until one day when the assistant at the elderly cash register in the front room of the shop, opposite the No Entrance door, waved me over and, raising her eyes to the heavens, accidentally on purpose let me see a note from Fräulein Leukroth: It would be welcome, gratifying even, if you would be good enough to see to it that the porcelain flower gets one over the eight to drink. For some particular reason the water, with which, despite the request, she had nonetheless to be economical, had to be stale. — We stood in the vestibule, listening. It must have been a Monday, for all that I could hear behind the matt-lacquered door was the murmur of my memories, not the voice of the lady with the paper rose telling a customer off for not treating Rororo paperbacks with due care and attention, Herr Leukroth shuffling along beneath the sacrosanct dimensions of a plaster cast of Goethe’s Jupiter head enthroned above the bookcase doors with little filigree keys in the locks that also wore adhesive-tape ties, also with typed inscriptions — Classics! Apply at counter to inspect! The command was obeyed, for an unauthorized touch would have created a different kind of silence; also, I thought, the keys must be linked to an invisible alarm: to Fräulein Leukroth’s nervous system turned inside out and stretching into the bookshop, perhaps also to the whispering of some telltale benign spirits conjured up by the scratch of a pen. It must have been a Monday, for Dienemann Succrs. was ‘Private’ and ‘Private’ shops were closed on Mondays, I knew that from Walther’s and Wackendorff’s bakeries, Vogelsang the butcher’s and the cobbler Anselm Grün. The floorcloth wasn’t steaming; deliberately ignored, it was drying out into the grey of a shark’s fin that had been washed up on the coconut mat. No icy silence from within when someone interrupted Fräulein Leukroth in her inky activity to ask about the books in the glass-fronted case beside her desk: behind a curtain with a pattern of moss-green flowers were, guarded by pharmacists’ bottles, Hermann Hesse books of the old S. Fischer Verlag, linen-bound in faded blue with gold-embossed lettering, Unger Gothic typeface, and those of the GDR Aufbau Verlag, linen in artificially faded lime green, sand-coloured wrappers, Garamond typeface, and when a train went past, the pharmacists’ bottles took over the trembling that sent out its jagged rays from the core of Fräulein Leukroth’s silence: Books by Hermann Hesse, sir. And for Fräulein Leukroth, who didn’t even turn her head, no further explanation was necessary. — Oh, Hermann Hesse, the potential customer insisted: — Most certainly! and: I will tell you straight away, Fräulein Leukroth said; — I presume you’re not selling them? — Listen, said Fräulein Leukroth, terminating the discussion, after Hermann Hesse! there is! no more literature! then carefully, while the prospective customer shrugged his shoulders, realizing he had not passed one of the usual Dresden tests of worthiness, wiped off a superfluous drop of ink from her steel nib on the rim of the Barock jar. And you, Herr Altberg, were listening. And I was watching as you opened the books, chatted with the assistants, advised Fräulein Leukroth about pharmacists’ mixtures for skin problems and illnesses caused by radiation from outer space, as you gave Herr Leukroth, who approached, withdrew, approached again with one of your volumes of essays in his hand, a signature; you seemed confused, perhaps you hadn’t imagined you yourself could be an object of interest for P. Dienemann Succrs.; I found it touching that I could observe you, one of my stern teachers, in a carefree moment. There is much that you have taught me — without realizing it, I have never had the courage to tell you; for I cannot pretend that I understand you. I suspect that our impressions of life, which I am unwilling to call experiences, since I don’t know whether anything is ever repeated, lie too far apart. I see us standing in the vestibule outside Dienemann’s antiquarian bookshop, you told me about the beginnings of the German Democratic Republic, about your hopes and dreams, about the dawn you greeted joyfully and for which, after the thousand-year darkness, you were prepared to do, to give, everything. You fell silent; I was listening. Gramophone records had eaten their way into the walls. Voices did not come together. The line from the fishwives’ song: Shark thou sea-green officer, slipped through the matt-lacquered and the connecting portal, disappeared into the bookcase beside Goethe’s Jupiter head, behind the table whose overhanging offerings of books worried the wooden fool. There was a little key in that case as well: Romantics, ditto! was typed on the tape. And as you remained silent, Fräulein Leukroth raised her head and listened on her part: even if no one was ‘rooting round cluelessly’ (as the assistant in the chiffon blouse would quietly groan after she’d followed a customer to see what he was up to, only to find, manically and fearlessly rummaging in the second rows, behind eternal revenants such as Karl Zuchardt’s Stirb du Narr! — never read, notoriously in stock — or Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis? ditto, an intellectual robber baron by the name of Georg Altberg); could there be someone who wasn’t standing the accepted Dresden viewing-metre away from the books, head respectfully tilted to one side in order to examine the titles, chin in his right hand and that supported by his horizontal left arm? Fräulein Leukroth listened. Was it time for her medicine? It would be welcome, if the staff of this establishment were more economical in their use of brown paper; old newspapers are just as good for wrapping books, for which reason I, as you are aware, always bring a supply. The subjunctive ‘were’ was carefully underlined.

12. Rust

You had to learn your lessons, relentlessly, tirelessly, endlessly, if one day you wanted to be one of the great ones — that, too, was a lesson Christian had learnt. Niklas, Ulrich and Richard had little time for anything but the best and the most significant; Ezzo, when he played a piece, was told that this or that violinist had done it better, that he still lacked this or that ‘in order to really move the listener, not just to play the notes but to fill them with life; there’s still no depth to it’. Christian had learnt this when Richard had taken out his old school reports and silently tapped an A grade in a subject where Christian had a B; a C was already a minor disaster and he didn’t dare imagine what would happen if he got a D, or even an E, the maximum credible catastrophe. Nor did he dare imagine what would happen if he didn’t get a place at medical school.

‘Being a doctor,’ Richard said, ‘is the best, the most wonderful profession there is. It’s a clearly defined, beneficial activity, the results of which can be seen immediately. A patient comes with a complaint. The doctor examines him, makes a diagnosis, starts the treatment. The patient goes home healed, relieved of pain, able to start work again.’

‘If he hasn’t died,’ Ulrich retorted. ‘Has it never struck you that hospitals are often next to graveyards? And next to ones where the gravediggers are shovelling out holes all the time, at that. — It’s the economy where the best jobs are, my lad. There you’re creating things of material value. Let’s say you’re producing lavatory seats. You don’t have to grin, it’s time someone undertook a defence of the lavatory seat. Despised it may be, but everyone needs that oval, even if no one talks about it. By the way, did you know it’s called le couvercle in French? You won’t be in the limelight if you manufacture kuverkles, definitely not, but woe betide you if they’re out of stock. The economy is real life. And you’ll make a packet there!’

‘You and your stupid jokes, don’t confuse the boy, Snorkel,’ Barbara said reproachfully. ‘The economy! Which one are you talking about? The socialist economy? Don’t make me laugh.’

‘You may laugh, my little ball of fluff, but I tell you that the economic laws also operate in …’

‘Richard’s not that far off the mark. The boy has to learn something solid. I always thought he should be a tailor. I think he has a natural talent for tailoring. A feeling for material seems to run in the Rohde family … Meno has a feel for it too. — Just don’t be anything connected with books, Christian. That’s all crap, isn’t it, Meno?’

‘Not entirely. Though there’s a certain amount of shit there too.’ Meno hardly took part in these discussions at all, concentrating on his supper while the others argued.

‘Rubbish! I know writers, they come and moan to me. They want to write that the sky is blue, but they have to write that the sky is red. A suit always has two sleeves, here just as in the West. And it has buttons. One of these … scribblers! asked me whether I knew the people who make buttons, he’d like to make buttons, nothing but buttons.’

‘As a doctor you really are a general practitioner. You have to be able to do everything. You even have to know a bit about the economy. And lots of doctors I know are artistically inclined. Art, craftwork, culture: everything comes together in the doctor. You can go into research, as Hans has. Toxicologists are always needed. You can even, if you study history along with medicine, become a medical historian, we have a chair in the Academy. A well-paid professor, with a nice situation in the Faculty of Medicine, well away from the ideologists. He sits there writing books all day.’

‘Well I think the nicest thing of all is still music,’ said Niklas.

When he was staying with his parents, Christian liked to go for a walk by himself in the evening. He didn’t see many people, mostly the district lay in profound silence. More clearly than ever he sensed the melancholy and solitary atmosphere of the old villas with their pointed gables and steep roofs, lit by the Advent stars on the balconies and in the oriel windows, by the meagre light of those street lamps that were still working. Snow fell, snow melted, sometimes it rained as well. Then he would hear his steps echoing on the wet flagstones of the pavement and feel that these houses concealed something, an insidious disease, and that this disease was connected with the inhabitants.

He often went to see Niklas, whom he liked very much, and he would look forward to the visit to his uncle well in advance, during the last class, during the monotonous sway of the journey from Waldbrunn to Dresden. If they had agreed on eight o’clock, he would be walking restlessly round the streets an hour beforehand, looking at the lights and asking himself what the inhabitants behind the windows might be doing, whether, at the sound of the bells from the city, at the striking of the clocks, which was audible through the windows, they too might be thinking of the disease, for which he could still not find a name, however hard he tried. He’d once talked about it with his Uncle Hans. Hans had given him a surprised look, shrugged his shoulders and answered, with an ironic smile, ‘We’re being poisoned, that’s all’, had added, ‘And Time, how strangely does it go its ways’, and placed his index finger to his lips. Christian had not forgotten that. It was a quotation from Der Rosenkavalier, it was sung by the Marschallin; and Christian believed that this Marschallin was still alive, somewhere here in one of the houses, and was whispering about time, even possessed it, like an essence, and fed it into the clocks in the slow, patient manner of a spinner at her spinning wheel from which there went a thread: time, dripping, trickling in the wallpaper, scurrying in the mirrors, time weaving its visions. On one of these evenings with Niklas in the music room of Evening Star, the needle of the record player kept jumping out of the groove and playing the same passage again and again, Tannhäuser, Christian imagined, kept raising his arm and singing the praises of Venus in her mountain grotto, at which point the needle would go no farther, seemed to hit a barrier that knocked it back and made it mechanically repeat the same melody to a rustle of tremolando violins, rippling harps and the crepitation of the record, that had been made during the Third Reich, a probe into a long-vanished theatre, scratched and, as Christian sometimes thought when he was sitting listening with Niklas, pervaded with the crackle of air-raid warnings on the wireless and the radar of the bombers approaching Dresden. But in the same way as the needle kept jumping back, until Niklas got up and put an end to the echoes, multiplying the minnesinger’s earnestness so that he slipped into ham acting, copy after copy thrown out like a jiggling marionette in an endless loop, so the days in the city seemed to Christian, repetitions that made you want to laugh, each day a mirror image of the previous one, each a paralysing copy of the other. Then he thought of Tonio Kröger, the bourgeois from the city with the draughty, gabled streets, the warehouses and churches, the Hanseatic merchants with a cornflower in their buttonhole and the ships sailing past their counting houses up the Trave. He had no idea what had made him think of that, the sight of the house called Dolphin’s Lair perhaps, or his happy anticipation of a musical evening with Niklas. It was a long time since Christian had read the story. Meno thought highly of it; sometimes, at their soirées, they would talk about Thomas Mann. As Christian walked round the sparsely lit streets that smelt of snow and the ash from lignite, he felt as if he were Tonio Kröger himself; true, he didn’t quite have the right style, since he wasn’t the son of strait-laced Lübeck patricians. He would presumably have had to go in and out of the Gothic vaults of the Kreuzschule in Dresden as well. Yet he still had that feeling and the longer he walked, the more Tonio Kröger seemed to take possession of him, as if he were the right mask for the district up there, protection against something Christian couldn’t define but that seemed to cause the morbid atmosphere of the houses all around, their silent decline, their sleep.

Niklas …

‘Salve, Christian, come on in, I’ve got something for you.’ It was mostly Niklas who came when he rang the bell at the door with the peeling light-grey paint and the crooked ‘Tietze’ sign covered in verdigris. Gudrun seldom went to the door and when she did Christian knew it wasn’t a good evening to visit Niklas; then he would often see him already in the hall adjusting his beret in the mirror with the curving frame and silhouettes of Reglinde and Ezzo on the right and left (Zwirnevaden Studios, Steiner Guest House), putting on his coat and gloves, checking his midwifery bag, his car keys — then he had a house call, would wave him away: another time, as you can see, today’s not on.

‘You can always go and see Ezzo,’ Gudrun would say, ‘though he has to do his practice and you mustn’t distract him; when you’re there he doesn’t complete his daily quota. And I have to go out soon as well. — But there aren’t any pears for you to gobble up,’ she explained and Christian, feeling slightly awkward, wondered whether she meant it seriously or whether it was intended as a kind of hearty joke, which to his mind didn’t go with Gudrun’s delicate features (Niklas said he’d recognized them in drawings by Dürer) and her stage voice (she was an actress at the theatre), with her smell of preserved rhubarb, ears of corn and deer tallow cream. Or she said, ‘Use sea-sand and almond bran for your acne, I don’t want you to infect Reglinde or Ezzo’, and when Christian replied that his pimples weren’t infectious, gave him a sceptical look, as if he were knowingly telling a lie, but anyway certainly didn’t know enough about such matters to have an opinion that was worth listening to. Sometimes there were better-eyesight weeks when the Tietzes fed mainly on carrots, since Gudrun had read in a magazine at Schnebel’s, the hairdresser’s, or heard from a colleague at the theatre, that carrots contained a lot of vitamin A and that vitamin A was good for your eyesight; during those weeks their eyes were sharp but their stomachs rumbled. Gudrun discovered that sliced carrots absorbed the taste of the meat that was cooked with them in the frying pan — the better-eyesight weeks were followed by the weeks of carrotburgers. She was told that butter was harmful and read something in an old magazine about an outbreak of margarine disease: ‘Professor Doktor Doktor aitch see Karl Linser of the Charité Hospital in Berlin gave an interview, so there must be something to it’, and she immediately threw away all the margarine she had in the house. (‘Carcinogenic! You turn yellow!’) Every year, shortly before Christmas, a scientist (‘a specialist!’) would announce in the newspapers his discovery that bananas were harmful and oranges (except for those from Cuba) contained certain substances that could inhibit children’s growth and lead to constipation in adults (‘he describes it precisely, you can peel them as carefully as you like, there’s always a bit of pith left on the piece, it’s deposited at the pylorus in your stomach and eventually you’re completely blocked up, for the pith of the orange doesn’t get digested!’). No one apart from Gudrun believed these specialists and to the annoyance of her family she gave the West bananas in the yellow packets away to the Hoffmann children. ‘You’ll see what they do to you, you’ll grow up like little dwarves; go on then, eat them, if you don’t believe me, go and catch cancer. You’ll all be eaten away by cancer! You always have to know best.’

‘Oh, do stop your nonsense,’ Richard said, ‘it’s just a very obvious ploy. They don’t want to use their hard currency for tropical fruits, and to avoid criticism, they put this rubbish about. And you fall for it! If it really were true, all monkeys would die soon after they’re born, given the amount of bananas they polish off.’

‘Oh yes, you always know best. The man in the newspaper was a proper scientist and you’re not even a proper doctor.’

‘Oh, come on now!’

‘You just hack people about!’

‘Despite that, I do understand something of these matters,’ said Richard, hurt.

‘Because you get everything out of books, just out of books, most of the stuff in them is pure fabrication, just to get people so they’ll believe anything and so the writers can collect their royalties.’

‘Is that true, Meno?’ At such moments Richard would fold up the newspaper.

‘Physicists and medics are the worst,’ said Meno in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They fabricate like nobody’s business and have no idea, none whatsoever. And moneygrubbers! Suck the publishers dry like vampires.’

Gudrun was not to be moved. ‘You two can make fun of me if you like, but I know what I know. I read recently that monkeys are monkeys because they eat nothing but bananas. You can let your children grow up into monkeys. Not me. And you, Meno, you haven’t even got any.’

‘Salve,’ said Niklas. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ Christian was eager to see what it was this time, a new record from Philharmonia, Trüpel’s record shop, picture postcards from Malthakus or a piece of Saxon sugar cake from Walther’s on Rissleite? Niklas loved surprises and put on a mysterious air, shuffled along in tattered slippers, one hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers, vigorously playing an air piano with the fingers of the other (or was he trying out fingerings on an imaginary viola fingerboard?), over the soft PVC of the hall to the ground-glass living-room door, illuminated with seductively warm light. Gudrun withdrew, either to the bedroom to learn her lines or to darn stockings, eight thimbles on her fingers making a soft, castanet-like noise, in the kitchen, where the cupboards hung crookedly and the window ledges were eaten away with black mould, where the paint on the pipes was blistering and embroidered recipes for Salzburg soufflé, pumpkin soup and a dish called ‘industrial accident’ (an exceptionally fragrant, disgusting-looking hotchpotch the children stirred with long spoons) could hardly cover the damp patches on the walls.

Then there began another session of what Christian was unwilling to call ‘teaching’, although there was a teacher, Niklas, and a pupil, Christian (only occasionally Ezzo or Reglinde as well, sometimes Muriel and Fabian Hoffmann, the children from the house on Wolfsleite); even though it was mostly the pupil who asked the questions and the teacher who gave the answers, ‘teaching’ didn’t describe it, that would have reminded Christian too much of Waldbrunn. The evenings with Niklas — and with the other Tower-dwellers Christian visited — had little in common with the lessons there. When Ezzo and Reglinde had time, Christian would bring his cello and they played string quartets, sometimes Gudrun would take the piano and they would go through a Mozart quintet or the ‘Trout’, the lilting theme of which would regularly send Gudrun into ecstasy and, humming along, she would get the utmost possible out of the yellowed keys of the Schimmel piano, which occasionally stuck in the top and bottom registers.

‘Salve.’ In the living room the tiled stove was pumping out regular rings of heat, briquettes rumbled onto the grating, the wind howled in the chimney. Sometimes sparks flew out onto the metal plate under the stove door. The windows rattled and banged even when it was snowing and there was no wind outside; the wood in the frames had cracks, the old-fashioned bascule bolts were covered in verdigris and, as in many of the apartments up there, thick draught excluders made in the Harmony Salon workshop from remnants of wool and clothing were stuck between the windows on the sill. Niklas poured a glass of mineral water for Christian and a Wernesgrüner Pils for himself, stroked the threadbare corduroy of the three-piece suite, leant back and said, ‘Aah’ and ‘Right, then’ to the plaster frieze round the ceiling, to the paintings by Kurt Querner on the walls: stolid scenes from the Erzgebirge done in earthy colours, the Luchberg in melting snow; a lane in Börnchen with gnarled trees; one of the famous portraits of Rehn, a peasant farmer, bringing out his pinched features with the rich blue of his eyes, his hands, crooked and knotted like roots, that had always impressed Christian. As did the portrait of Reglinde in the corner with the honey-coloured wing chair: it was one of the painter’s last works, Reglinde at eleven or twelve, in a plain dress, a few dolls beside her that Christian remembered from winter theatre evenings at the Tietzes’ and the Wolfsleite Hoffmanns’ years ago; as he walked home Christian often wondered about Reglinde’s alarmed eyes in the picture.

Niklas talked about productions from the past. The sound of the ‘abbot’s clock’, of Ezzo’s violin exercises in the adjoining room, of Gudrun declaiming, ‘Oh, who is the villain, speak’, of the chimes of the grandfather clock with the brass face fading away over the carpet, in front of the ceiling-high bookcase with Dehio art books, alphabetically arranged biographies of musicians and volumes of correspondence from Europe’s past, all mingled with names from the heyday of opera and music, which for Niklas was a German art, with all due respect to the Beatles and ABBA, about whom he could talk knowledgeably at the evening meetings of the Friends of Music. ‘The pentatonic scale … now, when the orchestra plays in Japan, they can’t get enough of our music. Mozart on the pentatonic scale, well, OK. America has its dschezz and Dschordsch Görschwin, it has Börnschtein’s West Said Schdori and Nyu York … Great, great. People are always saying the Germans are the nation of poets and philosophers, I would say they’re the nation of musicians. In no other area is the Germans’ contribution so unique as in music. Leaving aside Verdi and Berlioz, Puccini and Vivaldi … there’s not much left! A few Russians, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin, but that’s a special case, that’s already peripheral. Shostakovich as well and Prokoviev, Stravinsky, but he’s too abstract, it comes from his head, not his heart … No, music is a German art and that’s that.’

Niklas talked about the singers of the Dresden Opera, about the great conductors of the past. Outside the rain would beat against the windows, the snow swirl, the flakes, a hundred eyes sticking to the panes, slowly melt. In the summer Christian and Niklas would sit on the veranda, beside the music room. It smelt of the white-painted wooden furniture that came from Gudrun’s parents’ house, of the tobacco from Niklas’s pipe that he would smoke with relish on mild evenings with open windows, the humming of the bees, orange and blue sunset streaks and the call of the blackbirds. In the winter Christian would listen to Niklas, to the wide sweep of his memories bringing the past to life again, in the living room and the music room, where Niklas would first of all sit by the telescope table, then, when it was time to listen to music, on the chaise longue in front of the mirror that had turned a watery grey. The record on the turntable of the hi-fi machine with the imitation beech veneer would start to revolve and they listened to the singers Niklas had been talking about. Then, Christian felt, something happened to the room: the green wallpaper with the pattern of protozoa and diatoms seemed to open up; the Viennese clock acquired a human face; the yellow artificial rose under the glass cover on the escritoire in the corner where Niklas wrote his letters in ink on hand-made, deckle-edge Spechthausen paper, seemed to grow rampant and branch out, the way it happened in silhouette films in the Tannhäuser Cinema in which shadow plants (roses? thistles? neither Muriel nor Christian nor Fabian knew) twined round a castle; the photos of the singers on the walls were no longer close, looked as if they had floated up from the cabins of ships that had sunk; the rasping sound of the stylus sounded like the swell of the sea. Niklas sat leaning forward, tense, caught up in the sweep of the melodies, the entries. Christian observed his uncle surreptitiously; he too seemed to be part of the world of the tides, the murmur of the sea from days long past, not the present; sometimes Christian was even slightly startled to hear his uncle talk of everyday matters such as snow chains for the Shiguli or Dynamo Dresden’s last game; in this world of the thousand little things and the curse of climbing the stairs to the offices of public officials he seemed to be merely a visitor, wrapped in the cloak of a kind fairy. Christian had to feel his way back into his everyday world when he said goodbye to Niklas, had to find his way back as he went home (Caravel was diagonally opposite), often taking detours, his head full of the names of singers and composers, anecdotes from the life of the State Orchestra during previous decades, full of pictures of German cathedrals and features of pre-war Dresden.

And with Malthakus it was the stamps, the historical postcards with the landscapes, that the dealer’s narrative commentary turned into little living tableaux; the albums with stamps from distant countries: ‘papillons, 100 différents’, ‘bateaux, 100 différents’; butterflies from Guyana and Réunion, Gabon and Senegal; ship motifs: ‘République du Bénin’, Indochina, São Tomé e Príncipe; triangular stamps from Afghanistan joined by a perforated line at the hypotenuse that the dealer patiently explained: ‘The ship here with the red-and-white striped sails is a cog of the Hanseatic League’ (Christian knew it from an engraving on the glass door of the staircase at Caravel); ‘the one on the other side, with the blood-red sails, a Venetian merchantman’; then he rotated the globe and tapped his finger on the places that sounded legendary to the ears of the Heinrichstrasse and Wolfsleite children — Benin, previously the Kingdom of Dahomey, a narrow country on the west coast of Africa, capital — capital? I ought to know that. Quick, open the atlas. What is the capital of Benin called? But they got stuck in Togo, a former German colony bordering Benin; Togo was interesting too and then they discovered countries such as the Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, the capital of which (they all loved its name and could remember it later when they played ‘name — city — country’: Ouagadougou; Sinbad and his crew would certainly have been to Ouagadougou; everything was different in Ouagadougou).

Knowledge, knowledge. Names, names. Brains soaked it all up like sponges until they were dripping with knowledge that they didn’t release since these sponges couldn’t be squeezed. Knowledge was what counted; knowledge was the closely guarded treasure of those who belonged up there.

Those who knew nothing seemed to count for nothing. There was hardly any insult that was worse than ‘ignoramus’. At weekends there were anatomy lessons with Richard (he particularly enjoyed testing them on the bones of the wrist, having taught them a mnemonic verse: ‘A tall ship sailed in the moonlight bright — lunate — Triangulated a pea-shaped rock one night — triquetral, pisiform — The captain and his mate, each on a trapeze — trapezium, trapezoid — Dived head over heels, caught the hook with ease — capitate, hamate’) and talks on famous doctors: Fabian, Muriel, Robert and Christian, who intended to study medicine, sat in Richard’s study and revised their notes: ‘When did Sauerbruch start to work in Munich? — Late summer 1918. — Name three forerunners of surgery of the chest and one of their achievements. — Bülau. Bülau drain. Rehn. First open-heart operation. Mikulicz. Mikulicz line, clamp; operation on the oesophagus in the chest, made possible by Sauerbruch’s low-pressure chamber. Sauerbruch’s teacher in Breslau.’ Muriel and Fabian seemed to join in more out of habit (there was also tasty food from Anne); Christian admired Sauerbruch, was fascinated by the stories about Robert Koch’s heroic rise, dug his way through Ärzte im Selbstversuch, Bernt Karger-Decker’s book with its scary bright-orange wrapper about doctors who tried remedies out on themselves, through the many volumes of the biographical series Humanisten der Tat that took up a whole shelf in his father’s bookcase, opened, full of trepidation, the anatomical atlases, where thousands of Latin names indicated meticulously described parts of the body — ‘Do we have to learn all this at medical school?’ — ‘That’s on the syllabus in the first two years, in addition you get biochemistry and physiology, chemistry, biology, biophysics, mathematics for doctors and, unfortunately, Marxism — Leninism still,’ Richard replied. Christian refused to be put off by Anne’s concerned objections (‘Let them go out and play, Richard, you’re stuffing them full of books; you’re going too far and I don’t think it’s good for them’) and devoured as much knowledge as he could. He too wanted to be famous and recognized by Richard and Niklas, Malthakus and Meno, the Tower-dwellers, his name too must shine out: Christian Hoffmann — the great surgeon, the man who conquered cancer. The first person from the GDR to win a Nobel Prize, applauded in Stockholm. After that he would probably get out, accept the offer of an English or American elite university. Or study economics and become director of a concern after all, like Ulrich? A clear desk every morning, the secretary brings papers that can determine the future state of a whole country, your signature, please, Comrade Director. Comrade — unfortunately that was unavoidable. Christian examined his own feelings about it: no, no scruples. If it meant you could become a director. Or a scientist like Meno. An insect specialist and umpteen insect species will end in H for Hoffmann. A physicist puzzling over the foundations of the world! Ezzo saw himself as an astronaut. Sinbad and Tecumseh were good. Chingachgook, the big snake. To be a trapper like Leatherstocking. To be a cellist on the world stage, to thunderous applause — but Christian sensed, and his teacher had indicated, that his talent wasn’t up to that; it was enough to get by with, certainly; you could surprise the presidents of countries when, as the Nobel Prize winner for … (whatever) you picked up your cello and played one of Bach’s suites. Fabian, much taken with Lange’s stories, was drawn to the tropics, wanted to become a ship’s doctor and a second Albert Schweitzer. Robert would say, ‘You’ve all got a screw loose’, and go fishing or to watch football with Ulrich. Muriel was getting difficult, talked more about love than about science and art. Christian read.

And when he wasn’t reading, he sometimes started to laugh.

When he was younger he’d enjoyed Jules Verne, Jack London, Friedrich Gerstäcker’s novels set in exotic countries, had read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer again and again. He loved stories of adventure, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, stories of spies, musketeers and agents. When he had started at the senior high school, however, Meno had given him a book that impressed Christian in a way he couldn’t explain; it was The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, a book that told about an age that had long since disappeared, the Belle Époque in the Vienna of the turn of the century. It was teeming with names, allusions, quotations that Christian recognized from having heard them from Meno himself or from Niklas, an effect that delighted him. Not only that, there was a casual remark by Zweig he couldn’t get out of his mind: that in Europe before the First World War you didn’t need a passport to travel wherever you liked; that you could attend university in Paris or Florence, if you wanted (and, of course, assuming you had the money). In that book he found wide horizons he had not yet come across, even with the Tower-dwellers. In the ‘Camp for Work and Relaxation’ he had read Goethe’s Elective Affinities more in an attempt to impress Verena than out of interest; now this book by Zweig gave him a sense of what the concept of ‘world literature’ meant. World literature — they’d talked about that at school as well (Goethe, Faust I: but at the time Christian had preferred to play battleships or handball); he had only had a vague idea of what it meant: it was the grey-linen rows of dignified books behind the glass of the bookcase in the living room of Caravel that seemed to stare at Christian with an expression that said: You’re too young, too stupid for us. Out of a sense of disdain that already had a touch of curiosity, he had occasionally taken a book out of the row, leafed through a few pages here, read a paragraph there (dialogues between lovers, that too), then carefully weighed the book in his hand and replaced it. He had to read, he had to learn more. He told himself that his models had been much farther on at fourteen, fifteen, than he was now, at seventeen; he told himself that, if some day he really was to become one of the great figures of science, he would have to at least double the daily quota he’d set himself. Every day in Waldbrunn he longed for the end of lessons so that he could finally get down to his own work. He studied like one possessed, eight to ten hours a day, both coursework and his own, but only as much coursework as he needed to get an A grade in class and oral tests. His own work consisted of fifty words each of English, French and Latin vocabulary a day together with further topics in chemistry, physics and biology. Christian swotted day in, day out, to the point of bitter despair that arrived by midnight at the latest because by that time he usually started confusing all the vocabulary, had forgotten the word for the biochemical cancer cycle (a complex of thistly formulae intended for second-year medical students), which was almost unpronounceable and ended in — ate or — asis, and no longer knew what the difference between an enzyme, a vitamin and a hormone was. He was dog-tired but he hadn’t done enough yet. He now forced his brain, which was already generating delusions, to read at least one chapter of world literature. Woe to anyone who dared to disturb his daily routine; Christian had already once driven off Frau Stesny, the middle-aged head of the pupils’ hostel, with a fit of rage; astonishingly she hadn’t complained to Engelmann, the principal. The other pupils in the hostel looked askance at him because he shut himself off from everything. Svetlana Lehmann tapped her forehead, Verena shrugged her shoulders, Jens mocked. Only Siegbert said nothing, Siegbert, with his little desk full of matchstick ships and sailing manuals, who knew all the ranks in the People’s Navy (and also of the Nazi navy, but no one was to know that), the types of ships, classes of cruisers and tonnages, Siegbert Füger, who wanted to go to sea and liked stories of the sea, especially Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese comic books; Christian had given him a few, ones of which Lange, the ship’s doctor, had spare copies. He even read the Odyssey, Apollonius of Rhodes’s saga of the Argonauts, the reports of Pharaoh Necho’s captain, of Herodotus.

When Frau Stesny, not knowing what to do next, locked the door of the classroom where Christian studied in the evenings (he disturbed the quiet of the building, and not only when, at two in the morning, his overwrought brain had the idea of relieving the strain by playing his cello or the school piano) — well, if Frau Stesny locked the rooms, Christian would just go on working in the toilet. He didn’t get much sleep, just four or five hours, and went with glassy, red-rimmed eyes to classes where he only realized the teacher had asked him a question from the gleeful giggles of the rest of the class. The books were beginning to become attached to him, as he called it, for the others they were something like his emblem. He seldom went anywhere without having a book with him. He read during break, while the others ate their rolls, or, during the lunch hour, went out into the yard, where the girls swapped cassettes and the boys played cards, argued about rock bands or discussed the latest football results. He even arranged his books into different categories: reading for the bus he took to Dresden, reading for the lessons he found boring (English with Frau Kosinke, geography with Herr Plink, who kept waving his pointer at the maps hanging on the walls), reading for his free time (his daily chapter) and reading for the break. Soon he was no longer satisfied with reading one chapter of world literature a day and set himself 100 pages. His day extended well into the early hours of the next. During the autumn break, when he naturally continued his study, he increased his quota to 400 pages a day, with the result that he sometimes read for fourteen, fifteen hours on end and then got up off the couch eyes rolling, pale and wan as a potato sprout. Sometimes he read two or three books in a day and afterwards all he knew about Tagore, for example, was that during the previous week he had got through five books by him. He ploughed his way through the Waldbrunn library, returned the complete editions of Max Planck, Rutherford, Albert Schweitzer after three weeks, in order to take out the next enticing pile for the next week, and the longer the book, the better! Christian loved long books. A novel wasn’t a real novel unless it was at least 500 pages long. At 500 pages the ocean began, anything less than that was paddling in a brook. It was in vain that Meno shook his head and pointed out that there could be more of the world in a short story by Chekhov, more of life and art than in many a fat, blubbery tome. But Christian went for the blue whales, as he called the epic novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, he loved Thomas Wolfe, from the pages of his books came the sound of ships’ sirens, music from the steamers in the Southern states, the whistles of the American transcontinental trains. He read that Eugene Gant (that is Wolfe himself, he thought) had read 20,000 books in ten years (which seemed absolutely unimaginable to Christian), a real logodipsomaniac, then.

‘Now Christian’s really flipped his lid,’ Verena said.

On free days it had to be 500 pages, so for that he didn’t bother with physics and chemistry. Now the following happened: Robert had got really hooked on some Balzac novel and, out of the blue, worked his way through 555 pages in a single day. That mustn’t be allowed to happen; as far as reading and studying were concerned, Christian was the boss, Robert’s record had to be broken. One day Christian got up at four in the morning, washed, had not too full a breakfast and started to read. He wasn’t going to study that day, it was to be entirely devoted to breaking the new record. He read uninterruptedly from 4.30 a.m. until 12 p.m., though with two very irritating breaks for lunch and supper that Anne forced him to take. On the stroke of midnight he’d read 716 pages — and forgotten them, but what did that matter, he’d broken the record.

He had to become famous, then those at home would recognize him.

One evening in Waldbrunn, in a dark corner of his brain, overwrought with vocabulary and formulae, the plan for stage-by-stage progress appeared. Christian switched off the light and went to the window. Now the classroom was in darkness, just the metal of the chairs in the window row, which had been put up on the tables, wearily slurped the light from the lamp in the yard. He had no idea how late it was. The street lamps had come on long ago, the contours of the new district of Waldbrunn merged with the waves of the hill above Kaltwasser reservoir. Behind the two sports halls, low, standardized, glass-and-concrete buildings, was the ridge along which the F170 ran. The yellow headlamps of the long-distance lorries rummaged around over the rye-field on the ridge, the way from the school into the town.

The Great Man. Stage 1: Learning, studying, educating the mind — that was the stage Christian was on at the moment. Being highly educated was the first requirement for becoming a great man. A great man was, moreover, highly cultured as well and so when classes were over for the day (usually around 1 p.m.) Christian, instead of having lunch, would go to the club room and occupy the communal record player for an hour. It didn’t bother him in the least if others wanted to use the record player. Apart from him that was mostly only Svetlana — and she was an enthusiastic socialist, wanted to go to Lomonosov University in Moscow and listened to red singer-songwriters, for Christian ‘the pits’. Every minute the record player was on without that ‘nauseating stuff’ (as Christian, Jens and a couple of boys from the twelfth grade said) was a gain for culture. He saw himself as a serious, mature man and as such listened to classical music, though he was pretty much alone among the boarders with that point of view. Christian didn’t let that bother him: the others were philistines, how could they, coming from villages as they did, appreciate the profundity, the seriousness of a Bach, the serenity, the comic detachment of a Mozart, the emotional power of a Beethoven. Since Svetlana was a bit feeble-minded (an opinion he shared with several boys in his class), she didn’t need a record player. When listening, Christian would sit leaning back in his chair, with his legs up, a profoundly serious expression on his face when, for example, he was listening to Beethoven. Christian understood Beethoven’s outbursts of suffering … Like Christian, this titanic personality must have found himself surrounded by uncomprehending philistines and have had to struggle against them, his whole life long! Beethoven was a Great Man and Christian understood him, for he was cast in the same mould, definitely. Added to that, he really was affected by the music. He didn’t show it; it confused him and when he had the feeling that Svetlana or Siegbert was observing him, he would jump up and switch the record off, furious (leaving the record there, though — he was counting on their curiosity).

Stage 2: University studies. Naturally he would have to abandon them. A trifling university course could not satisfy him, the young scientific genius, the irrepressible hothead and tomorrow’s benefactor of mankind. He would even get poor grades at university: was that not the way it was, had he not read in many biographies of Great Men that they didn’t fit in? Did university courses not cover familiar territory — and wasn’t the reason a Great Man was great precisely that he broke new ground? Something that the simple-minded professors, trying to drum their long out-of-date knowledge into the ordinary minds of their students, could not of course see.

Stage 3: Nervous breakdown. That went with it. The tension the young Great Man is under is just too much. Even Mozart had sometimes gone off his rocker, so it was quite normal. Christian would have to go through terrible crises and consider suicide four times a day (it had to be four times, once or twice was too little, that happened in almost every family, three times sounded like a cliché, at four, Christian concluded, it somehow seemed more serious).

Stage 4: The Great Achievement, finally completed. Honours, prizes, applause would be heaped upon the young Faustian seeker after knowledge. Now the important thing was to remain modest (because of those who envied him and of the capricious deities of moments of inspiration) and not let himself be dazzled by all these externalities. The Great Man continues his research, restlessly, selflessly. He doesn’t care about the applause, all he cares about is his WORK. He makes a further discovery, even more revolutionary, more profound than the previous one. Petty-minded rivals who had begrudged him his success and shouted from the rooftops that the Great Hoffmann would soon be finished would crawl back into their holes. Remorsefully they would recant, shamefacedly admit their limitations. Triumphant jubilation.

So: down to work.

Love, Christian thought, would distract him from his studies.

13. Those we do not know

Little touching habits, he hadn’t forgotten them and he would presumably always associate them with their childhood: back in the fifties, in the sandstone hills by the Elbe. Meno was waiting, among the crowds doing their Christmas shopping, outside the Intecta furniture shop in the Old Market arcades on the corner of Thälmannstrasse, and recognized Anne at once from a distance; the way she threw back the orange scarf with a will of its own that she wore over her coat and that kept slipping down off her shoulders as she hurried along, that spot of orange in the turbid swell of the shopping-bag-laden throng; then the way she nibbled at the fingertips of her gloves while still walking, as if she were trying to take them off; that she always ran the last bit, once they had seen each other, embraced him passionately with all her shopping, her net bags with vegetables, her packages dangling from strings (had he ever, since she was married and the boys were beyond kindergarten age, seen her with her hands unencumbered — he couldn’t remember), embraced him unconcerned at what others might think, Meno’s colleagues at the publishers, when she met him there (Dresdner Edition looked out onto the Old Market, Meno just needed to cross the square to get to the furniture shop), or her colleagues from Neustadt Hospital whom she sometimes gave a lift to do their shopping. Anne never introduced him, the women would nod and swarm out at the hurried, well-trained pace of mothers who, after the morning shift, their first job, were setting off in the few hours remaining until closing time on their second job, there must have been something in the newspaper, or the bush telegraph had spread a rumour about deliveries: ‘Attention, housewives, the Centrum store has preserving jars in stock’ (they were needed in the autumn, but they arrived during the winter, what should one do, wait? You always regretted it), on another day the rings for the preserving jars; ‘hairdryers have arrived’ (the particular kind shaped like flounders with the blue plastic casing and black muzzle that after a few minutes of jet-engine noises smelt of burnt flies), or ‘Everything for the Child’: baby bottles of Jena glass that didn’t crack when heated, nappies that would survive no more than three or four washes, pans for boiling nappies, thermometers for checking the water while boiling nappies, Milasan baby food, dummies, two or three of the priceless modern prams that, actually intended for export, had managed to find their way to a department in a store on the edge of town that was now under siege …

‘Mo.’

‘Anne.’

She kissed him on the cheek and took his hand, waving it merrily up and down as if they were a couple that had just fallen in love. The list: in his mind’s eye he could see Anne’s rough-looking handwriting, a dozen lines, of which a couple at the beginning had been deleted; but he liked going shopping with her, he was interested in all the apparently trivial little things that were needed to make daily life troubleproof: shoelaces, vacuum-cleaner bags, buttons, a darning mushroom (he had seldom seen a new one in the families he visited, everywhere he went the ones he saw were the bread-brown darning mushrooms from the pre-war Müller sewing-machine works in Dresden, riddled with the holes of countless needles), and Anne liked to have him with her, since he never grumbled on their expeditions that took them all round the city, he was able to summon up an interest in coffee filter papers or the varying quality of materials for suits, she trusted his judgement of dress patterns (she had done that, he recalled, when she was still a little girl) and she asked his advice when she needed to buy presents. It was Advent now and when he looked at the faces of the women in the Centrum store or the poorly stocked shops along Prager Strasse, he thought that they hated this time of the year: all the running round after a few ridiculous articles of, in general, mediocre quality, the hustle and bustle of the Christmas Market with its brass bands, the chimney-sweep figures made of prunes, the baked apples, hot, strong grog, moaning kids clinging on to their hands and men who didn’t have to bother with all that because they had to work (but the women had to as well) or were sitting with a beer in their local bar watching Sports Report or playing cards. Robert, for example, wanted some new football boots, the ones with screw-in studs, and Anne told him as they crossed the Old Market, heading for Prager Strasse, that she had asked Ulrich where she might find boots like that, ‘he says the best place would be in Dům Sportu in Prague, they have Bata boots, they’re better than ours, but to go all the way to Prague for a pair of football boots …? But when I think about it, why not? Perhaps I’d find something for Richard there and perhaps a decent shirt for Niklas, he’s always wearing the same ones and the cuffs are already frayed, I’m surprised Gudrun doesn’t say something about it, and his trousers ought to be let out a bit, they’re much too short for him … We’ll see. Perhaps I’ll manage to get to Prague. You could come too, we’ll go in the car and have a nice day out. And you can speak Czech.’

‘Only the little Libussa teaches me, Anne. But I don’t know if I’ll have the time.’

‘Then we’ll just have to go one Saturday.’

‘Imagine what things’ll be like at Hřensko. And at all the other crossings. We’d have to get some crowns as well.’

‘We’ve still got two thousand. Two thousand unreturned, illicit crowns. And they say Dům Sportu’s got a very good angling department. That’d be something for you. And for Christian.’

‘How’s he getting along? I was talking to him about the senior high school and he seems to be managing all right.’

‘He’s difficult at the moment, he’s not easy to deal with, sometimes he can get quite abusive … He absolutely has to have a new pair of shoes and there’s nothing out there in Waldbrunn. And then the school, you know, he has a lot of work to do; sometimes I think they’re demanding too much — or he does of himself, he’s very ambitious and Richard keeps on at him too … I often wonder whether he’s not too strict with Christian, everyone ought to do what they can and if they can’t, then it’s no use forcing them. Oh, look at these, they’re pretty’ — she held up a few embroidered oven cloths, but shook her head when she saw the price — ‘and he needs some new cello strings as well, do you remember how one snapped at the party? That was a great success, don’t you think? Richard keeps playing your records over and over again.’

‘Does he still want to be a great, famous doctor?’

‘Christian? Oh yes, he talks about it sometimes. I don’t like the way he puts so much emphasis on the “great and famous”; I mean, being a doctor’s enough, surely? Why great and famous? And if he doesn’t become great and famous, will his whole world collapse? Well, he doesn’t get that from me … Now just look at those stupid rotary eggbeaters. Scandalous it is, really scandalous. Listen,’ she called out to the assistant who was standing behind a pile of lurid plastic products for the modern housewife, frozen stiff, ‘I’ll show you something.’ She picked up one of the appliances, which consisted of three intermeshing whisks on a revolving plate with a crank-handle at the side, and set the whisks whirring. Anne turned the handle faster, the whisks got caught up in each other and whichever way she turned the handle, they still didn’t move. Eventually one of the whisks broke off. Anne dropped the broken machine on the counter. ‘And you sell this trash?’ The modern housewives who were standing round started to mutter dangerously.

‘You’ve broken that, you’ll have to pay for it,’ the assistant said. ‘Hey, you, don’t you dare run off, help, police!’

A District Community Policeman came. ‘What’s going on here, citizens?’

‘Comrade DCP, that woman there wrecked this eggbeater and now she’s refusing to pay for it.’

‘There’s no way I’m going to pay a single pfennig for this rubbish, it’s outrageous, I just thought I’d try out your goods so that you can see what your modern housewives have to make do with. A rotary beater, huh, turn it five times and it’s beaten itself to bits.’

‘Citizen, you’ve damaged the goods, the citizen assistant has a right to compensation.’

‘Did you hear that!’ The modern housewives who were gathered round expressed their indignation. ‘That crap costs a pile of money — and it’s not even any use for cracking your old man on the head.’

‘But this is riotous assembly!’ The DCP took out his notebook. ‘On the other hand … let me have a look.’ The assistant handed him a beater. Then another. One after the other they broke. The assistant was furious and started swearing at the custodian of the law. He lost his temper as well and started shouting that his wife too needed a reliable mechanical eggbeater for her pre-Christmas baking; Meno drew Anne away.

Well, really, she would say. Well, really, he would answer. They were already laughing.

There was a long queue outside the Heinrich Mann Bookshop on Prager Strasse; Anne, sniffing an opportunity, an unusual, unannounced delivery, immediately asked what they had. The man in front of her shrugged his shoulders and said he’d only joined the queue because there were so many in it already, he was just going to wait and see.

‘Some important novel, an illustrated art book?’ Anne asked Meno, then someone shouted that hiking maps had been delivered.

In the window of the music shop next to HO Kaufhalle a few violins were hanging, shining like wet sweets, together with a screaming-gold violin and a ukulele; inside they had guitar strings, double-bass end pins and a good dozen recently delivered Czech violin chin rests (of which Anne took one for Ezzo, you never knew), but no cello strings, though there was an implement for cutting clarinet blades that Anne, since Robert had only one, bought immediately: Robert’s clarinet teacher had a brother who was an oboist and he, as Anne knew, corresponded with a cellist in the Berlin Philharmonic, perhaps they could wangle something through him.

They headed back towards the Old Market, swept along in the crowds coming from the main station and from Leninplatz. The women wrapped in headscarves, many of the men wearing Russian fur chapkas, pedestrians dressed in grey and brown, hurrying along, hunched up, towards the city centre, to the shops under the concrete slabs of the Königstein and Lilienstein luxury hotels. There were groups of people waiting outside the Round Cinema, which looked like a powder compact with vertical stripes. Meno looked across at the display cases in the promenade outside the various cinemas: Bud Spencer was flexing his biceps on the posters, seeing that justice was done with a smile on his face, Flatfoot on the Nile was being shown. The boys wanted to see it, Robert had asked Meno to go with them and had enlisted Ezzo and Reglinde as well, while Muriel and Fabian were going to wait until it was on in the Tannhäuser Cinema. The clock on the Church of the Holy Cross struck five. Meno looked up at the windows of Dresdner Edition in the massive bulk of one of the buildings on the east side of the Old Market; the light was still on in the office of Josef Redlich, the senior editor, in the little room of the proofreader, Oskar Klemm, as well, Schiffner’s window was dark.

A number 11 arrived, the red-and-white, mud-bespattered Tatra cars discharged people going to the cinema and the Christmas Market, women, like Meno, with bulging shopping bags in either hand. Anne was carrying a duffelbag full of clothes that had to be taken to the dry cleaner’s to be mended; it was Friday, the VEB Service Combine in Webergasse was open until 7 p.m. but there was only one hour left to buy things needed for the weekend and to hunt for Christmas presents. Anne suggested they should split up, she gave him the duffelbag, she wanted to look for some socks for Arthur, who lived out in the deepest backwater as far as the supply of goods was concerned, and Emmy had asked for a wheeled tote for shopping, ‘and of course we’ll give her some money as well, her pension’s nowhere near enough, and have you any ideas about something for Gudrun? I did want to get some gloves for Barbara; there were some in Exquisit, but I didn’t get them right away and they’d gone, well, I’ll just have to see if I can get them somewhere else. I’ve already got something for Uli, and for Kurt. At the dry cleaner’s it’s the express service and if they’re difficult, I’ve made an appointment, Mo, the number’s pinned to one of the pieces of clothing. The umbrella needs a new cover and the two pairs of scissors need sharpening. Where shall we meet?’

‘This end of Webergasse, in an hour?’

‘See you then’, and she was off. Just like the old days, he thought, when we were kids playing cops and robbers and she would disappear in the woods; just a few branches swaying, a dusting of pollen from the spruce trees, an alarmed bird; an invisible door had opened and swallowed her up.

He sometimes thought about their childhood, perhaps he was getting to the age when, amazed at the way time had quietly passed, you start to look back and in the evening, alone with shades, open the photograph album that is full of frozen gestures, you can still smell the aromas round them, they’ve just happened and not, as the date under the photo claims, one day twenty or thirty years ago. See: that apple at the top right of the picture, scarcely visible, but you know that it’s there, that it will be picked in a couple of minutes; the way the juice dripped off Anne’s chin as she bit into it and Ulrich tried in vain to take it off her, and look: Father waving from the window of our house, it’s 1952, not long since we got back from Moscow, when the Peace Race came through Bad Schandau and the crowds on the road beside the Elbe cheered the cyclists, or is he going to play us one of his Hans Albers records, ‘In a Starry Night by the Harbour’, an orange headband, Albers with a Sherlock Holmes pipe is looking up at the sky and Father says, as he takes the record out of the sleeve with the black Decca ellipse: ‘Did you know that the first time he appeared on the stage was here in Schandau, nineteen hundred and eleven?’

And then Anne, on some evenings in his mind’s eye he could see her face at that moment, her furrowed brow, her brown eyes wide with astonishment as she held out the apple to Ulrich; he was just as amazed as she was at this, for he had hesitated to touch the apple, had, embarrassed, pointed at the tree where there were other apples, then put his hands in his pockets and scuffed up the sand with the toe of his shoe … Anne: you can have it, if you want — but at that moment, with the suddenness of a bird of prey striking, Ulrich’s hand shot out of his pocket and grasped the fruit, leaving Anne stunned, as if the gesture had cut through her like a sword and nothing could undo it; Ulrich ran off with shouts of jubilation.

In the Service Combine in Webergasse Meno joined the queue and observed the way the staff went about their business, moving with fluent slowness and emphasizing every syllable when they spoke. Below a sign saying ‘Using Every Mark, Every Minute, Every Gram of Material with Greater Efficiency’ shirts were drying out on frames, billowing and bulging like a jazz trumpeter’s cheeks, stretching out plump, tube-like sleeves. Not all the drying dummies seemed to be working: now and then the air came hissing out, the shirts spat the sealing clips away and gave up the ghost with a grunt.

After he’d been served Meno sat down in the waiting area of the New Line hairdresser’s, which was on the same floor as the dry cleaner’s. Anne’s shirts would be ready in half an hour.

Sometimes he thought back to the years in Moscow. He remembered the autumn of 1947, the 800th anniversary of the founding of Moscow. He had been seven, Anne just two, Ulrich nine. A dark, untidy sky above the people in their Sunday best; in the parks there were brass bands, people selling candy floss and military bands waiting in the avenues.

Parked outside the Krasnaya Zvyozdochka kindergarten were the black limousines in which the Kremlin children were brought and picked up; the chauffeurs waited, smoking.

Girls in school uniforms with white aprons trotted past, chattering excitedly, holding little flags, they turned into the ‘Street of the Best Workers’, posters as high as the walls smiled down on the lines of demonstrators. Heroes of the Great Patriotic War, Heroes of Labour, of the Soviet Union. The girls had classes in the afternoon, in the second shift. The pupils from the first shift, which started at half past nine, were streaming out of the schools. Trolley buses, trams, lorries with slogans and decorated with flowers; the heavy Podeba and ZIS limousines came from the Arbat, jaunty marches rang out from the loudspeakers, everywhere red flags were fluttering. Portraits of the ‘most human of human beings’, attached to balloons, were swaying over Moscow. Meno recalled songs, fragments of lines drifted to the surface, he murmured the Russian words: ‘Stalin is a hero, a model for our children, / Stalin is the best friend of our youth’; ‘Our train goes full-steam ahead / and stops in communism’ … the starved faces of the people, Meno thought, Father’s emaciated hand holding mine, I ask about Mother and he answers, as he has for several months, that Luise is abroad, she sends the children her best wishes and hopes we are working hard at school. One day he takes Ulrich with him to the prison: Father waits until his letter of the alphabet is called. He goes to a counter to pay in money. If the official accepts the money, Mother is still alive.

14. Josta

Richard parked the Lada outside the ‘House of German — Soviet Friendship’ on Pushkin Platz and decided to walk. Leipziger Strasse was bustling with the evening throng, the lamps cast weary light over the traffic. A number 4 tram heading for Radebeul rattled past, swerving on the rails, Richard saw the cluster of passengers holding on to the straps sway to and fro. He crossed the road, but so slowly and immersed in thought that a military-green Volga stopped and a Russian soldier, driver for a senior officer whose gloves Richard could see making impatient gestures in the interior, stuck his head out of the window and shouted a hoarse but not unfriendly sounding ‘Nu, davai’ to him. Richard got out of the way, the Volga, a big limo, slithered off in the slush.

Cries came from the Paul Gruner Stadium, they were playing handball; there was still a league, mostly made up of workers and employees of the state concerns Robotron, Pentacon, Sachsenwerk. Indoor handball had long since taken over but here, in the suburbs, it still went on. Richard knew the changing rooms in the Paul Gruner Stadium, the photos of old sporting heroes: the Dresden footballer Richard Hofmann, known as the ‘Bomber’ because of his shot; the German and Hungarian teams of 1954, with signatures; the boots of players for Dynamo Dresden who had played in the youth teams here. The breeze freshened, bringing along smells: there was the brackish smell of the nearby Pieschen harbour, coming from the old arms of the Elbe in which the river water was stagnant and even in a harsh winter only formed soft ice. The fumes from the slaughterhouse in the Ostragehege district on the other side of the Elbe added a revoltingly sickly-sweet element to the river smell, then the wind changed, bringing the smells of the industrial district: vehicle exhaust fumes, metal, the acidic chimney smell of inefficiently burning lignite. Night was falling swiftly. How quickly the days pass, Richard thought. You leave the house in the dark and you go back home in the dark. And he was struck by the thought that he was now fifty and that there was something incomprehensible about it, for the day when he’d found a bird’s nest in his father’s garden and leant down in astonishment over the eggs with their green and rusty-red spots didn’t seem that long ago and yet it was forty years. He watched the people. The way they drifted along in the darkness wearing grey or brown coats, only now and then was there a little colour, pale blue, beige, a cautious pink, and everyone deep in thought and cogitation, no one with their head raised, looking at other people with an open expression: all this filled him with sadness, with a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness. Fifty years — and it was only yesterday that he’d kissed his first girl! She was older than him, nineteen or twenty, almost a woman for him at twelve. Her name was Rieke, a quiet girl who’d graduated from commercial college and was doing community service as a nurse, her firm having been completely demolished in the air raid. What beautiful hair she’d had: light brown with a few blonde strands; sometimes, when he looked at Christian or stroked his hair, he had to think of Rieke — and to repress a smile no one else would have understood; an explanation would have ended in a bad mood all round. How light and gentle the touch on his skin had been as she smeared on ointment or rubbed his back with cognac, and he could feel her breath as she sat on the bed, bending down behind him, and a rebellious strand of hair that she kept blowing back. She leant back before something that was aroused in him, giving him a presentiment of something previously unknown, throbbing, forbidden, could no longer be seen as mere chance, as an incidental contact that kept occurring during this kind of treatment. One evening, when they were alone, it lasted too long for his senses, erect, over-sharp antennae, and he turned over, not knowing himself what he was doing, or why, or where he found the courage, just that something was driving him beyond his fear and stuttering pulse to take her nonplussed face in his hands and kiss her on the lips. She didn’t pull back, didn’t give him a slap. Afterwards she sat there in silence, looked at him, began to smile and, with a shy gesture he found strangely arousing, pushed back her hair, which had fallen over her face. ‘Well, you are starting young,’ she murmured and he thought, What comes next? as his mind was swamped with a flood of scraps from books he’d read on the sly, hints and dirty jokes from older anti-aircraft auxiliaries, obscene pictures in magazines. Then an expression that he didn’t recognize appeared in her eyes, a kind of tender and respectful mockery; she lifted up his pyjama trousers: ‘Well, you are a one. Only twelve and already you can see the effects.’ He said nothing, she laughed quietly. ‘Come back later, you need to feed yourself up a bit first.’ At the time he’d felt insulted, he could very well remember the dull, vague feeling of shame mixed with indignant sadness; now Richard had to laugh. Thank you, Rieke, you tender young woman with your smell of cognac and soap. Tell me, has life been kind to you? I hope it has — I still lust after you! Richard gave a little leap and then, when an approaching passer-by looked at him in astonishment, pretended he’d just managed to avoid a dog turd on the pavement. He went past the Faun Palace and remembered some of the films he’d seen in the cinema that used to be a dance hall and meeting place for the workers. A building full of nooks and crannies, the seats with threadbare upholstery; on the walls of the vestibule were dusty silhouettes of Hans Moser, Vilma Degischer, Anny Ondra and other stars of UFA or Wien-Film. Framed signed portraits of DEFA actors were hung either side of the wooden kiosk housing the ticket office that, with its projecting front and brass fittings on its rounded corners, looked like a stranded carriage of the Orient Express. On the post of the wide, curving staircase with the worn fitted carpet was a snake plant some long-departed owner of the cinema had brought back from the tropics. Richard called it that because it had white and green speckled leaves hanging out of the pot like a bunch of sleeping snakes. He reminded himself to ask Meno its proper name when the opportunity arose. He saw the long queues outside the swing door of the cinema, the flickering greenish light in the display cases with the posters of Progress Film Distributors: a man in a trench coat with the collar turned up, behind him the tower of Lomonosov University, with the red star on the top stretching up into the evening sky, and facing him a woman whose wide-open eyes expressed disappointment, a last remnant of love and farewell. She looked like Anne, Richard turned his head away. He was overcome with sadness, melancholy; Rieke’s smile, the cheerful mood that had brightened his day only a few minutes ago, had vanished, vanished so completely it was as if it had never been. He tried to repress the thoughts that came to him, but it was impossible. Anne, he thought. Fifty, he thought. You’ve been made a Medical Councillor, just as Manfred prophesied at the birthday party: speech, thanks in the name of the people et cetera, certificate opened, certificate closed, handshake, applause, speech of thanks, one-two, buckle my shoe, just like marionettes. And Pahl did get the Fetscher Prize … a good surgeon, someone ought to tell him that at our age we should be beyond these little vanities. Fifty, he thought, and memories. You’re full of memories, but where has your youth gone? The laughter, the exuberance, the ready-for-anything energy …? The wind, the wind blowing through your hair. He’d read that somewhere recently, probably in one of those magazines the nurses read during the night shift; perhaps it was a line from a pop song, one of those trashy songs they played on TV in shows with titles like Variety Bandbox or Your Requests, songs he couldn’t listen to without a feeling of distaste and revulsion. But sometimes it was these simple, sentimental and often all-too-calculatingly naive tunes that contained a phrase like that, a single line that stuck out from the rest of the concoction and touched a nerve in him that many of the serious, complex and harmonically much richer scores in the concert halls missed, leaving him cold. They rang out but they didn’t go through the seventh skin to his innermost heart … Where the secret lay, unfathomable to all, even those closest to him.

He had hardly rung the bell for a second than Josta was embracing him, kissing him. ‘You’re late.’

‘No reproaches, now.’

She grasped his shoulders and, as so often, he was amazed at how undisguised the emotions that could be read on her face were. A changing flush of hurt, pride, anger, defensiveness and the hunting urge of a hungry cat flitted across her face that was a Mediterranean brown with black-cherry eyes.

‘Ah, Count Danilo is in a bad mood again. As he came up the stairs to see his mistress that old hag Frau Freese watched him through her spyhole. In the lobby it smells of wet washing and —’

‘Oh, do stop it!’ he broke in grumpily. ‘And give up these silly nicknames, I’m no Count Danilo.’

‘Well, what are you then? My little spoilt darling.’ Josta threw her head back and laughed so that he could see the single amalgam filling in the row of her teeth, took his hand and stepped back.

‘Your eyes, you … witch!’

‘Ooh, I can see it,’ Josta cried merrily, lifted his hand to her mouth and took a vigorous bite at the ball of his thumb.

‘Stop! that hurts.’ She bit even harder, undid his belt.

‘Daniel,’ he murmured.

‘Playing football. He knows you’re here. At the moment he has no great need to see you. Unlike me.’

‘Where’s Lucie,’ he whispered as Josta knelt down.

‘Don’t worry, the apple of your eye is fast asleep.’

He looked at the bite marks on the ball of his thumb, dark red and deeply incised. His desire, which had flared up so abruptly, subsided as he looked through the corridor door into the living room, where the television he’d got for Josta through connections was on. He was overcome with resentment and a sudden feeling of disgust at the sight of the gas meter in the corner of the hall behind the sliding door into the kitchen and, on a shelf beside the key rack, the two dolls with loving smiles holding out their hands in a tender gesture. Josta stood up and embraced him, remaining silent. He released the ponytail that stuck out sideways; it looked pertly determined to go its own way and had caught Richard’s eye the first time they’d met, in the Academy photocopying office, of which Josta was the head.

‘Happy birthday,’ she said quietly.

‘Fifty, for God’s sake.’

‘For me you’re younger than many a thirty-year-old.’ They went into the living room. Richard switched the television off. It was one of Josta’s idiosyncrasies to leave it on while they were talking.

‘I’ve got nothing for you — apart from myself,’ she said with a kind of furtive coquettishness. ‘You’ve forbidden me to give you anything.’

‘A tie I pretend I bought myself? Scent?’ Richard smiled sarcastically. ‘I can’t take it home.’

‘You could leave it here?’

He looked up. A slight undertone of bitterness in her reply told him she was trying to challenge him again.

‘Josta …’

‘Your family, I know. Oh, don’t keep using your family as an excuse. You’ve got a family here just as much as there. Your daughter’s here, your son’s here —’

‘Daniel isn’t my son.’

Josta came up to him, twisting her lips in a mocking grin. ‘No, he’s not your son. But he calls you Dad.’

‘He despises me. I can feel how he always goes on the defensive when I’m here and try to get closer to him.’

‘No, he doesn’t despise you! He loves you …’

‘What?’

‘I know he does, I can sense something like that, I know him very well. That penknife you brought him is sacred, and recently he got into a fight because of you, the mother of one of his classmates was a patient of yours and supposedly was treated badly … supposedly on your ward … He’s coming up to twelve …’ Josta turned away. ‘I was so looking forward to your visit. You’re the one who’s cold, not Daniel!’

Richard went over to the window. This grey sky over the district and tenements opposite with straw stars and sad washing fluttering stiffly in the wind … Down below, a fenced-off playground illuminated by lamps with well-wrapped-up mothers keeping an eye on pale children who were shooting at each other with toy cap pistols. Along the wire fence of the playground was a row of overfull dustbins, the snow round them stained by piles of ash that had simply been dumped beside the bins because of a lack of space. ‘I can’t come at Christmas.’

‘No, of course not.’ Josta clenched her lips in a forced smile. ‘But Lucie’s made a present for you. You can’t forbid her to do that. Oh, she’s woken up now after all.’ Lucie came in, a teddy bear under her arm. Her hair was sticking out all over, she looked pale and tired. When she saw Richard, she ran straight over to him without a word. He knelt down, she wrapped her arms round his neck, a gesture that suddenly made him feel easy and free, as if Lucie’s embrace had broken the dejection he had felt even on the way to Josta’s.

‘Tummy ache,’ she said. ‘Daddy, make my tummy ache go away.’

‘My little girl.’ He stroked and kissed her. ‘My little girl’s got tummy ache … Let’s have a look.’ She lay down, Richard carefully palpated her stomach. The abdominal wall was soft, there was no point of pain and Lucie didn’t have a temperature either. Nothing serious. He asked how long she had had stomach ache, what she had eaten, how her digestion was. Josta waved his questions away. ‘She has that quite often.’ Richard kissed Lucie’s stomach and covered her up again. The little girl laughed. ‘Better now, Daddy.’

‘There you are.’

‘Do you want to see the drawing I made for you.’

‘Show me.’

It was a sheet of paper covered with numbers. They had arms and legs, happy and sad faces, a seven was wearing a hat, a fat-bellied five was smoking a cigar and had a little, chubby, sheep-like eight with dachshund ears on a lead.

‘Lovely! You’ve drawn that beautifully. Is this for me?’

‘Because it’s your birthday.’

‘What made you think of the numbers?’

‘I saw them. When Mummy takes me to the kindergarten, we always go past a seven.’

Josta laughed. ‘It’s a poster for 7 October. They’re learning the numbers in the kindergarten just now, that’s why.’

‘And are you staying here now, Daddy?’

Richard turned away from the bright little face looking up at him so trustingly; it hurt, and all the gloominess that the sight of Lucie had driven away came back. ‘Not today.’

Richard left. Josta stood at the window and didn’t return his farewell wave.

He went down the stairs in the darkness. It seemed not only to sharpen his eyes, he felt he perceived the smells and sounds more intensely than when he had come up the stairs half an hour ago. The smell of ash, damp washing, unaired beds, moisture and mould in dilapidated masonry, potato soup. From an apartment on the second floor — Josta lived on the fourth, the top floor — came loud voices, cries, bickering, the crash of crockery. Frau Freese on the upper ground floor, the block supervisor’s apartment under the Nazis, must have heard him, for even on the half-landing above it, where the door of a shared lavatory was open, letting out a pungent smell of Ata scouring powder, he could see that her spyhole was open: a yellow needle of light pierced the darkness of the staircase and disappeared immediately as soon as he tried to creep past on tiptoe — Frau Freese had either closed the spyhole or greedily glued her beady eye to the opening.

The front door snapped shut behind him. The air was cold as iron. He went down to Rehfelder Strasse and turned towards the Sachsenbad, where he kept his swimming things. The pool attendant knew him as a regular and had even offered, in return for a doctor’s certificate that kept him out of the army reserves, to give him a key, in case he should want to go swimming later because there were too many people doing their lengths. That he went swimming after work every Thursday, when he wasn’t on duty, was his alibi for Anne and the boys. Anne had accepted that once a week he needed some time to himself and firmly rejected all suggestions that they use the time together. Anne, he felt, would not spy on him. Richard feared the boys, most of all Robert. During the week Christian was at the senior high school, so he was unlikely to meet him here. Moreover he tended to stay at home. Robert was different. He was adventurous, thought nothing of trailing all round Dresden with his pals, of getting on the city rail system or one of the suburban trains and, to Anne’s amazement, bringing home some bread and fresh rolls he’d bought with his pocket money from a baker’s in Meissen. Moreover he enjoyed swimming as much as he, Richard, did and there weren’t that many swimming pools in Dresden. Also he had the feeling that Robert sometimes watched him, scrutinized him sceptically when he came back from swimming on those Thursdays. Was he imagining things? He had assumed the rapid gait, sniffing for danger on all sides, of a timid person who feels observed. It was not only Anne and the boys he had to fear, there might be acquaintances he knew nothing about — Frau Freese might be the aunt or grandmother of one of Robert’s pals. Or of the boy Daniel had had a fight with … Chance, pure or not, loved such unfortunate encounters. Or one of his colleagues from work, a nurse or a physiotherapist who happened to live in the area, might see him and wonder what Dr Hoffmann was doing in the building where Frau Josta Fischer, the attractive — and divorced — secretary in the Administration department of the Medical Academy, lived alone with her two children in a two-and-a-half-room apartment on the top floor, even that was suspicious given the shortage of accommodation … And he couldn’t be certain that Josta kept to her part of their agreement with the same strict rigour, the same constant, never-slackening caution as he did … Were there questions regarding Lucie? Did Daniel keep his mouth shut? He felt miserable and would have given a lot to get out of the tangle of lies. Five years ago he’d tried to end his affair with Josta, but then she’d got pregnant; his immediate reaction was to suggest an abortion but she had refused categorically, even used the word murder to him. Do you want to murder your child? Even today her reproach made him shudder. If he’d had his way, Weniger would have carried out an abortion, the box for ‘child’s father’ in the case history would have been left empty. His Lucie, his daughter whom he loved more than anything! Richard leant against a wall. What have I become …! A beggarly scoundrel, a cheat who creeps through the town every Thursday, caught in a net of falsity, lies, nastiness … Sometimes he couldn’t look Anne in the eye, sometimes he was tormented by fear when he met Meno or Ulrich and they greeted him as their brother-in-law … What would they think of him, if it were to come out? That he was a swine, definitely, a vile wretch … who couldn’t get away from Josta. When her eyes flashed, as they had just now, when she threw her head back challengingly, especially when she had that ponytail on the side of her head, that for others was probably no more than a quirky detail — it aroused him, almost took his breath away, had aroused him the first time he saw it, that time when he’d taken the typescripts of his lectures to the office to be hectographed. She was twenty-five and in the prime of womanhood. She was aware of it and used it. Not like a girl who is flirtatious but doesn’t really know where it might lead because she doesn’t yet really know either the other sex or herself; but like a mature, experienced woman, and when you were alone in a room with her, it crackled with tension — every time he would be reminded of the plastic rods the physics teacher used to rub with a cloth and you couldn’t touch them without getting an electric shock. When he slept with her, he felt young, it wasn’t followed by the sadness that had overcome him with other women. She clutched him and whimpered and screamed, drove him to efforts he had hardly been capable of as a thirty-year-old. Josta was insatiable and made no secret of her sexual appetite and the pleasure it gave her. Everything about her was violent: her physical reactions, her desire, once it had been aroused — sometimes he thought it was like a powder keg and when you went past, all it took was a bit of friction to set it off — her fury, her muscles, her demands and her hatred. Wild rage, feverish desire, what he thought of as her witch’s fury urging his blind scattering of seed on to the very last drop: that was how he had fathered Lucie in seconds of unimaginable happiness. His daughter! He thought of her hair, her large brown eyes that gave him such an intelligent, questioning look, the child’s calm, attentive quickness to learn, her unobtrusive curiosity and touching imagination. She’d given him a picture with numbers that had eyes, ears and clothes, numbers, ‘I saw them, we always go past a seven.’ He’d left the sheet of paper at Josta’s, but it was his best birthday present. He would really have liked to take it with him and show it to everyone! Sometimes he felt the urge to take the girl home with him, to present her proudly to Anne and to say, Isn’t she marvellous. My little daughter Lucie! Simply so that Anne could share the joy, this exhilarating feeling with him, so that he could give some of it to her and not selfishly keep it all to himself. Do you know what great happiness, of which you have no idea, there is in my life, come here and have a look at it, it’s called Lucie, Lucie, I can’t keep it to myself or I’ll burst, I’m crazy with happiness; I have to share it round liberally otherwise it will tear me apart! That was how he saw it in his mind. My God, am I really so naive, Richard thought, that’s impossible. Could I really do that to her? — You’ve already done it to her, he heard himself say. You’ve already done it to her.

15. Who has the best Christmas tree?

It was clear that Scheffler, the Rector of the Medical Academy, didn’t know exactly what course to set: on the one hand Comrade Leonid Ilyich had died, scarcely two months ago, and the great ship of socialism was drifting along, leaderless. On the other, Christmas was approaching — and every restriction beyond a certain limit would be interpreted not as respect for the dead, but as weakness, and an expression of paralysis. Richard glanced round the Rector’s office, Brezhnev’s gorilla face, with the sly look in his deep-set eyes beneath his bottle-brush brows, the black lines across the corner of the photograph, next to it the Comrade Chairman of the State Council in a grey suit before a sky-blue background, a winning smile on his lips; then the series of Scheffler’s predecessors.

‘So you’re rejecting my lecture?’

‘Please, Herr Hoffmann.’ Scheffler made a gesture of irritation. ‘You must understand my position. It’s bad enough that this stupid battle of the Christmas trees is starting again.’

‘We hardly have any painkillers, Rector.’

‘Yes, I know. The pharmacist came to see me this morning. There’s one thing I’m asking of you Herr Hoffmann — don’t panic. We’ll find a way to deal with it. This very day I’ve an appointment with Barsano. His wife will be there. I’ll ask for the Friedrich Wolf to help us out.’ That was something that hospital had never done, Scheffler knew that, Richard knew that. ‘Don’t panic, that’s the most important thing at the moment. There are enough rumours as it is. And what we’ve discussed is just between ourselves, yes?’ Wernstein said, as he and Richard were washing their hands outside the operating theatres: ‘They say the Internal Medicine people have found a beautiful Christmas tree.’

‘And ours?’

‘The senior nurse was at the Christmas Market, the Christmas tree stall: just the halt and the lame.’

That meant that the Surgical Clinic was in danger of losing the competition for the best Christmas tree, and to Internal Medicine of all people! That, it was decided in a specially convened meeting, must not be allowed to happen. In the Orthopaedic Clinic Wernstein had seen a rachitic specimen that had probably grown to maturity in the dry sand of Brandenburg; in the Eye Clinic a well-proportioned, charming tree, but scarcely five dioptres tall; in Urology a hulking great Douglas fir, ten foot wide at the bottom but only eight high, moreover it ended in a three twigs arranged like a whisk. Neurology was entering one from the Christmas Market, three foot wide at the bottom and twelve foot high, thin, brittle and touchy, for it had immediately started to shed its needles and still hadn’t stopped.

That evening Richard went to Planetenweg. Kühnast didn’t have a telephone at home and the porter at the pharmaceutical factory hadn’t been able to put him through. Richard had rung the House with a Thousand Eyes and asked Alois Lange to put a note on the chemist’s door. All over the district there were boxes on the doors, with a pencil on a string, for that kind of message. Please knock, bell not working, it said under Kühnast’s nameplate.

‘Ah, Herr Hoffmann, do come in. I saw Herr Lange’s note. — No, no, you can keep your shoes on. This way, please.’ They went past bookshelves, with gas and electricity meters ticking between them, and into the living room. Ground-glass doors, damp patches on the hall ceiling, fine cracks, plaster flaking off. ‘My wife’s made a few sandwiches.’ Kühnast pointed to a tray. ‘What would you like to drink?’

‘One of your liqueurs, if you don’t mind.’

A pleased expression flashed across Kühnast’s face. ‘Of course, we’re only at the trial stage. Has it’ — the chemist adjusted his glasses, which had been mended with adhesive tape — ‘got round to you then? I can recommend the peach.’ Kühnast poured him a glass and watched Richard as he tipped the liquid — it was a lurid sunset-red — down his throat. ‘Strong.’

‘Isn’t it?’ The chemist sat down, crossed his legs. ‘Right then. What can I do for you, Herr Hoffmann?’

Richard described the problem. ‘… so I thought that you, being in the pharmaceutical factory …’

‘At the source.’ Herr Kühnast nodded and, after a while, took off his spectacles and dangled them by the mended earpiece. It would soon be Christmas, he said, in measured tones. Richard didn’t quite understand. The Dresden Christmas stollen was famous, and justifiably so, Kühnast went on. Butter, sugar, flour, candied peel, sultanas — and every year it was becoming more and more difficult to get hold of the exotic ingredients; Walther’s bakery was increasingly compelled to only bake them if the ingredients were supplied. Sultanas, where could you get those? And the stollen ought to be rich in fat, when you squeezed it, the cut end should be damp, the stollen should be heavy, nourishing, rest comfortably in your stomach for a while, sweet but not sickly-sweet company for the digestive enzymes, the stollen should be rich in sultanas, the stollen should be from Walther’s bakery. ‘Twenty of them, Herr Hoffmann. All my relations, you know.’

With Wernstein and Dreyssiger, the most enterprising of the younger doctors, Richard went to Malivor Marroquin, the costumier’s; each of them hired a Father Christmas outfit. ‘A bit uncomfortable, but it’ll work. And we need camouflage.’

They parked the car with its trailer on the edge of the heath. The moon peered through the tops of the trees, making the snow beside the forest track shine like corrugated zinc. Dreyssiger shouldered the saw, Wernstein took the axe, Richard the bolt cutters.

‘As long as nothing goes wrong,’ Wernstein said. ‘If we’re caught, we’ve had it.’

‘Nah, we’ll manage it,’ said Dreyssiger, who was in high spirits. ‘Who dares wins. Or are you going to chicken out, Thomas?’

‘If only this stupid beard wasn’t so itchy. I’d guess it’s been stored in tons of moth powder. That’s what it smells like too.’

‘Careful from now on,’ Richard cautioned them. ‘It’s about ten minutes to the plantation from here. It’s guarded. By Busse, the forester, in a raised hide, and a soldier. The local pastor told me that. Busse will probably have his dog with him.’

Grinning, Wernstein help up half a blutwurst.

‘Excellent.’

‘I hate blutwurst, boss.’

‘The best tree is in the middle, slightly apart from the rest. It’s said to be clearly visible from the hillock before the plantation.’

‘Pretty well informed, your pastor.’

‘No one can stop him combining his woodland walks with observations. But let’s get on. The plantation’s fenced off, Busse’s hide is about fifty metres from the track; the soldier patrols the fence. We’ll creep up cautiously — and then this here.’ Richard held up the bolt cutters. ‘Snip, snip, snip and we’re through. Herr Dreyssiger, you and I will crawl over to the corpus delicti and saw it down. Herr Wernstein will keep a look-out. Can you imitate an owl?’

Wernstein put his hands together and blew into the gap between his thumbs.

‘Sounds OK.’ Richard gave a nod of approval. ‘Two hoots if things get dicey. From now on not a sound unless it’s absolutely necessary. And in a whisper.’

The baker’s mother had a heart condition and Walther was in principle sympathetic towards Richard’s request. But he had a bakery to run and a private one at that. ‘The taxes’ — he raised his floury hands — ‘the taxes, Herr Doktor. We have to have a new oven but the taxman takes all our profits.’ Richard gave him the sultanas from Alice and Sandor’s parcel.

‘I’ll make you the twenty stollen, Herr Doktor. But I need medicines for my mother.’

‘I’ll write you a prescription.’

‘No, no, they’re special ones from Dr Tietze. From over there. Made over here but for over there. And sent back from over there.’

They waited behind a tree on the top of the hillock overlooking the plantation and watched. The hide wasn’t to be seen, but the soldier was; he was wrapped up warmly and, Kalashnikov on his shoulder, was walking up and down in front of a gate in the fence. Now and then he flapped his arms, switched on a torch to illuminate the surroundings and rubbed his hands. He looked at his watch. On the hour he set off on his round.

‘I estimate he’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.’ Richard wet his index finger and held it up. The wind was against them, so wouldn’t carry their scent to Busse’s dog. Once the soldier was out of sight, Richard gave the sign; Wernstein stayed behind. In the shadow of the track he and Dreyssiger slipped across to the fence; Richard checked the tension of the wire and cut it apart almost soundlessly. A criminal act! he thought. But the tree has to go through it. I hope it’s not visible and I hope the idiot in uniform doesn’t shine his light on that spot when he comes back. They crept into the plantation, stood up with some difficulty among the closely planted trees. They hung up their Father Christmas coats on a branch — they’d only be a hindrance in there and get torn — and worked their way through to the middle of the plantation. The trees were thinner there and a white rectangle was dangling from every tree. Dreyssiger shielded his torch, cautiously shone it on them. The signs bore names, all of them those of high Party functionaries; the finest blue spruce was labelled with the name ‘Barsano’. It was about ten foot high and completely regular in growth.

The nurses on North Ward 1 opened the last batch of painkillers. Kühnast was sympathetic towards Richard’s problem — in principle. ‘We could run a special shift. The problem is that I wouldn’t have any staff. It’s only possible on a Saturday, our big shots are never around then.’

Richard rounded up his students and arranged a subbotnik. He loved the kind of extra-curricular activity that this Saturday voluntary shift would be. His opinion as a university teacher was that his students ought to know where they were studying, what they were studying and why they were studying. Germany had once been the world’s pharmacy and Dresden the cradle of pharmacology. The pharmaceutical factory, created by the amalgamation of the firms Madaus, Gehe and the von Heyden Chemical Factory, where acetylsalicylic acid — the basic material for aspirin, the most widely sold medicine in the world — was first produced on an industrial scale, had its main site in Leipziger Strasse, in Gehe’s former drugs and chemical finishing plant. The gutters hung crookedly, the windows wore cravats of ash, the smiles of award-winning workers on the photos along the works entry were eaten away by sulphuric cancer, as was the chalked ‘labourers of all kinds’ on the ‘We are looking for’ board hanging beside the porter’s lodge.

‘Psst!’ Dreyssiger held up his hand. They heard the cracking of the undergrowth and immediately scurried into cover.

‘Well, just look at that, it’s Magenstock!’ Richard ducked down. ‘Magenstock in person with one of his sons.’

The two of them headed straight for the best blue spruce, listened for a few seconds, during which Richard and Dreyssiger didn’t utter a word, and started to saw. Richard thought: should they jump up and say, Stop, we were here first? Dreyssiger was already doing that and striding over towards Pastor Magenstock. ‘Who are you?’ the pastor grunted. Dreyssiger shone his light on their faces. They had black make-up on, a kind of Indian war paint. ‘We were here first.’ Dreyssiger could hardly control his anger.

‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann,’ Pastor Magenstock murmured, pressing his hand to his heart. ‘So your questions were not without ulterior motive.’

With a wave of his hand Richard told Dreyssiger to switch his torch off. Hearts pounding, the four men listened. There was nothing to be heard apart from the whispering of the trees.

‘Herr Hoffmann, what you are doing is … in the interest of a clinic?’ Pastor Magenstock was breathing with difficulty. ‘You see, I’m doing this in the interest of my faith. The custom comes from the womb of Christianity.’

At that moment Wernstein’s warning hoot sounded. The men pulled themselves to their feet. Magenstock and his son ran over to Barsano’s spruce and furiously completed their sawing. A dog started to bark. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ Magenstock croaked with remarkable coolness. Dreyssiger grabbed the saw, in his panic Richard left the bolt cutters on the ground. Already they could see the swaying beam of a torch through the branches of the young trees. The four of them crashed unhesitatingly through the lower branches. ‘Stop there! Stop!’ and ‘Get them, Rudo!’ came the cries behind them. Magenstock’s son bent the twigs back as he dashed on ahead, and sent them smacking into his father’s face. The dog was barking, interspersed with Wernstein’s nonstop owl cries; how pointless, Richard thought, it sounds like a drugged cuckoo. ‘Stop there! Stoooop!’

‘It just won’t do, Herr Kühnast. You can’t let just any old people in here. There are hygiene regulations, there’s a schedule for machine running time —’

‘They would only have done non-skilled work,’ the chemist said. ‘We’ve had problems in packing for months.’

‘Nevertheless. If something gets broken or an accident happens, what then? Anyway, you should have agreed it with me first.’ The expression on Kühnast’s superior’s face changed. ‘On the other hand, you’re here now. Just come with me a moment, Herr Hoffmann’, and he took him to a broom cupboard full of typewriters. ‘All faulty! I’ve been trying to get a technician from your brother’s firm for eighteen months now. You’ll get your medicines. Once our machines have finally been repaired. And give your brother my best wishes.’

‘I’ll let you go, gentlemen. On one condition. One of you must play Father Christmas for my boys,’ the forester growled. ‘The little rascals don’t believe me any more.’ They tossed for it. Wernstein lost.

Richard took the First Party Secretary’s tree to Ulrich, who had agreed to send a technician to the pharmaceutical factory if he was given a Christmas tree with which his department won the coveted challenge cup in the socialist ‘Who has the best Christmas tree?’ competition — and the considerable money prize that went with it.

‘Will Dr Hoffmann please go to Professor Müller,’ came the announcement over the clinic’s Tannoy. Müller was walking agitatedly up and down. ‘If only Reucker wouldn’t give me those triumphant looks during meetings. I have to control myself, Herr Hoffmann, and I don’t like having to control myself.’ He twisted his lips in a sulky raspberry pout. ‘But it’s no use. I suppose we have to admit we’ve been beaten by the Internal Medicine lot this year. It’s beyond belief that Reucker is also the chairman of the Christmas Tree Inspection Committee.’

‘What? Not the Rector?’

‘Exactly. That’s the scandal.’

‘We’ve not given up yet.’

‘But as far as I can see all that’s left is the Christmas Market.’

‘They’ve got nothing but walking sticks that would make us the laughing stock of the Academy.’

Müller’s face lit up as an idea came to him. ‘And twigs, Herr Hoffmann, and twigs.’

But, at the inspection, with a cool gesture Reucker, the head of the Internal Medicine Clinic, took a screwdriver out of the pocket of his snow-white coat, searched for a while, during which Müller’s lips pressed together until they were no more than a slit, then screwed off one branch of the proudly upright, symmetrically built surgical tree. The nurses, doctors, diet cooks, nursing auxiliaries stood there, heads bowed; the crackle of their coats was audible. ‘The screw-tree does not grow in our land,’ said Reucker and he dropped the screw from high up into the hand of an assistant, who, engaged to a nurse from Surgery, gave a smug smile. In the house on Planetenweg they ate the best stollen in the world that evening.

16. The blank sheet

The Christmas holidays were over. Alice and Sandor had returned to Ecuador, amazed at the ashes and snow, as they had said; amazed at an excursion to Seiffen, where the toymakers turned hoops of wood and cut sheep, cows and the pack animals of the Three Kings out of them, painted them and sold them, bright and new, at the Christmas Market. They’d seen a miners’ procession, breathed in the smell of ‘Knox’ incense cones and punch and, adding the East German marks they’d been forced to exchange to their West marks, they’d bought one of the tall, plain pyramids that were not sold at the Dresden Christmas Market but for which they had to knock at the low door of an Erzgebirge cottage and overcome the suspicion of the carver’s wife, who opened the door and regarded them in silence. And Dr Griesel, who lived on the upper ground floor of Caravel and kept the house register, said to Christian, with a sour expression on his face, ‘You can tell your father that it just won’t do … He told me nothing about that trip and his visitors are staying longer than intended. I shall have to report it.’

‘Oh, the clown can go to hell, he just moans all the time because he didn’t get our apartment. Yesyes, Herr Hoffmann, we’re always helping to heat your apartment,’ said Richard, imitating Dr Griesel’s fretsaw voice. ‘But he’s always leaving his Trabbi in my parking space.’

Their neighbour’s gaunt knuckle tapped the register with Griesel’s entries in his engineer’s script. ‘I am the house supervisor and it is my duty to keep this register. The declared length of visit has been exceeded. And recently you left the front door and the cellar door open and all the cats of the neighbourhood came in and shat on the sand, the next time you’ll clear it up yourself with your bare hands. And we don’t heat the whole neighbourhood, either.’

At school the pre-Christmas torpor had vanished. A hum of tension, of hectic activity, had returned. Upstairs and downstairs the new building, which, compared with the old school, a concrete block for almost 1,000 pupils, seemed full of light, was abuzz with pupils repeating vocabulary and theorems. In the corridors the PVC reduced the sound of hundreds of pairs of slippers — Waldbrunn was the smallest senior high in the GDR — to a soft shuffle. Maxim Gorki’s eyes glittered on a photo in the display case on the first floor, below it were a trumpet, a Pioneer’s neckerchief, a copy of a letter from Gorki to young people, a letter of greeting from the Wismut workers to the new senior high school and, something a lot of pupils stopped to look at, an agate, the polished surface of which was covered in milky rings and fiery patterns. It came from Schlottwitz, not far from Waldbrunn, where many such stones were found.

For Christian the classes with Herr Baumann turned out to be the fiasco he had feared. ‘Well, Christian, thinking again, are we?’ Herr Baumann would say sympathetically, his rosy-cheeked face under the scholar’s brow crinkling in amusement when Christian pondered an exercise on the following model: Calculate where A and B will meet when they are building a road towards each other with A laying concrete slabs of size α at rate x; B concrete slabs of size β at rate y. To hell with those exercises! To hell with mathematics and its five lessons a week! What if B was a boozer and deviated from the set line … Of course, there was no boozing in maths.

‘Thinking again, are we?’ Baumann smiled quietly and didn’t rate any of the busily scribbling pupils more highly than was necessary. ‘I’m giving you a B, Svetlana,’ he’d said recently when Svetlana Lehmann had to go up to the blackboard and, concealed behind one of the wings, wrestle with a vector calculation. ‘I’m giving you a B because I have to. A B means: good. So that means you’re good at maths. So sit back down. D’you know who was good at maths? René Gruber, he was good at maths.’ With that Baumann shrugged his shoulders and softly announced, ‘Now we’re going to put our folders in our desks and take out a piece of paper.’ The class sat there, paralysed with fear; only Verena had shining eyes. Yes, she was good at maths as well. When she did exercises, Herr Baumann didn’t smile and when, at the blackboard, she found another way of solving an equation and, in the middle of a tangle of formulas and unbelievably complicated-looking integrals and square roots, looked for help from Herr Baumann, who was sitting on the edge of the desk at the front, following, the rings of his blue irises, now devoid of gentleness, like two metal discs, he would answer, ‘What you were trying there was really elegant, Verena, but look at this’, then take a piece of red chalk and insert numbers in his copperplate handwriting in the gaps in Verena’s spiky lines. There were only two pupils whom he always addressed by the familiar ‘du’ — Verena and Heike Fieber, who sat next to Jens Ansorge at the front desk of the window row and during maths lessons held her freckled face in the sunshine that trickled over the hill with the motorway into the classroom. At such times Baumann would ask her, like a kindly grandfather asking his little granddaughter, ‘Well, Heike, dreaming? Or are you counting lorries?’ adding, ‘René Gruber could have looked out of the window. But, do you know, he didn’t.’ People didn’t talk about René Gruber at the Maxim Gorki Senior High School, it was an unwritten law. On the one hand René Gruber was undoubtedly a mathematical genius who had won both the GDR and the Eastern Bloc Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow — and that, as some malicious Waldbrunners said, despite the fact that his mother was on the check-out at the local Konsum, next door to the angling club, and his father a simple forestry worker. On the other hand when they sent René, on the basis of his achievements, his political reliability and his family background, as a working-class child to the International Mathematical Olympiad in New York, where he won a special prize for the most elegant solution, he did not return but accepted instead the offer of an American university. From then on he was regarded as an illegal emigrant and traitor. Baumann never used that word when he talked about René Gruber, and that struck Christian. The closer he came to retirement, the more exclusively Baumann’s interests were directed towards mathematics, the pure sphere of conclusive proofs and irrefutable, crystal-clear conclusions.

During classes in the laboratory cubicles Verena sat on the bench beside Christian, only separated from him by the row of instruments. Siegbert Füger teased him: ‘Hey, Christian, you seem impressed by Fräulein Winkler.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘You keep looking across at her.’

If even Siegbert Füger, who sat in the window row, noticed, then he’d have to be more careful. It meant Verena would probably have noticed too. That would explain her curt and tart remarks when he said ‘Good morning’ to her for the second time in a day — which, as he admitted to himself, he did out of both politeness and a certain maliciousness … Of course, the politeness was exaggerated and since Verena would nod the first time he said it, she couldn’t be deaf or not have noticed him in the throng of pupils. He wanted to hear her voice, for her voice, an alto whose vibrations already had undertones of a mature woman, fascinated him; he tried not to let it be obvious. His fascination was such that when she was nearby, he would tell dirty jokes to make Falk Truschler or Jens Ansorge laugh but in reality were directed at Verena in order to provoke her to protest or express her displeasure, and that he got to hear often enough … Sometimes then a particularly quick-witted reply would occur to him — at least he thought it was quick-witted; the way Jens and Falk fell silent seemed to confirm that. Verena would also fall silent and scrutinize him and he felt this eye contact, this deep shadow that had no coldness, as something delicious that far outweighed his embarrassment at his pimples. Stop, stay there! his eyes flickered, but he couldn’t interpret her look: had he, Christian, just thrown away his last chance and condemned himself to appear an incorrigible idiot in her eyes …? And after one such look Jens had the effrontery to tell him he should take advantage of the moment of stunned silence between them and kiss Verena. ‘You’d do that?’ Christian asked in disgust.

‘Of course, you idiot. Anyone can see the girl fancies you,’ Jens roared.

‘Not that big-city peacock,’ she retorted.

Christian flared up. ‘How do you know that?’ he demanded. How pretty she looked now.

‘You play the cello in the cellar, everyone can hear it, you … poseur! Our gifted artist always immerses himself in his music just as 11/1 has finished and he can achieve the greatest effect, especially on Kerstin Scholz!’

It was true. Christian often found himself thinking of Kerstin Scholz, especially of her figure, when he was practising in the cellar. And that brought a certain intensity to his exercises.

‘Oh, how I suffer,’ Verena mocked, ‘but only in front of the others.’

‘So you do listen?’

‘Don’t kid yourself!’

He found her sauciness impressive … ‘Oh, you know, you … pretty little thing,’ was his lame retort. Jens pretended he was going to be sick. Verena went bright red. Falk grinned. She turned away without a word.

Herr Schnürchel was strange in a way that made Christian go along with Schnürchel’s games. Christian thought, in the evening: he smiled when you finally got the Moscow pronunciation of the letter shtsha right. Creamy like a soft ice. On the one hand Herr Schnürchel crept round the hostel and school corridors with suede-soft steps, put on his dusting gloves with pleasurable meticulousness and with an expression of dismay turned up lots of dirt, complained about Christian’s black-and-white calendar and Jens Ansorge’s magnetic tapes with suspiciously invisible music — Christian knew that Jens listened to the German New Wave music from the West — on the other hand Schnürchel would have nothing to do with the linguistic slovenliness of previous Russian teaching and came to every lesson with a pannier brimful of Russian words that he would tip out at his hard-pressed pupils’ Heiko fountain pens. Christian was intrigued by this other side of Schnürchel, his ambition was aroused. Every morning — Russian was generally one of the first two classes — his eye would survey Schnürchel’s cheeks, so closely shaved they looked gangrenous, the horse nostrils of his narrow nose with the red ball at the tip, his black hair that he smoothed down with sugar water; it was divided by a parting as precise as the edge of a folder. Herr Schnürchel would sit at his desk, ready to pounce, his eyes wide open with a look that was too penetrating for seven o’clock in the morning and made even Svetlana Lehmann lower her eyes. Herr Schnürchel wore Präsent 20 suits with razor-sharp creases, his shirts and ties were striped and always had a badge pinned to them, a pennant with the hammer and sickle on it. When he sat down, he crossed his feet and tilted his chair impatiently so that the white flesh of his calves could be seen above his striped socks and garters.

One day in March, during the history class, he wrote a question on the board and told them to put their books and folders away in their desks. An unannounced class test. 1983, the Karl Marx Year. Wall newspapers had been covered with articles on the prophet-bearded philosopher, gradually obliterating the black-edged Brezhnev portraits. On 1 May, International Workers’ Day, there was to be a ‘Karl Marx procession of the pupils of the high school and senior high school’, Principal Fahner had announced at assembly. Schnürchel’s question was: ‘By what can we tell that the victory of socialism over capitalism proceeds according to certain laws. Base your argument on Marx’s theory of history.’ Without hesitation the pens started to scribble. Christian was annoyed; he was badly prepared. Every grade was important — the final grade was the average of all the individual grades and anyone who, like Christian, wanted to study medicine had to be close to an A at the end of the eleventh year, since it was that year’s report with which you applied for a place at university. He started to break the question down into its component parts. ‘By what’ and ‘according to laws’ and ‘Marx’s theory of history’ seemed to be the key words. Marx’s theory of history … Nothing came to mind, however hard he tried. He remembered the history room at the Louis Fürnberg High School where a few pictures on the wall, with an arrow underneath running from darkness to light, showed the history of humanity: primitive men with raised spears facing a mammoth, hairy women gathering fruits, the boys sharpening arrows or chipping hand axes; then Roman heads, slaves bowed low under the yoke, the glint of the Spartacus uprising already in their eyes … In the Middle Ages peasants in revolt brandished their scythes; then the picture from the days of the French Revolution with the bare-breasted figure of Liberty storming the barricades (her breasts had been worn flat by pupils who liked to get physically to grips with history); then came the age of the bearded heads: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and then nothing more, there was no wall left, the arrow of time stopped at the corner. There were always lots of pieces of chewing gum there … When someone asked the question ‘What next?’ a dreamy look would come over Frau Dreieck, the history teacher and principal of the high school, and she would give an answer containing a lot about light and air, making Christian think of Pioneer camps … the transition of imperialism, the orchid stage (flourishing on decaying ground) of capitalism, into socialism that somehow switched to or somehow softened into communism … He regularly pondered that ‘somehow’. The word ‘switched’ made Christian think of ‘setting the points’, a concept that frequently occurred in civics lessons; and now he had to set his points, in the direction of writing down his thoughts … Somehow. But what thoughts? Should he describe his amazement at the arrow of history ending in the corner of the classroom? Or would he be on the right lines (to continue the image), if he thought of a very ripe pear in his grandfather’s garden in Glashütte? Was history like the fruit, hanging proud and heavy with juice before the eyes of a humanity thirsting after water and sweetness? You could make excellent fruit brandy from pears like that … So was socialism the pear and communism the brandy distilled from it? Fruit brandy for everyone. And the hangover the next morning …? Did that follow according to some law? The pear ripens, pests nibble at it and hollow it out, maggots leave a capitalist parasitical trail of waste matter, but then … If you ate you had to go to the bog, that too was a law of nature. Marx’s theory of history. Christian looked around for help, but he was sitting by himself and couldn’t crib from anyone. Herr Schnürchel was sitting, feet crossed, at the teacher’s desk, rocking back- and forward in his chair, his basilisk stare fixed on Verena. Verena wasn’t writing. She seemed to be taking a break or pursuing some thought that her pen would record in a few seconds. Verena was staring out of the window. As far as Christian could tell, the sheet of paper in front of her was white. Her neighbour, Reina Kossmann, was squinting over at her irritatedly. Verena wasn’t writing. When the bell rang, Christian had gleaned four pages from the treasure-house of memory. Verena handed in a blank sheet.

17. Long-distance calls

Spring had arrived quietly, its pale fingers of sunshine had wiped away the snow along the F170 so that the fields round Possendorf and Karsdorf seemed to be covered in dirty sheets. There were still days of cold, but they merely suspended the rout of winter; the snow was sickening, beneath the crust there was a dripping, sintering, trickling, water-druses formed, quicksilvered, licked away at bridges between hollows, sought each other out, wove rivulets. Icicles hung from the school roof, like rows of glassy eels hung up to dry, drops tocked, pinged and clacked in melodious antiphony; Jens Ansorge would have liked to record it and work it up into a ‘Song of the Thaw’. What he had in mind was Tomita’s music based on Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition that the Japanese sound artist had arranged in the witches’ kitchen of his synthesizer and published with Amiga. How the others envied Jens that record! It had just come out and could not be bought in any record shop in the whole area, not even in Philharmonia. The owner, Herr Trüpel, had anticipated Christian’s request and told him even as the ‘clong’ of the shop-door bell was still sounding that ‘Herr To-mitta’s disc’ was no longer in stock, not even ‘for the freaks’. As he spoke he had given Christian a blank stare from blue eyes that were much enlarged by gold-rimmed glasses with round lenses. Not even under the counter? That was asked more out of naivety than cheek; Herr Trüpel simply raised his left eyebrow and hesitated a moment before he looked under the counter, stood up ramrod-straight and said, ‘No.’ One had to make do with cassettes. Without a word Herr Trüpel placed one on the counter in front of Christian. ‘That will do.’ And collected the retail price of 20 marks — for an ORWO magnetic tape cassette.

Thaw in the Erzgebirge. The grey of the shingle roofs emerged like a stony skin, old and worn out, dulled by the lashing of wind and rain. The air lost the metallic smell of snow. In the higher villages the roads often became impassable, washed away by torrential mountain streams. The bark of the fruit trees lining the tracks across the fields was black and shiny with the moisture; the trees on the slopes of the Windberg and the Quohrener Kipse were like peasant women hunched from work.

When the class went on a study outing on Tuesdays during the double biology lesson with Dr Frank, Christian kept apart from the other boarders in his house in order to avoid having to talk to them. He kept his senses awake to all impressions: this was his father’s and Uncle Hans’s country, this was where Arthur Hoffmann, his clock-grandfather, lived. And it was Verena’s country. They walked along the banks of the Kaltwasser, the Wilde Bergfrau, explored the upper reaches of the Rote Bergfrau with the tributaries that washed out the earth from underground veins of copper that gave it the reddish colour from which its name came, and Christian would think: she’s seen this, she went for walks here, perhaps she learnt to swim here, perhaps just here where the bank curves. He never asked her, didn’t dare to, fearing one of her tart or dismissive answers. But he observed her all the more closely, stared at every plant she looked at for any length of time, registered every whispering huddle, every outburst of laughter when the girls got together, casting mocking glances at the boys scattered around. Most often, he imagined, he seemed to be the target of these secret conclaves so that for a while he kept away from Verena, even sought out Dr Frank, their class teacher, as if he could think of nothing more interesting than the flora associated with a stream in the eastern Erzgebirge. He was familiar with most of the plants from his many walks with Meno and Grandfather Kurt. Dr Frank asked cautious questions about him. If Christian seemed about to say too much, he left him in peace. Then Frank would walk on by himself, well ahead of the pupils, and come back when he found something interesting. He would never force it on them or explain it just to show off his knowledge but seemed almost shamefaced in asking the pupils to pay attention. Dr Frank was a calm man with medium-length, greying hair that looked shaggy and had a half-hearted parting — less, so it seemed to Christian, because Dr Frank felt the need to have his hair combed than because it was usual and you had to have your hair done in some way or other anyway. He had grown up in Schmiedeberg, a small town to the south of Waldbrunn that huddled up against the Erzgebirge motorway, low, nondescript houses set in the delightful countryside of the catchment area of the Wilde Bergfrau dominated by the factory buildings and chimneys of VEB GISAG Ferdinand Kunert, where most of the inhabitants of Schmiedeberg worked. Frank had not only completed a PhD but a DSc as well, the only schoolteacher in the whole country with that qualification, so it was said. The Technical University of Dresden had even offered him a professorship but, since he wanted to abandon neither his pupils nor Schmiedeberg, he had declined. Christian knew that his father had spoken to Frank and that it was Frank’s intervention with the district education department that had led to an exception being made to the usual selection procedure. He ought to have attended one of the senior high schools in Dresden but since those had the reputation of being particularly dogmatic ideologically, Richard was happier to see his son in Waldbrunn.

Frank was a Party member. In one of their first chemistry lessons he remarked that if he should meet someone who had attended the school and his classes at the expense of the people of the German Democratic Republic but then gone to the West, he would cross over to the other side of the road. As he spoke, he had given Christian a look of veiled melancholy with flashes of shy warmth.

Frank was doing research into left-handedness. The days when left-handed pupils were rigorously made to write with the right hand were not long since past. Frank himself was a left-hander who had had his ‘polarity’ reversed and it seemed to disturb him, for he mentioned it several times, paused, broke off. Sometimes he would pick up a piece of chalk with his left hand, turn away as if he had been caught out, and when he turned back to the blackboard, the chalk was in his right hand.

Frank knew plants and animals, the wooded gorges as far away as the Karl-Marx-Stadt district, showed the pupils the abandoned tin mines outside Altenberg, the boggy Georgenfeld moors where the sundew grew. He knew the Kahleberg, from where you could see the ČSSR and on which, as on the whole ridge, the only trees were isolated, damaged spruces. The class went for several walks there, for just a few hours each time since the wind, which swept the yellowish fog over the Erzgebirge, grew stronger in the afternoon. At first the fog caused an irritation in the throat and difficulty swallowing, then coughing and red-rimmed eyes. Dr Frank, who also taught chemistry, knew where the fog came from.

One Tuesday at the end of March the history tests were handed back. Herr Schnürchel meandered round the room, giving out their essays, briefly commenting on them: ‘Svetlana, nice, clear class standpoint, very good deduction, A’, ‘Siegbert, confused the Gotha Programme with the Anti-Dühring, still a C’, ‘Christian’ — Schnürchel’s eyes fixed on him and he felt as if he were being cut open by their oxyacetylene-torch look — ‘too many empty words but you bring out Marx’s theory of history well, B minus’, then he sat down, intertwined his fingers and contemplated the remaining sheet of paper. Christian looked out of the window so that he had Schnürchel’s profile in view but avoided eye contact; Heike Fieber was playing with her fuzzy hair, Reina Kossmann had placed her hands on her desktop, her shoulders hunched up, her face and Verena’s two bright patches in the light flaking from the neon tubes in this still misty early morning that would probably brighten up into a sunny day. Schnürchel’s voice flashed out and seemed to hit Verena physically, as gently as a lizard’s tongue: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t feel well?’

‘I … didn’t feel unwell.’

‘No.’ Schnürchel nodded, as if he’d expected that answer, but Christian could see neither satisfaction nor irritation in his expression. ‘If there is something you have to tell me …’

The whole class seemed to be concentrated round Verena’s seat, a chorus of intense silence not daring to ask, What’s going to happen? crouching now in expectation of a blow, straining every nerve to absorb its force. Suddenly Christian could hear Uncle Niklas’s voice: In this country you have to be able to afford everything, see him turn round unhurriedly in the music room of Evening Star and take a sip of coffee. What he had said lodged in his mind, continued to work, returned as a vivid, nasty thought that took root when Verena’s face showed no signs of unease, was just paler than usual, which could come from the neon light; her coal-black eyes, alert, almost cold, fixed on Schnürchel’s. Could she afford it? No, that was absurd. If she could, it would be the equivalent of exposure, and They could have no interest in that, no more than in stupidity. Pupils who were involved supposedly had certain gaps or nonsense entries in their column in the class register. Their parents’ professions were not entered if they belonged to Them, or just the bare name was there. But that was not the case with Verena. Father: Johannes Winkler, doctor, District Clinic, Waldbrunn; Mother: Katharina Winkler, organist and choirmaster, Protestant church, Waldbrunn; Siblings: Sabine, librarian, District Library.

Verena an informant … He sought her eyes, he must have given her a horrified look, her eyes slid away.

‘Perhaps you want to tell me afterwards.’ Schnürchel’s words were not a question but a closing statement. His stripy socks, his crossed feet — not funny at all.

‘I didn’t feel unwell.’ Verena’s voice was jagged, she had to clear her throat.

‘Verena.’ This time Schnürchel answered quickly, Christian sensed the surprise in the class at the restrained warmth of his tone. ‘Then I will have to call a meeting of the FGY leadership and inform your class teacher.’ Verena remained silent, and Christian couldn’t understand her, turned his head towards the door and whispered, ‘Why? Why?’ with a pointless intensity. He felt another burst of suspicion and thought he could also see it in Jens Ansorge’s expression, in Siegbert Füger’s thin smile, Reina Kossmann’s now chalk-white face.

The meeting of the FGY committee was arranged for three o’clock, after the last class, in the Russian room surrounded by pictures of Sputnik and the Artek Pioneer camp on the blackboards, sponsorship letters from their related Komsomol organization and a plaster bust of Maxim Gorki. The rest of the class waited outside.

Agenda, taking the minutes — Falk Truschler took out a pencil and paper — Dr Frank’s freckled hand opening and closing. ‘Go on, please.’ He nodded to Verena, who was staring to one side, the sheet of paper, blank apart from her name and the exercise, before her. ‘I didn’t know what I should write.’ Her voice was clear, tone curt, with a touch of contempt; Christian looked up but only met Frank’s eyes, the light brown of which he for some inexplicable reason now found disagreeable, as he did his helplessly opening and closing hand. ‘Then you had a blackout.’ Frank stated it in a murmur, it wasn’t a question. ‘That can happen.’

‘In this case you will have to be given an E.’ Schnürchel had spoken hesitantly but before Frank had stopped speaking. Again there was the silence, like something that couldn’t be switched off. Christian was wearing the blue Free German Youth shirt, as were Falk Truschler and Siegbert Füger and Svetlana Lehmann: Herr Schnürchel had asked all the boarders in the class to put them on.

‘I don’t agree with the way this discussion is going. In my opinion Verena has a negative attitude to the question set and didn’t answer it for that reason. It wouldn’t be the first time.’

Verena looked up and scrutinized Svetlana with startled fascination.

‘Yes, you got up to the same kind of thing back at the high school. Just like your sister.’

‘Svetlana —’

‘In my opinion it’s deliberate provocation, Dr Frank.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Reina Kossmann, the treasurer on the committee, shook her head. ‘She said something to me beforehand.’ Verena had felt ill because of something that happened once a month –

‘She said she didn’t feel unwell,’ Svetlana insisted. ‘I’d be interested to know what standpoints the two of you have. My view is that the committee should pass a resolution and present it to the principal.’ Svetlana thought for a moment, tapped her lips with her finger. ‘To both principals. And to the Party committee.’

At this Siegbert Füger joined in: Svetlana couldn’t simply say ‘I don’t believe her’; in that case not only Verena, Reina too, would be under suspicion of lying, he himself didn’t know Verena from the high school but from sports lessons with Herr Schanzler here, there’d been a collision when they were playing dodgeball. Her lip had bled, but she hadn’t fainted, as usually happened, Verena was the kind of person who would just grit her teeth, as she had before the history test.

What did he mean by ‘as usually happened’, Reina wanted to know, straightening her back, it was the boys who were the quickest to start moaning and wailing, for example at the potato harvest. Christian remained silent because he could see in his mind’s eye Verena’s face contorted with pain after she’d hit her thumb with the hammer, but since Falk Truschler said nothing — he had to take the minutes — Svetlana fixed her eyes on him, while Dr Frank folded a piece of paper up small and Schnürchel took a tube out of his briefcase, squeezed out an inch of transparent cream and rubbed it over his hands. There was a pleasant smell of herbs.

‘Your position, Christian?’ At that moment he found himself thinking of Svetlana’s curly hair. It was beautiful and of a brown colour he couldn’t quite find a word for. ‘She isn’t in condition to do a test if she feels ill.’

‘She should have said so beforehand, of course. — That was her mistake,’ Schnürchel said reflectively. ‘We can’t withdraw the E grade. Not a good start, but I think that in your case it will just be a blip. There are oral tests as well and apart from this you’re good to very good.’

‘That’s all you have to say?’ Schnürchel’s contribution seemed to have gone right past Svetlana, like an insect you ignore because you’re concentrating on something. She fixed her eyes on Christian and it seemed to him that she was having to make an effort, her eyelids were fluttering almost imperceptibly, her look wasn’t steady. ‘Pity that the best positions were already taken, hm? The deputy Free German Youth secretary, the clerk and the treasurer. That would have done for acceptance at medical college, wouldn’t it? But the way things are … As agitator you’d have to show real commitment, wouldn’t you? Nail your colours to the mast.’

‘Svetlana, you’re not being objective. We can’t work together like that.’ It was Dr Frank who said that, his lips grey, and Reina Kossmann hissed, ‘To suggest I accepted an easy position just to get a few extra plus points in my file —’

‘But it’s the truth! The most important thing for you lot is getting to college, your career, that’s why you join the Free German Youth committee. Not as secretary or agitator, where it really matters, of course … Would you be here if it didn’t bring any plus points? What we’re trying to realize in this country is a matter of complete indifference to you!’

‘Svetlana! We’ll get nowhere like this. Dr Frank is right, that is not objective. It is not correct. Not correct. To conclude we should hear what Verena has to say. Please calm down.’ It was remarkable how gentle Schnürchel could be, fatherly, as if he had to save an unruly favourite daughter from herself; his left hand had shot forward: as if he wanted to grasp something, Christian thought. Perhaps it was a situation he had come across before, one he recognized.

‘What Reina said is right. I … had problems.’ Verena was pale now, she spoke quietly, her face turned away.

That evening Christian rang home. He had walked a long way, past the city castle, where there were still lights on, and past the cinema, along the embankment beside the Wilde Bergfrau to the tannery. The foaming, thundering river did nothing to calm him down, he kept seeing scenes from the afternoon in his mind’s eye and couldn’t clear his head. On the bridge he leant over the parapet and looked at the dark eddies with metallic spindles gliding through them at irregular intervals, but after a while he felt cold and the darkness was becoming a problem. A single lamp was hanging like a white pot above where the road along the embankment crossed the main road leading out that started at the bridge. He headed back into the town, towards the market, but went the wrong way and after an empty time found himself outside the cinema again, which confused him; but then he saw the telephone booth beside the path outside the porter’s lodge of the castle. The porter eyed him over a copy of Morgenpost. Christian strolled over to the telephone booth. That seemed to be enough for the porter, he turned back to his newspaper. The telephone in this booth was probably monitored. Nothing that might get us into trouble on the telephone, Anne had drummed into him. But perhaps things were different with this telephone … It was outside the Party headquarters. On the one hand. On the other there must be more telephones in the rooms of the dilapidated castle than anywhere else in Waldbrunn, so why would they need another one here … Was that not precisely the trap? They knew how people thought: hardly anyone used the telephone on the market square, in fact so far Christian had never seen anyone using it — everyone assumed that the booth would be monitored and since Security knew the way people thought, knew that even when someone made a call from there, aware it was being monitored they would only say harmless things, Security might perhaps regard that booth as useless and leave it untapped, while here, smiling at how clever they were, people walked straight into the snare.

Or was the booth outside the castle perhaps after all a free space that the Party leadership could keep for themselves? Christian thought it over. How would he act if he were one of Them … He’d simply tap every line without further ado. Richard had often played ‘Think like your enemy’ with him and Robert and had said, ‘That’s unlikely, they can’t have so many people to listen in, they would need three shifts a day and that on every line, and even if they had the personnel they would hardly have the technology and tapes. There must be a few untapped lines in this country. That of the Comrade Chairman of the State Council will definitely not be one, nor that of the head of Security.’ — ‘Nor those of the telephone booths either,’ Christian had replied. — ‘Why not? It’s precisely those that are not very promising for them since no one says anything on a public line. Only idiots and foreigners would do that and they’re kept under surveillance round the clock anyway.’

Christian continued to think about it. There was just one reason to call from here and not from the phone at the market. This booth would probably be in working order.

‘Hoffmann?’

Christian could hear laughter in the background, his father’s voice, the Westminster chimes of the grandfather clock striking the quarter.

‘Hi, Mum, it’s me.’

‘Oh, is there something special, since you’re calling?’

Christian closed his eyes, so strange did those voices sound, as if they were sloshing round in an aquarium. ‘No … No.’ He couldn’t speak, not now, not on the telephone and, especially, not to his mother. When he’d had problems he’d never gone to his mother. Nor to Richard. To Meno instead, whom he could hear in the background. That meant he couldn’t ring him either.

‘Has something happened, Christian?’ Now she was suspicious; he knew the concern in her voice.

‘No, not at all. I … just wanted to ask Robert something, is he there? It’s about the Tomita record …’

‘No, he’s gone to Uli’s with Ezzo.’

‘It can wait until the weekend. Is Niklas there?’

‘Yes, and Wernstein.’

‘All the best, Mum.’

‘Are you coming at the weekend?’

Christian gave a vague answer, but brightened up and told her about the history test and his B minus and how annoyed he was, told her about the reasons for that moderate grade, so that when he’d finished he had the feeling Anne wouldn’t ask any more questions.

18. Coal Island

Ridged like a karst landscape, a deposit of jagged piled-up ice floes, Coal Island lay before the four visitors, of which three showed their permits to the guard on the bridge before setting off — Richard took little Philipp down from his shoulders so that Regine could take him by the hand — across the Kupferne Schwester bridge to the government offices. Fog lay over East Rome, the whistle of Black Mathilda as it turned out of the tunnel and announced its approach to the power station sounded muffled. Even at this early hour the snow on the bridge had been trampled by many pairs of shoes; it was the first Thursday in the month, the day the offices were open to the public. Meno shaded his eyes, the white was dazzling and he saw that it was the first sharp rays of the March sun setting off sparks on the steeply sloping, frost-encrusted roofs of the buildings and on their windows, now clear as water, now a confusing swirl, bursting apart like dewdrops on a cobweb, suddenly frozen in a multiple prismatic glare, sparks flickering up as a tangle of light and finding countless echoes in the deep fault-lines between the buildings: this had recalled the picture, the piled-up quartz slabs, yokes, ice crystals.

They had arrived before the offices opened and joined the queue that stretched from the portico of the entrance to where the Marx — Engels Memorial Grove, empty, an almost insurmountable obstacle for the human voice, spread out its concrete grey. Marx and Engels had bronze books in their hands and seemed to be reading them. Crows were perched on their heads and the soldier on sentry duty, who wasn’t allowed to move, kept trying to drive them away by clicking his tongue. A few of those waiting clearly felt sympathy for him and raised their hands to clap, but acquaintances who were less sympathetic and had their eyes fixed on the portico pushed them down. At ‘one hundred’ Richard gave up counting, opened his briefcase, checked that the report was still there (but who would have taken it away from him anyway, he’d packed and checked the briefcase himself before he left the house); Meno too had opened his worn attaché case and was rummaging around in the papers. Regine clutched the violin case to her and let go of Philipp, who immediately went over to the sentry at the Memorial Grove, who, as the clocks in the office building began to chime, stood to attention, shifting his machine gun with angular movements, staring fixedly in front of him from under his steel helmet and for the following hours, until he was relieved, would give no indication of whether he saw the queue, which was dispersing at the front, growing at the back, whether he saw anything at all: Philipp plucked at his uniform, made faces at him, but the only response was the restrained amusement of a few of those waiting. The queue moved forward. There was a play of bluish, crimson and purple iridescence over the pepper-and-salt granite of the vestibule. A cord controlled access to the kiosk-like lean-to where a porter was sitting surrounded by telephones on retractable arms that were sliding out and back with deliberate slowness, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Perhaps a faulty control, Meno thought.

The members of the public stated their business, opened their bags to be checked and were allowed through. Behind the porter’s lean-to there was a wall with clocks showing different times around the world; the name of the place was written on the clock face in black lettering: Jakarta, New York, London, Valletta, Moscow, Vladivostok, Lima, Peking and many others; little Philipp listened to the clicking of the hands and wanted to know who lived in all these places. The offices’ paternoster lifts opposite the clock-wall started to move.

‘We have to separate here,’ Richard said, pointing to the clocks. ‘Shall we meet at twelve?’

‘There’s a public-address system,’ said Meno. ‘If one of us has to wait longer they can put out a call for the others.’

‘So second floor, F wing,’ Regine reminded herself. ‘Come on, Philipp.’ She took the boy by the hand; he headed straight for one of the lifts. On the second floor they looked down from a rotunda into an air well. Employees in grey coats were hurrying to and fro, some pushing files in carts trundling along quietly; worn carpets swallowed up the footsteps, the clearing of throats behind the doors, the distant murmuring. Corridors radiated out from the rotunda, which had a glass chandelier in the Kremlin’s beloved icicle style hanging down into it.

‘Touch the knight,’ Philipp demanded and Richard lifted him up so that he could reach the stone figures on the balustrade of the rotunda. Men with shields and raised swords; most of the finely chiselled features expressed amazement, perhaps at being caught by surprise, that the sculptor had mixed, as if strained through a muslin cloth, with more profound liquids: a clear conscience, new negotiations seen in older light, traces of a comic love of haggling; the weathered armour had strange spines on the shoulders and breastplates, they made Richard think of a rare disease through which the poor patient’s skin had developed horny spines, he tried to remember the name but only the prefix ‘ichthyo-’ occurred to him. Philipp couldn’t break off the spines and said with a laugh, as if to be on the safe side, ‘Ouch,’ when he touched one with the tip of his finger. The sculptor must have gone to great pains to make the stone so pencil-sharp. Now something was ticking, like the pendulum of a large metronome set at a slow tempo. Richard looked out of the window, it must be coming from outside, from the derricks beyond the offices, in the prohibited part of Coal Island.

Second floor, F wing. Corridors enlivened by threadbare red runners and smelling musty. The distant roar of a vacuum cleaner, the clatter of typewriters behind closed doors, queues outside open ones.

The thud of stamps, whispering, the creak of thick piles of paper having holes made by office punches, the hum of sewing machines. Certain files were sewn into the binders, something that had been taken over from the Soviet Union, where it had been the custom of the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, as Richard had learnt from a patient who worked on Coal Island.

‘And you think we can go straight to this office?’ Richard asked doubtfully. ‘Normally you have to go to Central Registration first.’ ‘The invitation is direct and I know where I have to go, I don’t need to go to Central Registration for that,’ Regine said. The official at the desk at the entrance to F wing knew better, however. ‘You’ve no slip from Central Registration, you can’t be allowed in just like that, Citizen Neubert —’

Regine protested that this registration was a pure waste of time, why should she register downstairs when her appointment was up here –

The official reminded her of the regulations, which she, as a citizen, had to observe!

Regine shrugged her shoulders. Richard followed her, she hurried on ahead, unfazed by the junctions that led to other corridor systems, all of which looked the same. Not even the indoor plants on the window ledges were noticeably different: well-fed exotic plants with spoon-shaped, carefully dusted, fleshy leaves. One little copper watering can with a spout like an ibis beak per floor.

They passed a rotunda and Richard was already thinking they’d lost the way and gone back to the first — the same icicle chandelier with thousands of bits of opaque paste frippery dangling from it, the same pillars on the rotunda’s balustrade, the same threadbare reddish-pink runner — but the statues, although similarly armed with swords and shields, had different expressions on their faces. Amusingly, one of the stone knights had stuck his sword between his knees and was blowing his nose on a handkerchief. The sculptor, in whose name Richard was now interested, had done the folds with delicate meticulousness and kept them as thin as a communion wafer.

Central Registration was a hall with counters all round buzzing with voices, Job-like patience, the noise of conveyor belts. In the middle a Christmas tree, still decorated with snail-shaped decorations, Narva lemons and little wooden horses from Seiffen, was quietly shedding its needles and in cordoned-off solitude, which didn’t seem to bother the overalled messengers pushing their carts through the queues without looking anyone in the eye. Regine joined the queue at the counter with the letters ‘L, M, N’, Richard that at ‘H’ and when he looked round he saw Meno, who, like them, had been overhasty and had to register at the ‘R’ counter, which had the second-longest queue after ‘S, Sch, St’.

After an hour it was Richard’s turn. He had two pieces of business: in the first place he had to collect a second medical report on the case of a car tyre repairer who, although he was the sole specialist of that type in the southern area of Dresden, had been sent his call-up papers (upon which Richard, at the behest of Müller, whose Opel Kapitän was sorely in need of such a specialist, had written a first report attesting the man’s absolute unfitness for military service because his left leg was ten centimetres shorter); in the second, the gas water-heater in Caravel was nearing the end if its life and Richard wanted to apply for a new one.

‘Fourth floor, E corridor, HM office — Housing Matters — forward slash, Roman two,’ the man behind the counter informed him. Regine also had two things to see to: firstly she had to get a certificate attesting that Hansi’s violin was not part of the state’s cultural heritage and that its export would not damage the interests of the state in any other way, secondly she had an invitation to a ‘personal discussion’ with the official in charge of her matter. ‘The valuation section is also on the fourth floor, though in B corridor, but we can go up together,’ Regine said. In the HM — Housing Matters — office Richard was told that the employee at Central Registration had made a mistake and that the office for requesting communal gas water-heaters was on the eleventh floor, G corridor, CHA — Communal Housing Administration — office, Arabic five. He went back to Regine. She was looking nervously at the clock. She had an appointment at nine thirty and there were about two dozen people waiting at the Valuation Section. Could Richard get the violin valued for her?

‘But you’ll have to get a certificate confirming that, my dear lady,’ a man in front of them in the queue warned her. ‘Firstly you’ll have to get a certificate confirming that you are the person requiring an article to be assessed, secondly that it belongs to you, thirdly that you have given this gentleman here the power of attorney. — I speak from experience.’

After he came back from the certification procedure Richard remembered that recently there had been certain rumours circulating about this valuation section. Wernstein had told him about one case that he had heard from a nurse who was engaged to an assistant doctor in Internal Medicine. A technician in the department had inherited a Guarneri violin, but wasn’t sure if it was genuine and had had it examined here, at the Valuation Section. The instrument was actually a genuine Guarneri, a rarity on which her late aunt had quietly and modestly bowed her way through several decades in the ranks of the second violins in the Dresden Philharmonic; no one apart from the aunt, who was single, had known what a special instrument it was; the first mention of the name of the Italian instrument maker was in her will. In the Valuation Section a man in a grey suit had appeared who, after the evaluator had pored over a few catalogues, repeatedly looked inside the violin with a dentist’s mirror and, for safety’s sake, consulted a colleague, picked up the telephone and had a long conversation. A few days later the technician, who thought her worries were over, was sent a letter from the Coal Island finance department. She couldn’t pay the sum that was demanded in inheritance tax and so the violin was taken away from her. That was the story Wernstein had told; but Niklas Tietze, whom Richard asked, had also heard about it; as had Barbara, who had picked it up at Wiener’s, the hairdresser’s.

The evaluator glanced at Richard’s power of attorney, shuffled back to his table, which was covered in green billiard cloth, and started to study the violin.

At first he twisted and turned it with jaunty, elegant movements, the violin whirled, stopped — a look through a lens; more turning, a few pencilled notes; more turning. He didn’t look inside the body, didn’t open a catalogue. Scroll, pegbox, fingerboard, shape of the F-holes; then he put the violin under his chin, took the bow out of the case and began to play Bach’s Chaconne. He let its solemn, stately tones ring out clearly for a good minute, so that the other officials of the Valuation Section interrupted their work and listened to him. The muttering in the queue stopped, the crackle of sandwich wrappers, the rustling, the shuffle of feet. But no one clapped when he put the violin down. Richard observed his crisp, precise movements; there was no superfluous nor even jerky action; in his mind’s eye he could see his father repairing a clock at his workbench in Glashütte, Malthakus sorting postage stamps, the same precise, finely adjusted movements, and that made him think.

The evaluator put a form in the typewriter and typed a few lines. Then he replaced the instrument and closed the lid. However much of an effort the violin maker had made — he spoke the name with mocking contempt — who, as far as the secrets of the ribs and purfling were concerned was at least more than just an amateur, his violins would never be part of the cultural heritage of the German Democratic Republic. There, he had it in writing. The evaluator stuck a revenue stamp on the certificate and pushed it across the flap in the door. Richard paid, was about to leave.

‘One moment.’

‘Yes?’

The evaluator removed his glasses and took his time cleaning them. ‘As you will be aware, the bow goes with the violin. I have only certified that the violin is not part of our country’s cultural heritage. You have to get that certified for the bow as well.’

‘Oh, right.’ Richard fiddled with the violin case, was going to take the bow out there and then.

‘Sir,’ the evaluator said, ‘I am a certified specialist for string instruments and bows; according to regulations, however, string instruments and their bows are to be submitted for assessment separately.’

‘But I’m here and you could, I mean it would save time, and there are other people waiting behind me —’

‘According to regulations string instruments and bows are to be submitted for assessment separately.’

Richard lost his temper. ‘Now listen … what nonsense! You’ve just played the violin yourself. — And to do that you used the bow, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to play it. Please have a look at it and put your stamp on the bumph —’

‘Are you threatening my colleague?’ another official asked, looking Richard disparagingly up and down. ‘In our state all citizens are equal before the law. Are you demanding special treatment? Who do you think you are?’

‘Just check his bow, this is ridiculous,’ a man behind Richard muttered. ‘I’ve got nothing against all citizens being equal and that, but I’ve got a violin and a bow to be assessed as well, so I’ll have to go to the back again too, and who knows how many others will be in that situation today. A load of nonsense!’

‘Yes, nonsense,’ Richard agreed. ‘I’m going to make a complaint.’

‘If you want to have the bow certified, please go to the back of the queue,’ the first evaluator said with official politeness. There was no point in continuing to object; if he did so Richard would have only been inconveniencing Regine, who would have had to come back another day. Richard stood aside, took a sandwich out of his briefcase, thinking about a bomb, and joined the queue at the back.

After the bow had been checked (‘not one of Tourte’s, not one of Pfretzschner’s, not one of Schmidt’s’), Richard went to the second floor, F corridor, to find Regine. Going up and down the stairs, he encountered acquaintances, said hello to Frau Teerwagen here, to Frau Stahl from the House with a Thousand Eyes there, had a brief chat with Clarens.

‘Not on duty either, Hans?’ Clarens shrugged his shoulders in silent impotence. ‘What’re you here for?’

‘Gas water-heater, report, favour’ — Richard waved the violin. ‘And you?’

‘Vehicle licensing office, increased coal allocation, burials office.’

‘Who’s died?’ Richard shouted from one staircase to the other. The psychiatrist waved his question away. ‘Let’s just say: hope, my friend, hope!’ and, smiling and waving goodbye, he slid back into the stream of supplicants, applicants, messengers and officials.

‘Where are you going?’ The attendant outside F corridor asked to see Richard’s identity card.

‘I’m waiting for someone.’

‘This is solely for people wanting to emigrate, those are the only ones I can let in.’

‘But as I said, I’m just waiting for someone, surely that isn’t forbidden?’

‘Hm. Who are you waiting for?’

‘Frau Regine Neubert.’

The attendant leafed through his documents. ‘Your name? — We could sort the matter out in the following way: I give you an entry permit. You leave your identity card here, you’ll get it back when you leave. You have one hour, then you must come and report to me again.’

Richard looked up, it was rare to be addressed in such a friendly manner here.

‘Hmm, Dr Hoffmann.’ Immersed in thought, the attendant riffled through the lists of names, one sheet after the other.

In F corridor the sewing machines were buzzing behind the doors. Here the queue stretched out into the rotunda. Richard, not finding Regine, stood by a window and waited, not without receiving suspicious, not to say hostile, looks — a man with a violin who didn’t join the queue, what was he doing here?

‘Hey, you there,’ a woman barked, ‘there’s no jumping the queue here. We all want to get out.’ Richard was about to reply that he had no intention of jumping the queue when a door was flung open and a woman stormed out, swearing and cursing loudly. ‘I’m Alexandra Barsano, you’ve presumably heard the name, this will cost you dear,’ she shouted back in through the open door. Soothing words were to be heard from inside. The waiting queue observed the scene that was being played out in front of them in silence. Richard remembered: years ago there had been photos in the press showing the powerful Party Secretary of the district, one arm proudly round the shoulder of his daughter; but the young woman, who was getting more and more worked up, swaying as if drunk and waving her arms around, clearly had nothing to do with the young girl in the old photos any more. A few shaggy black strands were hanging down either side of a Mohican hairstyle, the spikes of which were a lurid yellow, otherwise her head was completely shaven. Her eyes ringed in black, skull-rings on her fingers, a slashed leather jacket with a ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ symbol sewn on the back, leather trousers, studded belt; over her shoulder Alexandra Barsano had, attached to clinking silver chains, a chimney sweep’s weight. As she turned round, Richard saw the Party badge on her lapel. A man in a grey suit approached.

‘You’ll hear from me,’ Alexandra Barsano snarled. The man in the suit drew her to one side, talking to her quietly all the time. The door to the office slammed shut, opened briefly, someone hung an ‘Office closed’ sign on it. Alexandra Barsano ran to the door and hammered on it with her fists. Two men in uniform appeared and led her away, she didn’t resist, the chimney’s sweep’s weight hit her in the back. The man straightened his suit, ran a comb through his hair, jutted out his chin to the queue: ‘The office is closed.’

The muttering from the people in the queue grew louder.

‘I will have any troublemakers arrested for resistance to the authority of the state. Is that clear? This office is closed, shut, for the rest of the day.’ The man in the suit strode off. In disbelief, those in the queue waited for a while longer, then dispersed, grumbling and cursing. The daughter of our District Secretary at the office for exit permits, Richard was thinking, still dazed by the scene, when the office door opened and Regine came out, pale and tear-stained. Beside her was Philipp holding a packet of Ata out of which there came a trickle of white scouring powder. ‘Come by yourself the next time, Citizen Neubert.’ During a long discussion, in the course of which she had been strongly advised to divorce her husband, since he was a traitor and they had ‘proofs’ that he went to brothels in Munich, Philipp had wandered over to the washbasin of the soundproof discussion cubicle and, with scrubbing brush and duster, set off an Ata snow-fest in the whole room. The door slammed shut; as he walked away Richard could hear coughing inside.

The first censor, Meno thought, as he adjusted his tie in the mirror over one of the washbasins there were at regular intervals along the corridor. He was somewhere in the depths of the east wing of Coal Island. Up there, on the top floor, it was quiet; it was an area one needed a special permit to enter. Schiffner had made one out for Meno and signed it.

‘Come on in now,’ the writer Eschschloraque called, roguishly beckoning Meno with his index finger from the end of the corridor. Although the reddish wood of the purlins allowed a soft, reassuring light to filter into the corridor, Meno was somehow reminded of a visit to Frau Knabe, his dentist; in her practice, at least in the vestibule, there was the same forbearing, forgiving, peach-soft brightness (the mistake was that time passed, Meno had the impression that the ministering spirits, who camouflaged the anterooms of the pain-inflicters, knew this); even though the smell of coffee and cigarettes dribbled out of the keyholes of the doors he passed, the feeling of having to go down a tunnel with no turn-off came just as promptly as in Frau Knabe’s practice — only Meno had not expected the dramaticus (Eschschloraque wrote mostly plays). Today, on Schiffner’s behalf, he was supposed to be seeing all four senior assessors of the Dresden branch of the Ministry of Culture’s publishing section; he had previously only negotiated here with two of them, Albert Salomon, whom people called ‘Slalomon’ because of his reports that took account of every twist and turn of political developments, and Karlfriede Sinner-Priest, who was known as Mrs Privy-Councillor.

‘Do come in, Rohde. Do you like tea? — Good to hear. Tea drinkers are mostly good people to talk with. They’re intelligent murderers into the bargain and they mostly have something to say. I need that for one of my plays, you should know. Is it not much more effective when a torturer sips a cup of tea than when he just downs a beer?’

‘Aren’t you making it too easy for yourself if you have the said torturer drinking tea. The critics will say, “Oh God, a torturer drinks beer, a proletarian touch! How does a crafty author avoid that? He makes him drink tea. That is such an unsurprising surprise, Herr Eschschloraque, that it’s become a cliché.” ’

‘You may well be right, my dear Rohde. Should I go back to beer, then? What our critics don’t realize is that this beer has been through all the pipes of the directorial drinks department and has reached a second innocence, a higher innocence so to speak. I would avoid the cliché by renewing the cliché … Hm. Interesting tactic, but you’d have to get the torturer to deliver a soliloquy on the innocence of beer. Despite that, I feel I can manage a tea. I can give you Earl Grey.’

‘I’ve brought a lemon, Herr Eschschloraque.’

‘Is it to have an acid taste? Acid corrodes but you don’t make anything wrong with it. I could have my torturer drink cocoa instead … Or a fizzy drink. Lemonade. I prefer people who love lemons to those who love melons, for example, basically a melon is nothing more than sugar and water and despite all the seeds is only the principle of the bellows transferred to horticulture. Anyway, you don’t need to offer me anything apart from arguments, up to now I have nurtured the illusion of being incorruptible. Sit down and let’s continue.’

Eschschloraque made the tea and started the ‘Conjuration of Snakes’ as the presentation of manuscripts and discussion of reports was called among the editors. Meno looked round, listened and observed Eschschloraque. He asked which manuscripts Meno was thinking of fighting for. Meno knew the ritual, made a gesture that could mean everything and said nothing: keep your cards close to you chest, editor. If you name a writer, the other person might hate him and finish him off with a smile. If you deliberately name a wrong one, in order to mislead them, the other person might be happy with that and confirm the name with a smile. Cover your flanks and protect your king — and be aware that your queen can never be brought into action too soon. Sacrifice a pawn, if it’s a knight or bishop that’s threatened, sacrifice your queen so that the last pawn can checkmate the king. And remember, the other person has studied your wiles and knows your ruses.

‘Right, then I will give you two names for which I will fight in the publishing plan. Let’s not fool ourselves, Rohde. You have fourteen titles, twelve of them are’ — Eschschloraque glanced through the telescope by the window of the room that was stuffed full of books and papers — ‘the way they are. Two will cause offence: Altberg’s essays and Eduard Eschschloraque’s slim volume of writings full of wittily mendacious truths and classic pesticide for the romantic rodents gnawing away at the vineyard of literature. You know just as well as I do that one of these projects has to die.’

But Eschschloraque’s smile vanished when he continued. Meno left his tea untouched and let his eyes wander round the room while the playwright, who seemed to Meno like a mixture between a clown and a sharp-witted old woman, exercised his wickedly mocking tongue on the more or less characteristic qualities of those colleagues whose manuscripts he had reported on in his quality of assessor. A copper engraving of Goethe on the wall, the old Weimar edition of his works in a glass-fronted bookcase, a bust of Goethe on the dramatist’s desk between a Soviet pennant and a signed portrait of Stalin; in front of them two neatly aligned typewriters: a black Erika and beside it a sign, like those saying ‘Reserved’ in restaurants, bearing the inscription ‘Mortal’; a second sign, beside the other typewriter, made by Rheinmetall, with ‘Immortal — when I’m fresh’; by this time Meno had shifted sideways up to the table and didn’t need to bend back much as the playwright strode up and down. ‘Hoary expressions, Rohde! And always with heartfelt’ — Eschschloraque drew the exclamation mark in the air with his finger — ‘good wishes … why not liverfelt or lungfelt once in a while? We all have to breathe, why should good things always have to come from the heart? Most people’s ticker is a clock, not a heart. The liver: the body’s chemical factory. Its potions and juices are much richer.’

His sarcastic thrusts broke off as if he’d hit a barrier when Eschschloraque got round to the Old Man of the Mountain’s book.

Meno was astonished at the seriousness, the knowledgeable, almost solemnly expressed love that warmed Eschschloraque’s remarks on those essays; he wouldn’t have believed Eschschloraque capable of it, wouldn’t have expected it of him. ‘Do you know what I see, my dear Rohde, when I look through this telescope? I see a classical land and Altberg is one of Goethe’s children. Goethe. Goethe! After all, he’s the father — and all the criticism merely the twitching of frogs’ legs.’ He had never, Eschschloraque went on, read such essays on writers and their works. That was European, indeed world, class.

Meno couldn’t believe his ears. Eschschloraque, that captious critic, that occupational shadow who ruthlessly pursued every careless slip, who openly spoke up for Stalin and the Stalinist system, for whom Richard Wagner’s music was a crime, the man was standing there by the door, disarmed, all his mockery, his caustic wit gone. ‘Don’t gawp like that, that’s your blasted lemon. Hm. So we’ll live and pray and sing, and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies … but he misunderstands matters when he says that their relationships with each other are always created by people alone. Have you never encountered lifeless people? Have you never thought about the idea that you might have different shadows that take alternate shifts? — Now you know,’ Eschschloraque said brusquely, ‘or at least you think you do. The manuscript submitted by Eschschloraque needs to be revised and improved. It cannot be recommended for publication at the present moment. And now out you go, you’ve stolen enough of my precious time as it is. You’ll have it all in writing — and no sly tricks, Rohde.’

‘Left leg shorter by twelve centimetres,’ Dr Pahl wrote on the form and closed the handbook on assessing fitness for military service. ‘The man is entirely unfit for military service. At ten centimetres he could have been conscripted as a naval wireless operator or staff clerk without having to go through basic training. Of course, that leaves the question of what we do if there’s an appeal or if the orthopaedist for the regional military command should read the file. He’d immediately want to know what remedial measures were being looked at. Are there orthopaedic shoes with the soles built up by twelve centimetres?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Richard said. ‘We’d have to add that an operation to shorten the other leg is being planned.’

‘Hm.’ Pahl thought for a moment. ‘A bit thin. That would be a matter for Orthopaedics and at least I do know some colleagues there that we can trust. But what will happen if some overzealous military bone setter should simply summon this tyre repairer to have a look at the leg.’

‘And would he not also want to know how the man had managed to walk up to now? Twelve centimetres, Herr Pahl!’

‘Yes, he’s not just got a limp. Well, we’ll just say he’s made himself raised soles for his shoe out of old tyres. It’s crazy to conscript this man! We have to stop it. Do you know the orthopaedist for the local military command, Herr Hoffmann?’

‘Unfortunately not.’

‘Me neither. — Shall we risk it?’

‘Let’s risk it.’

Meno almost exclaimed, ‘You!?’ when he saw the Old Man of the Mountain come out of the door. The old man invited him into his room. ‘What would you like to drink? Tea, mineral water, lemonade? No, I know what you drink.’ Altberg reached under the desk and, with a sly grin, fished out a bottle with an oily, amber liquid. ‘Home-made, the recipe comes from my housekeeper. Nectar of the Gods. Please …’ Waving away Meno’s protests, Altberg poured some of the nectar into two glasses. ‘Prost!’

Meno took a sip: shards of fire went tumbling down his throat, merging into a fire-eel that slowly, bristling with spines, filled his gullet; Meno felt he was on fire and as if his eyes were being forced out of their sockets from inside. Then the blaze splashed back in a surging wave that went to the roots of his hair, to the tips of his fingers, electrified his nostrils and brought peace. The Old Man of the Mountain poured himself a second glass, tossed it back, chewed on the drink like a slice of bread. Then he took the reports out of the drawer and his friendliness vanished.

The old man tore, ripped, slashed almost the entire publishing plan to pieces. He made holes in a novel by Paul Schade that left it like a Swiss cheese; he made the pieces between the holes sound as if they had the taste of a rubber eraser, designating them ideologist’s puree, he crossed out the holes, sliced them lengthways, chopped them up crosswise, drew, after he’d downed a third glass of nectar, the slats of a blind in the air and shut them.

‘Do you know what would have happened to you in the past, after the Eleventh Plenary Session of the Party Central Committee, if you had ventured to present such a plan, such deviations from the Party line? Just ask your colleague Lilly Platané in Editorial Office 1 … A financial penalty in the form of a reduction in salary, a serious charge of endangering the targets of the plan, self-criticism before the editorial board … Just be glad I’m not attacking you personally. You can look over the cuts I prescribe when you get home.’ He put his reports in a folder and tossed it over to Meno.

‘But there’s something else. Herr Eschschloraque’s manuscript. That, my dear Rohde,’ the old man said, ‘I’m going to finish off for you well and good. My volume of stories is going to be chucked out, a good thing then that I’ve got a few more essays as well; and in place of that you want to publish this crap, this stilted celery, this …’ He struggled for words to drive his contempt for Eschschloraque, who was a blowfly, incapable of flight, crawling over plaster casts of the classics, forcibly into Meno’s ear while he, pale, was contending with the consequences of the nectar. Meno wondered if he should make the Old Man of the Mountain aware of Eschschloraque’s attitude but, stunned, he decided not to.

Three o’clock. Richard checked his wristwatch as the gong echoed. Regine had said goodbye, she had bravely and defiantly decided she was going to come back there in a fortnight’s time. No hysteria à la Alexandra Barsano, that only led to trouble and got you nowhere. Obstinate insistence, unwavering chipping away until you found the weak spot — ‘even if I have to spend the night here’. Richard leant against the wall, looked out of the window, wondered whether to steal one of the little copper watering cans or at least a sucker from one of the fleshy leaved plants, ate his last sandwich. The violin evaluated, the report with Pahl finished — a sensible and experienced man, you never knew which assessor you were going to get … That left the gas water-heater. The strange ticking noise there’d been this morning had gone. Meno had not turned up at twelve and the porter had refused to send out a call for ‘any old citizen, we’re not at the football stadium’.

Or the racecourse, Richard thought. Flurries of snow started. The derricks in the prohibited area of Coal Island were just visible, as if sketched with faint pencil lines. Crows winged down from the Marx — Engels memorial; the sentry in front of it, whom Richard could see obliquely from behind, stood there motionless, covered in snow, rifle at attention. A clunking meandered down the heating pipes that ran, uncovered, along the walls. Richard folded his sandwich paper, washed himself in one of the hand-basins and set off for the eleventh floor, G corridor, office CHA/5.

Meno looked at the clock: his next appointment was for 3.30 p.m. Ravenous, he ate the apple and the two pieces of cream cake he’d packed in his briefcase in the morning. Slalomon. He was the only one who still wrote his reports — extensive free-skating programmes with a scatter of cut flowers — by hand. His handwriting was clear and flowing, as in official letters from the nineteenth century. They looked strange among the office files, like jetsam from a long-ago age, and when he read Albert Salomon’s reports, with the roundabout style avoiding anything too direct, Meno had the same feeling as with the pre-war telegrams he saw at Malthakus’s, lines that read as if put together laboriously and against considerable resistance, arousing in him the urge to write an essay on the attraction of the ‘just-about’; it must have something to do with being saved, an innate desire for protection, that made such a document, rescued from the crypt of time, seem more valuable than modern, easy, newsy letters which gave the impression that neither their preparation nor their distribution had taken much effort.

A lengthy part of Salomon’s reports consisted of apologies: apologies for having to make a judgement; for recommending a cut here and there; for inconveniencing the author and editor; for the fact that he, Albert Salomon, existed.

Mrs Privy Councillor: Eschschloraque, in his role as dramatist, had once taken the liberty of making a joke and given himself a speech in one of his plays: ‘Censors! Who is it that becomes a censor if not someone / whose head is largely empty / even if the fellow’s read this line’ — that was what the whole play was like had been Karlfriede Sinner-Priest’s sole comment on this salutation from a fellow socialist. Meno was afraid of her. She was unpredictable, her opinion outweighed all others in the Ministry of Culture, she had been on Coal Island since time immemorial, her reports were looked upon as an ideological litmus test. No Hermes editor had ever managed to get a book accepted that she wanted to refuse ‘entry into literature’. She was gaunt and looked as if she’d been turned on a wood lathe, a doll that never laughed, who, depending on her mood, would kill off a book or a person with a single sentence, sharp as a sliver of glass, or go off on sparkling, sometimes self-ironic purple passages enthusiastically scrambling over each other. Her authority was Lenin, her interest free of prejudice. She had pencils stuck like Japanese pins in her wig that was always askew and made her face seem unnaturally long, giving her the look of something extinct; Meno sometimes imagined her at a castle ball, dancing ceremoniously to the sound of a spinet. She had been given one of the SS’s travel scholarships. She had survived Buchenwald.

Richard was astonished to see Albert Salomon at the office of the Communal Housing Administration. He was waiting on the sixth floor, C corridor, office H/2; office CHA/5 in G corridor on the eleventh floor was only for heating problems, insulating material, pumps and the maintenance of gas meters, but not for gas water-heaters, they were a sanitary problem, as Richard was informed. Albert Salomon kept looking at the clock above the office window and appeared to be getting increasingly nervous. Richard knew him, he was one of his patients. Before 1933 Albert Salomon had worked for Meissen Porcelain as a pattern maker and design painter but someone had informed on him and he had ended up in a Gestapo prison, then in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was tortured and both his arms were crushed. His right arm, the one he used to paint and write with, had had to be amputated in the concentration camp. Only once, as far as Richard could remember, had Salomon talked about the camp: commenting on a passage in a Soviet novel in which he thought a detail was wrong — the boot-testing track with different surfaces along which prisoners had to go at a forced march for days on end to test out various materials for the soles of army boots; every surface ‘a city I thought about’.

A shrill bell sounded. ‘Closing time!’ The office window rattled shut.

19. Urania

The ten-minute clock struck twenty to five; once more Meno checked his manuscript, key, the letter of invitation written by Arbogast’s secretary, took the rose for Arbogast’s wife out of the water, wrapped it in paper and left. He went down Wolfsleite, waved to Herr Krausewitz, who, puffing away at his Mundlos cigar, was busy in the garden of Wolfstone: ‘Oh, good evening, Herr Krausewitz, isn’t it a little early for flowers?’ — pointing at the garden tools in Krausewitz’s wheelbarrow.

‘For flowers yes, Herr Rohde, but it is time for the fruit trees, and the branches of the old apple trees are too thick, I’ll have to thin them out, otherwise we’ll only get little apples in the autumn.’ — ‘Pretty cold, isn’t it?’ — ‘Oh,’ said Krausewitz, waving the comment away, ‘fear ye not the cold March snow, a good warm heart doth beat below, as the farmers say. And the caterpillars have to be dealt with as well. Look’ — he pointed to several branches — ‘I put some glue-bands on — and now the blasted creatures have laid their eggs underneath the strips. The winter moth especially, it was a real pest last year. The bands aren’t sticking on any longer, I’ll have to renew them. Otherwise the caterpillars will crawl up the branches and that’ll be it for the fruit and everything that goes with it.’

‘In our garden the trees have lots of splits in the bark.’

‘You mustn’t leave them open, Herr Rohde. No wonder given how cold it’s been. The bark splits like dry skin. I recommend you cut away the edges smoothly and then seal them with a proprietary product. Frau Lange should still have some, I saw her getting in a good supply in the pharmacy last October. Otherwise just come and ask.’ — ‘So cut away smoothly?’ — ‘Like a surgeon, yes. These trees are living beings too. And they have a character of their own as well. But, as I said, don’t forget to seal the splits.’

How were things at the airport, Meno asked. Krausewitz worked there as a controller. Same as ever, routine you know, they tried to transfer him from the tower to ground control, after all he had turned fifty-eight, hadn’t he? But in the tests he’d outperformed two younger colleagues and then there was the experience, so he was still slotted into the cycle of four-hour shifts like all the rest. Give the Langes my best wishes, won’t you. With that, Krausewitz tipped his angler’s hat and dug the spade, which he’d been leaning on while they talked, into the soil, which was still dappled with snow.

Meno had gone home rather earlier than usual that day, which was easier on a Friday since the publishing section in the Ministry of Culture didn’t call after one and Schiffner left at that time when he’d come from Berlin: not to start the weekend but for his beloved visits to artists’ studios where he hoped to find up-and-coming young artists. ‘Until this evening, Herr Rohde, we’ll see each other then at Arbogast’s, I’m very much looking forward to your talk. You could have told me what your hobby is, after all we can do something for that sort of thing — you just sit here quietly pondering over literature and keeping yourself to yourself.’

Meno really ought to have done some more work on a manuscript by Lührer, an urgent task, but he wanted to read his paper out loud again and had gone to see his colleague Stefanie Wrobel, known as Madame Eglantine. ‘Off you go,’ she’d said with a resigned smile, ‘and all the best for this evening.’

‘Thanks. I owe you. If I can do anything for you —’

‘You could put on a pot of water for my coffee before you go. I’d also like a copy of your talk, a detailed report of course — and an honest explanation.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of how you managed to saddle me with our classical author’s latest opus.’ She pointed at Eschschloraque’s manuscript.

‘He’s threatening me.’

‘Who is he not threatening?’ Madame Eglantine shrugged her shoulders and hurriedly downed the last of her coffee.

Darkness was still falling quickly, the lights above Wolfsleite and the Turmstrasse crossroads drifted into view like moons. A white Citroën turned into Wolfsleite and stopped outside the first house after Turmstrasse. That had to be the car of Sperber, the lawyer. Meno kept in the shadow of the trees on his side of the road. The lawyer got out, there was a jangle of keys, the gate at the end of the wrought-iron fence opened and Meno watched Sperber, about whom there were many rumours circulating in the Tower: that during the week he worked in a lawyers’ chambers on the Ascanian Island, where he also had an apartment and a mistress, whom his wife not only knew about but had selected for him herself from among the throng of female students in the law faculty, where he also gave lectures; that he was a fanatical supporter of Dynamo Dresden — Meno had that from Ulrich, who had often met him in the stadium — and that he was ready to listen to anyone who was in political difficulties. Sperber turned round, fixed his eyes on Meno, waved: ‘Good evening, Herr Rohde, it doesn’t start until seven, if I’m not mistaken.’ Does that mean Sperber’s part of Urania as well? Concealing his surprise, Meno went over to Sperber, trying to appear unselfconscious, for he was embarrassed at being discovered in his attempt to hide. But he’ll be familiar with that, he told himself with amused irritation, it’ll be the behaviour pattern of his clients. Sperber said it was good they’d finally got to know each other, he was a fan of Dresdner Edition, a subscriber, you might almost say, and since the name of the editor was always given in the imprint, he had in a way already made his acquaintance, assuming one could take a person’s approach to their work for the person, as he also had that of Frau, ‘or Fräulein?’ — Sperber gave a charming smile — Wrobel, who, however, ought to be more strict with some authors, there were errors, naming no names, of course. — Of course. — Some of our living classical authors are quite unsure about punctuation. For prices you need an em dash, not a two-em dash nor a hyphen. Recently he’d come across a word division he’d immediately made the subject of his lecture: surg-eon instead of, correctly, sur-geon! Sperber chopped down with the side of his hand and screwed up his right eye. Schiffner was one of the old school, couldn’t he … But more of that later. Sperber laughed and took Meno’s hand in a limp handshake.

Turmstrasse was busier, a squad of soldiers was marching in the direction of Bautzner Strasse, perhaps heading for the Waldcafé or the Tannhäuser Cinema or, more likely, to a dance in the Bird of Paradise Bar in the Schlemm Hotel; no, thought Meno, when he saw that the leader had a net of handballs slung over his shoulder, and recalled a plain notice on the advertising pillar on Planetenweg: a friendly between the German and Soviet brothers-in-arms in the sports hall in the grounds of the sanatorium. People were coming out of Sibyllenleite, from the funicular, some familiar faces among them; Meno nodded to Iris Hoffmann, who worked as an engineering draughtswoman for the VEB Pentacon combine, she nodded back. And there was the sweet chestnut outside Arbogast’s Institute already, there was the People’s Observatory behind the wall, the wide gate on rollers with the flashing light at the cobbled drive to the Institute buildings on Turmstrasse, there the modern cube of the Institute for Flow Research at the beginning of Holländische Leite, into which Meno turned. On Unterer Plan he waited at a high, wrought-iron gate; the elaborate Gothic tendrils combined to form a black gryphon; the top of the gate was in the shape of a bee lily.

Arbogast Castle appeared in all its glory. Castle wasn’t the official designation; the Baron preferred the more modest ‘House’ and that was what was written in high relief on a metal plate over the main entrance with the sweeping flight of steps. Many of the Tower-dwellers called it ‘Castle’, a designation that another property up there had: ‘Rapallo Castle’ below Sibyllenleite. But Rapallo Castle looked Mediterranean, had the bright lines of the south, a Riviera building in northern exile with stone scrolls and an elegantly curved roof, not a palace jagged with pinnacles and needlepoint ridge turrets like the one Meno was facing that made him think more of prehistoric animals, extinct dinosaurs with armoured scales and dragon’s spikes, than of a home with hot and cold running water.

Lights were going on and off, cutting changing stage sets out of the garden: the three flagpoles beside the steps appeared: the Soviet flag in faded red, the black-red-and-gold one with the hammer, compasses and wreath of grain, and the third flag, a yellow one with a black retort. Meno had never seen that flag before, perhaps it bore the coat of arms of the Lords of Arbogast. When windows in the east wing lit up, they illuminated the large Arbogast observatory, which, clad in white stone, looked like an owl’s egg in the sloping part of the garden. There were still a few minutes to go until five o’clock, the time for which Arbogast had invited Meno. He grasped the wrought iron of the gate, unsure whether he should ring now. At that moment an alarm bell began to blare, sirens joined in with their wail; lights burst on in the garden, flooding the paths with white brightness. A camera on a tubular stand rose like a ghost out of a flap in the ground, searched for a moment, then shot a flash at his face that looked as baffled as it was terrified. He staggered back, and it was a good thing too, for at the next moment two snarling bodies thumped into the gate; Meno thought, once he had recovered his sight, he recognized one of the two dogs as Kastshey. The camera hummed back into the ground. Once more Meno heard the shrill ‘heigh-ho’ boatman’s whistle, the dogs immediately left the gate and raced back with long bounds into the depths of the garden, where, after a few seconds, they silently disappeared. An intercom beside the gate crackled and a rusty female voice said, ‘Baron Arbogast is delighted you have come. Please use the little door in the wall beside the intercom.’ Until now Meno hadn’t noticed this door; it was less a door than a heavy steel bulkhead that slid up like the blade of a guillotine. Clutching his briefcase with his manuscript to him, Meno leapt through the opening. At the entrance he was received by a female dwarf in an apron, the pockets of which were packed full of clothes pegs. ‘Good evening, Herr Rohde. My name is Else Alke, I am Baron Arbogast’s housekeeper. He apologizes for not being here to welcome you himself and for keeping you waiting a little while. An important meeting. For Baroness Arbogast?’ The housekeeper pointed to the rose, which Meno quickly unwrapped. ‘Give it to me.’ She took the paper, raised her head and stared at Meno out of toad-green eyes. ‘The Baroness loves roses.’

I thought she would, Meno said to himself. While Alke was taking his coat and hat and putting them away, he looked round. He had taken his best suit out of the wardrobe, put on the best of the few shirts he owned, but the polished chessboard floor, the flame-patterned columns to the right and left separating gallery corridors from the hall, the heavy oak table: a black dragon carrying the top on its outspread wings, two solid-silver candelabra the height of a man on it flanking an oil painting, the rock-crystal chandelier filling the hall with soft light — all that made it clear to him that he was poor. He had also had that feeling when he had visited Jochen Londoner, Hanna’s father, but it wasn’t as strong as here, this was wealth that shouldn’t exist in socialism. Meno had already seen a few apartments of big-selling authors, of Party functionaries — never a house like this, however. The Party functionaries mostly had dubious taste, clearly deriving from their lower-middle-class background; it had also struck him that Party functionaries had no time for comfort without recognizable usefulness. The poor food at Barsano’s was notorious and the apartment he had furnished for himself in the extensive Block A complex was spartan. Here on the other hand … A door banged at the end of the left-hand colonnade, a man in a white coat came out and went, with echoing footsteps, bent over papers, without taking any notice of him, to the staircase. It was made of white marble with black spots, like a Dalmatian’s coat, and split into two wings that rose in an elegant curve to the first floor, where they came together in a balcony with a balustrade. On a thin-legged stand, like an easel, was a mirror that, as Meno realized when he went closer, was not made of glass but of metal. Meno adjusted his tie.

He heard the housekeeper’s rusty voice behind him. ‘The Baroness.’ Hurriedly he looked round at her, Else Alke nodded to him and pointed to the staircase. At the top a door opened and a woman in a hunting outfit came down to him.

‘Frau von Arbogast.’ My God, I really did sketch a kiss on the hand.

‘Herr Rohde. What a beautiful rose.’ She was visibly pleased.

‘Thank you very much for your invitation.’ How old can she be, fifty, sixty? Older? A face as brown as leather, a tough, supple figure. I wouldn’t want to go through the fires that have melted away every superfluous gram. And she does indeed have lilac hair.

‘It’s my husband you must thank. We’re delighted you’ve found the time to come and see us.’ Could she offer him something? Her husband was unfortunately still occupied, an urgent unscheduled meeting such as often cropped up in the stages of the formulation of the five-year plan. He had asked her to express his regret at his lack of punctuality, all the more so as he had explicitly requested that Herr Rohde be there as early as five o’clock. Would Herr Rohde be happy with her company until then? ‘Can I offer you something?’ They were standing at the bottom of the stairs and when he nodded, she made a gesture that he only understood when the housekeeper appeared. ‘Please put the rose in a vase and in my room. Something to drink for Herr Rohde.’ She raised her brows questioningly.

‘A glass of water, please.’

‘Oh, Herr Rohde. A glass of water. I’d like to give you something especially delicious. Bring us two glasses of pomegranate juice, please.’ They had been sent the fruit from the Black Sea, from Georgia, the Institute still had connections there. ‘There are various stories about us going round the district here. We are aware of that. The truth is that we worked in Sinop for ten years. It was good work and it was right that we did it.’ Was there anything else he wanted. He said no, observed her. How concerned she is. She’s like a ringmaster while the bareback riders are performing. That suit she’s wearing didn’t come from Exquisit. ‘That picture.’ He pointed to the oil painting over the dragon table. Frau von Arbogast couldn’t say. She handed Meno a glass and filled it and one for herself out of a carafe of blood-red pomegranate juice; the housekeeper held the tray and stared straight ahead as the Baroness drank with little hurried sips. Meno drank some, praised it. The juice was icy cold, of a velvety consistency and tasty; Meno closed his eyes, it was as if his throat were being coated in metal. The man in the white coat walked past again. ‘Herr Ritschel.’ The man stopped and turned round slowly, as if in slow motion or like someone who has to control an old rage, to face the Baroness. ‘Would you please tell my husband that I’m going to show Herr Rohde round the house for a while.’ Herr Ritschel turned round again, slightly more quickly, and plodded up the stairs.

‘By the way, I hope the dogs and the alarm system didn’t give you too much of a fright? It’s one of my husband’s passions, you know. He earned the money to set up his first firm by making cameras and alarm systems. The first camera went to me and burnt out, but that was intentional, Ludwig wanted to see me again … He’s so proud of his skill at making things.’ She examined her fingernails, took Meno’s empty glass and placed it beside her own on the tray that the housekeeper had left on the dragon table. ‘Yes, the picture. It’s very old. I brought it with me.’ The frame was square with sides of about six feet. The picture itself was in a circle that touched all four sides of the square but left the four corners free; they were painted over with copper paint and had an inscription with lots of flourishes that Meno couldn’t decipher. In a colonnade with stairs leading up to it, four men in long togas were quietly talking. In the foreground a man was sitting at a microscope; two men in green were standing by a telescope, one pointing up at the sky, the other observing an astrolabe with the seven planets; they looked like fruits ripening on his outstretched hand. A man with white hair was holding a carline thistle. A woman was doing calculations. In a meadow a child was playing; a wolf and a stag were drinking from a spring. A girl was holding a balance, a boy was drawing. Standing in the corner was someone with bad eyes. ‘Do you know what I always think when I see that man?’ The baroness pointed to a man in red with arms outstretched and face raised. ‘That he’s just about to invent the piano. Old Dutch school, that’s all I know; Ludwig says it’s a piece of good painting and I think he’s right, since most people who come to see us are interested in the picture. Fräulein Schevola, however, doesn’t think much of it … Too many old, learned men and if there has to be a woman, then a mathematician … She doesn’t like unjust pictures.’

‘Unjust?’

‘Pictures with totalitarian colours which are so strong that they demand humility and love, as she says. — You know Judith Schevola?’

‘From her books,’ Meno said, avoiding a direct answer.

‘She is a stimulating element in the circle of old debauchees who want to put the world to rights, some of whom you will meet this evening.’ She gave Meno a hard smile. ‘Let’s go. Ludwig would like you to see a few things before the others arrive. Ah, but he can show you them better than I.’ They went to meet Arbogast.

‘Herr Rohde. I’m delighted you’ve come. Please excuse my delay. Is there anything I can do for you? — Did you have some of our pomegranate juice brought out for him?’

‘Of course, Ludwig. — We were just looking at the picture. Herr Rohde was asking who painted it.’

‘You’re keen on painting? Oh, that is a pointless question to someone from Dresdner Edition.’ The Baron let go of Meno’s hand, which he, still standing on the bottom stair on which he was a good two heads higher than Meno, had been giving a weak but unceasing handshake.

‘I’ll go and check the preparations again. I’ll leave you two alone now.’

‘Of course, my jewel.’ Arbogast sketched a bow to his wife. She gave Meno a wink and left.

‘You must forgive my limp handshake, it’s what happens when you put your right hand in the one-million-volt electron-beam of a Van de Graaff generator. Do you know what that is? — Doesn’t matter. It corresponds to the ionizing effect of a hundred-kilogram radium source, which is, of course, purely hypothetical. Marie Curie had one gram at her disposal and for radium that is a considerable amount. So,’ Arbogast said coolly, looking at the blotchy burnt skin of his hand, ‘for the rest of my life as a physicist I’ll know what I’m talking about when I discuss radiation damage. My fingers are still a bit stiff … It’s something of an advantage at tennis. And Trude has never complained. My wife.’ Arbogast looked at the clock. ‘We still have fifty-two minutes and sixteen seconds before the official part of the evening begins. I would very much like to have a chat with you. If you’re agreeable?’ Arbogast spoke with a slightly nasal tone and a hint of a North German accent, which Meno had only just noticed from the way he pronounced the ‘st’ of stiff as ‘s-t’ rather than as the ‘sht’ usual elsewhere.

On the first storey the floor was made of smoothly polished clay-coloured stone with sea snails and ammonites that had been deposited in it; most were the size of a one-mark coin, a few had the diameter of a standard alarm clock, some that of a plate with the compartmentation clearly visible. Noticing Meno’s interest, Arbogast waited at the glass double door that had a proliferation of ferns engraved on it, bizarre plants with something of ice needles about them, very elaborately worked. The door handles were bronze sea horses.

Arbogast led Meno through a room with a conference table, at which Herr Ritschel and a few other white-coated assistants, without looking up, were slowly leafing through periodicals, to his study, quietly waving away Meno’s attempt at a general greeting. His study adjoined the conference room and was very plainly furnished: a large desk with two telephones, two chairs at an obtuse angle to each other, bookshelves that Meno scrutinized with curiosity the moment he went in: novels by Karl May stood beside handbooks of optics, a few Dresdner Edition volumes beside leather-bound annual numbers of physics journals. Meno couldn’t work out the system by which the books were ordered until he noticed that the books on any one shelf were all of the same height.

‘It looks better, I like this order, that might seem barbaric to you but, you know … Let’s sit down. Do you smoke?’

‘Now and then,’ Meno lied, ‘rarely and … not here, Herr Professor.’

‘We can abandon the formalities, Herr Rohde. Feel free as far as smoking is concerned, I’ve breathed in a fair number of substances.’ A thin smile appeared behind his steel-rimmed spectacles. ‘Be my guest.’

From his chair Meno could let his eye roam round the room unobtrusively. He had the impression that Arbogast noticed his curiosity and even approved of it, despite the fact that it wasn’t very polite to have a good look round while they were talking. Meno briefly wondered whether the chairs were deliberately placed at that angle to each other in order to allow guests to look round unobtrusively … At least it didn’t seem to bother Arbogast that Meno took advantage of the opportunity and that his answers were rather monosyllabic. Arbogast talked about Urania and the usual course the evenings took. He had crossed his legs and jiggled his foot in time to his words, and waggled his toes so that the leather of his snakeskin slippers was constantly undulating; in addition, though slightly out of time, Arbogast underlined his words with gestures of his long hands; Meno could see the black scarab slipping up and down on his ring finger. On the wall behind the desk were some framed tables and a coloured representation of the human organs of vision with the eye, suspended from fine ligaments, shown in various sections and perspectives. They were, as far as Meno could tell, physical and mathematical tables, but he couldn’t make head or tail of the one in the middle. Arbogast noticed what he was looking at. ‘That table is, in fact, only related to the others in general terms. I have been keeping it since I was young, since the inflation period, to be precise. On the left are the individuals I have got to know. On the right the amount of money needed to bribe each one.’ The Baron smiled. ‘I was always expensive, you know. Very expensive. To be able to afford that is part of an idea of freedom that is unfortunately misunderstood nowadays. You should tell me where you come some time.’ There was a knock at the door. Herr Ritschel came in. He pushed a cart with rubber tyres across the floor. With a gesture of apology Arbogast stood up, Meno as well, when Ritschel turned his head slowly in his direction. His eye sockets were unusually deep and shadowed, did he have eyes at all …?

‘The models, series D,’ Herr Ritschel murmured, giving each syllable the same emphasis. In the cart were several A4-size blocks of some transparent synthetic material, all veined with coloured lines.

‘You’re a zoologist, Herr Rohde,’ said Arbogast, waving him over, ‘you will be interested in this.’ There were eyes with nerve fibres and visual pathways each leading to a piece of the cerebral cortex, coloured light blue, the visual cortex where the brain creates an image of the world from the optical impressions pouring in.

‘Dingo, dogfish, dolphin, donkey, dove, dromedary, duckbilled platypus,’ said Herr Ritschel in his strange, equal-emphasis tones. ‘The donkey’s eyes are strikingly similar to those of the Minister of Science and Technology.’ Arbogast picked up one of the blocks and turned it over and over, scrutinizing it. ‘I can’t help it, Ritschel, but I’m sure these eyes have looked at me quite often. You did do them from real life …’

‘Of course, Herr Professor. They are from Bileam, our pet donkey that unfortunately died last summer. I asked to have its eyes as a model.’

‘He’s my best man for synthetic materials, Herr Rohde, invaluable.’

Ritschel bowed slightly.

Meno had never before seen anything like these eyes in the transparent blocks, even in the zoological institutes of Leipzig and Jena, where outstanding specialists were working. The preparations had been cast with the greatest precision in the blocks of synthetic material, though not to scale, however, for they were all the same size, the pupils looked like table-tennis balls with a colourful glaze. In each a single eye had been let in beside the visual pathway, sections showed the internal arrangement: iris ring, control muscle for the iris, corpus vitreum, retina, choroidea and from that a further section with rod and cone.

‘One of my hobby horses.’ Arbogast had sat down again and was looking at the stick with the gryphon handle; he nodded to Ritschel, who put the blocks back in the cart and trundled it out again. ‘Another is, as you will have noticed, the physics of alarm systems. Do you know, even I have felt what it is like to have to earn your daily bread — even if it doesn’t look like that. I grew up during the inflation years. It was with alarm systems and cameras I’d constructed myself that I earned enough to gain the knowledge I needed to build my physics laboratory. I started off in a lumber room, in the bad years around 1923 in Berlin. I was just sixteen, Herr Rohde, and an independent entrepreneur. If you like I’ll show them to you afterwards. But, Rohde’ — Arbogast spread out his arms and invited Meno to sit down again as well — ‘let us talk about you instead. When I do have guests, I like to get to know them better. One gets too caught up in one’s daily work and I enjoy evenings such as this, look forward to them weeks in advance. What do you say to Ritschel’s skills?’

‘Amazing, Herr Arbogast.’

‘Well, von Arbogast. Yes, you’re right, it really is amazing. Ritschel is a master of his art … As a former zoologist you will know how much as a scientist one is dependent on one’s craftsmen. They it is who construct our apparatuses and what would even a Röntgen have been without his laboratory mechanic … These eyes: they are looking at us, Rohde, my friend. It is the eyes that see and are seen. “What is most decisive happens in our looks,” said the optical illusion — a little physicist’s joke in passing. It is a particular delight for me in the evening, after the day’s work is done, to stroll round my eye-room and feel my heart start to pound at the hundreds of mute questions … Not a pleasant feeling, certainly not, but helpful. It seems to set off certain synapses, cause an increase in hormonal activity, I’ve had my best ideas there lately. — But let’s talk about you. You come from the countryside south-east of here?’

‘From Schandau.’

‘Any brothers or sisters?’

‘One sister, one brother.’

‘We’ve had business with your brother-in-law … An open-minded man. We have certain projects that require cooperation with a clinic. We’ll contact him again at some point. — You like my pencils?’

Meno had been staring at his desk, trying to count the pencils, which were arranged precisely according to size, in one of Ritschel’s transparent blocks, a battery of sharply pointed little lances.

‘There are precisely three hundred and fourteen. Pi, you understand. Three point one four pencils would have been too few for me, so I moved the decimal point back two places. But unfortunately I can’t give you a pencil. There always have to be exactly three hundred and fourteen, the Ludolphine number, the relationship between circumference and diameter. And it must always be these same pencils. Genuine Faber pencils. The dark green is soothing, it’s a real little pine forest I have before me here, the colour is fresh and young, too; the Czech ones you can buy in this country use poorer-quality wood, it splinters and breaks. Moreover they’re yellow. That never happens with these. I don’t want to be confronted with an autumnal deciduous wood. That’s why I have a special standing order with Faber … I could put you on our list of potential pencil-recipients, if you like.

‘Very kind of you.’

‘My deputy, my two sons, and the head of our gas discharge laboratory are in front of you in the queue, however. — As a zoologist how did you manage to end up as editor in a literary publishing house, if I might ask. That’s something I wondered about.’

Yes, Meno thought, that was in Leipzig, 1968. It’s the little things you remember first before they let what’s behind them shine through: a match, perhaps, a swimming cap with something written in ballpoint pen on it, a pattern on a piece of clothing. Perhaps the match with which the Party Secretary lit his cigarette — was it an F6 or a Juwel, or did he smoke Karo, which was considered a worker’s brand? — and then his voice, matter-of-fact, slightly disappointed: As long as you’re a member of that society you can forget about your PhD, Rohde. Socialist zoology demands people who are committed to it. You’re one of Professor Haube’s students, you should take him as your model in that respect too. That gang of Protestant students is a collection of counter-revolutionary subversives, keep away from them! We’ll soon have eradicated them. Just think what’s going on in Prague! — I wasn’t the only one thinking of that, nor the students and assistant professors at the Institute; Talstrasse and Liebigstrasse were abuzz with the whispers, the cafés, it was what people were talking about wherever you went. Socialism with a human face … It was what we all wanted.

‘There were problems. I was in the Protestant Student Society, in Leipzig, in ’68.’

‘I understand. Yes, those regulations. They were not necessarily to our advantage. When you remember how many valuable people, talented scientists … I know there’s this stipulation that the mark for your degree dissertation must not be more than one grade higher than that in Marxism — Leninism. That, I would say, is not very productive. But perhaps it was necessary at the time … We have largely overcome that now. You must put yourself in the mind of the decisionmakers at the time, we were threatened on all sides, the situation was getting out of control in Czechoslovakia, drastic measures had to be taken. Which is not to say that in individual cases, probably in yours as well …’

Meno remained silent.

‘There were misunderstandings and overheated reactions, and yet …’ Arbogast made a conciliatory gesture. ‘You know how it is. I can understand you. And I have been told that you are an excellent editor. So you were expelled from the university?’

‘Not actually. But a scientist without a PhD, at a university—’

‘Yes. These are things that happen to people. But take comfort from me, my friend. I was only able to attend a few lectures at university and I’m only an honorary doctor. But I hope that I can say that despite that I have made something of myself, hmm? — Then you joined Insel Verlag?’

‘You are well informed, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘An experiment is only as good as its preparations.’ Arbogast twisted his lips. ‘Which is not to say that I regard you as an experiment. Yes, and now I remember — before Insel you were with Teubner’s, the scientific and academic publishers that also brought out my volumes of tables for electrophysics. You were a bit out of the firing line there, so to speak, but not far from your original field.’

He’ll have had his informants, Meno thought. B. G. Teubner, where I found work, Haube got me the position. A course at the Bibliographical Institute, evening classes. The bears at the entrance to the Zoological Institute … The light and the rooms come back into memory and if you see them again, they’ve become strange and have nothing to do with you any more — and yet they did belong to me, just as I belonged to them. The stockily built, bald Party Secretary of the Institute, in the conference room in Talstrasse; my mentor, who’s present at the summons; my fellow assistant, who has to take minutes and with whom I share a room in the student residence … The empty-looking pieces of furniture reflecting Haube’s idea of socialist functionality — he hated flourishes, hated the baroque, the Catholic Church, hated Vienna, where he had grown up and we didn’t know and of which he, a large illustrated book in his hand, would speak in a tone of revulsion, hacking at the black-and-white photos with his index finger, the Theresianum, the Ringstrasse, the Capuchin Vault, the Hofburg: that had been the breeding ground for Hitler and his gang — the shit-brown criminals, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no other word for it, you will have to get used to my strong language in this respect.

‘Your eye collection is very impressive, Herr von Arbogast.’

Write it down, Hanna had said, and then perhaps you can get it out of your system. Those years in the sixties when we were young in Leipzig and carried two cards round with us in our wallets: one with a number, that was the butter number you had to give in the shop to get some of the rationed butter — or not to get it when the ration had all been used up: there’s none left, Herr Rohde, but I can give you a bit of margarine; and the house fire basic card 1, the coal card that you needed for your fuel allocation. — The Café Corso in Gewandgässchen, the decayed splendour of the cloth merchants, with its landlady who spoke in a Bavarian accent, its buffet on the first floor and sitting opposite it the fat ladies, who were worthy of a place in Heimito von Doderer’s Demons, the cream-cake-ladies as they were called; the hum of voices upstairs in the preserved Art Deco room: the sea-green fabric wallpaper behind which the Geiger counters ticked and the auriculate jellyfish listened, so people said; where, when the windows were open in the summer, the bellowing voice of the Regional Party Secretary was squeezed out of the pillars with the city radio loudspeakers; the Café Corso: Ernst Bloch would come and talk about Marxism; the university Rector, Mayer-Schorsch, with the fraternity duelling scars he was said to have acquired on the same duelling floor as Haube, would order half a dozen glasses of Hornano vermouth for himself, drink a toast to the goateed Chairman of the State Council on the wall, stand a round for his students and argue about Brecht with the principal of the Institute of Literature, while we at the tables at the front would whisper about Sartre and Anouilh, Beckett, the poems of Yevtushenko and Okudzhava till our heads were spinning; to get that out of my system –

Arbogast had been playing with one of the pencils and staring pensively out of the window. Giving Meno, who was sitting slumped in his chair, a brief glance, he said, ‘Well, Rohde, I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I’m writing my autobiography. Your publishing house has approached me, the book is something they’d like to see. What I need is a critical eye, an opponent I can take seriously … I read these pages to my family at weekends, they all nod, but I have the feeling this acceptance comes either from cluelessness or from a mistaken idea of love; perhaps they also want to spare my feelings … It could be that Trude is to a certain extent lacking in that respect … To put it in a nutshell: I need a partner. I’ve made enquiries about you, as I said, and you have an outstanding reputation.’

There was a knock at the door.

‘We’ll talk about this another time. Think it over carefully. Should you say no, you will be forfeiting a fee that would be, well, appropriate. If you say yes, you will have a large amount of work ahead of you, at an unusual hour now and then. I’ll call you tomorrow evening, at eight sixteen. Come in.’

‘The guests are arriving, Herr Baron.’

‘Thank you, Frau Alke.’ Arbogast picked up the gryphon walking stick and ushered Meno out of the room. They went down into the hall. Meno recognized Vogelstrom, who was talking to Dietzsch, a sculptor who was a neighbour of the Hoffmanns in Wolfstone, Lothar Däne, the music critic of the Sächsisches Tageblatt, the physicist Teerwagen in conversation with Dr Kühnast from the pharmaceutical factory, the dentist, Frau Knabe, who had the apartment above Krausewitz in Wolfstone. Her husband, who worked in the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments in the Zwinger, was standing with Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and a woman: Judith Schevola. Meno had heard rumours about her that were going round the literary scene and read a few remarkable stories by her in Sinn und Form … One of the most gifted young writers, she wrote with a passion that was rare in German literature. He had seen her a few times at meetings of the Writers’ Association, also at the Leipzig Fair, but had never spoken to her. She had grey, close-cropped hair, but seemed to be in her early or mid-thirties at the most. Everything about her face looked displaced and distorted, as if it had been put together out of many other faces. Only her eyes seemed to belong to her. She scrutinized Arbogast, then Meno, taking sips from a glass of pomegranate juice. The men were standing facing her, on the other side of the hall as well. Alke opened the door, letting in Sperber, the lawyer, Schiffner, the publisher, and a man with a slightly hunched walk and a fleshy lower lip hanging down, whom Meno knew all too well; he started back and grasped the banister, which the woman with grey hair seemed to register with simultaneous curiosity and hostility, then she looked up and followed Meno’s reactions; he thought: like an entomologist pulling a fly’s leg off to see how it will deal with the new situation. The man — who had noticed him and surreptitiously raised his arm — was Jochen Londoner, his ex-father-in-law.

‘Please make your way to our television room.’

‘One moment, Ludwig.’ Giving her husband a polite smile, Frau von Arbogast introduced Meno to the other guests. Judith Schevola’s greeting was brief: ‘We know each other. At the last Association conference you showed a great talent for falling asleep.’ Arbogast led the company to the door out of which Ritschel had emerged. Judith Schevola, Malthakus, the stamp dealer, and Frau Knabe, the dentist, stood looking at the painting over the dragon table and only came when Arbogast rang a little bell.

After his talk and the subsequent discussion, Meno went upstairs before the others; a buffet had been set up in the conference room. Alke and Ritschel were busy at the table with the white cloth. A youngish physicist, who had sat behind Arbogast during the talk, gave Meno a friendly nod. ‘If there’s anything else you’d like to see …’ He opened a little door that led out onto an oriel running round part of the building.

‘Thank you, Herr …’

‘Kittwitz. I work at the Institute for Flow Research. And don’t worry, they’ll find you soon enough, Herr Rohde. I enjoyed your talk. The way the garden spider makes its nest — remarkable parallels to the buffet-encirclement behaviour at physics conferences … But I’ll leave you in peace now.’

Rohde went to the edge of the balcony. The cool air did him good, his face was burning and he was glad that Kittwitz’s friendly gesture had enabled him to have a few moments to himself. He was shaken by hot and cold shivers alternately, the excitement was gradually dying down, for a few seconds he was in a state between profound tiredness and cool alertness, like a clock spring, he thought, that is being squeezed tight by the fingers of a clockmaker but can slip out and fly open at any moment; this blasted stage fright, I didn’t speak well. In his mind’s eye he saw the face of his ex-father-in-law, bright, with the expression of concentrated listening that he knew and in which his lower lip drooped and was drawn up with a start at regular intervals, then Londoner became aware that he was being or could be observed; he would grasp his chin between index and middle finger and clear his throat; those nails that were always too long, Meno thought, the thick signet ring — master’s ring, Londoner used to say — like a yellow frog on the bottom joint of his index finger: one of those tropical amphibians with warning colours; but this one seemed to be asleep in a state of metamorphosis, especially when Londoner, as during his talk, let his hand dangle down and crossed his legs, kept his heavy eyelids closed and his nose — Hanna’s nose, too small for his full-fleshed face — became covered in drops of sweat. Arbogast’s introduction; Schiffner’s eyes, unfathomable under his white bushy brows, variable: sometimes cool, sometimes concerned, sometimes with a kind of fatherly benevolence that fascinated and oppressed Meno in equal measure; and Madame — in his thoughts he used that instead of the ‘Fräulein’ that seemed inappropriate — Schevola, cold, head proudly thrown back: Do you think what you have to say is of any interest to me? Get it out of your system, Meno told himself, and that strange television room …

He searched for his cigarettes, Arbogast wouldn’t see that he smoked, but even if he did, he was presumably allowed one now. He hadn’t brought any with him and remembered that he had left the yellow packet of Orient at home, between his typewriter and an issue of Sinn und Form that Schiffner had given him to have a look at. The city lay dark below him, with sparse lights scattered round the edges, Kleinzschachwitz and Pillnitz upstream, above them, near Pappritz, the television tower with faintly phosphorescent antennae; the Elbe water meadows and the hills towards the Czech border mere inky-black surfaces; farther downstream the Johannstadt suburb with its prefabricated tenements; directly below him the continuation of the slope of Arbogast’s garden cocooned in marshy darkness, the Blue Marvel with its filigree double tent stretching so elegantly across the river, a number 4 tram was crossing it, Meno could see the conductor as a patch of shadow in the yellowish light of the carriage. A white smudge was dangling from the power cable over Schillerplatz, a fraying banner hanging down limply like a dead squid preserved in formaldehyde. When there was some movement in the air, bringing back currents of stench, he thought he could smell the decay away over Körnerplatz and the wooded slopes of the district on the edge of which Arbogast’s property stood. It was the smell of ash from the Mitte and Löbtau combined heat and power stations by the Brücke der Jugend, the chimneys of which looked down on the city with red Cyclops eyes. He heard the babble of voices from the conference room, he also had the feeling his name was being called. His tiredness increased, at the same time he felt a strong desire for a cigarette. He watched, saw the Elbe like a spine of tar below him, the houses a gangrenous black, like decomposing flesh, shimmering movements in it, as if gleaming white trichinae had bored into the rotting stone flesh, ready to lay their eggs. There was a play of searchlight beams on the Käthe-Kollwitz-Ufer, fleecy arms of light feeling their way, with the movements of helpless swimmers, over the dark-lying cellular systems of the buildings in the sector of the workers’ housing cooperative; sometimes they were struck, as if by an indignant, hostile glance, by the gleam of a distant window, so there must still be life there. What kind of life, Meno wondered, what is life like down there? A ship with an orchestra on board could run aground, the cracks of light along the curtains wouldn’t get any wider. The Blue Miracle was deserted, only the Schillergarten restaurant on the opposite bank of the Elbe seemed to still be open. There, too, the curtains were drawn but a door opened now and then and a customer staggered out into the fresh air, either to go off in the direction of the bus stops on Schillerplatz or to disappear behind the restaurant. It was not the only such establishment to have problems with the sewerage system, Meno remembered the Bodega in Leipzig, a favourite meeting place during the book fair that possessed no conveniences, one had to use the back yard there as well … Now the Elbe was a bluish shade, then sea creatures seemed to crawl past, milky, misshapen beings made to look leprous by the water. The stench came, rolled up the slopes, Meno knew it from his tongue, it was the taste of a match that has been chewed too long, to which something like a dash of sauerkraut was added: the effluent from the Heidenau cellulose works that was let out into the water at night.

‘Do you smoke? There’s a hell of a stink again.’ Judith Schevola tapped a few cigarettes out of a Duett packet and offered them to Meno when he nodded. ‘Impressive the way you described the ways these venomous tropical spiders have of killing. I must read that again later. I bought your Old German Poems. The Old Man of the Mountain spoke to me about it just now. I think he has a pretty high regard for you. Although immediately afterwards he told me you’d rejected one of his projects.’

‘That wasn’t me, that was the publishing section in the Ministry. I hope he told you that as well.’

‘I understand. How stupid. I’ve no matches on me.’ Schevola went through her pockets, the cigarette stuck between her lips.

‘Just a minute.’ Meno lit a match. She bent over his hand that was shielding the flame. He lit one for himself as well, took a deep pull, blew out the smoke with relish. ‘Oh, wonderful. Thanks. I left mine at home.’

‘I hope you like it. What do you usually smoke, when your memory doesn’t fail you?’

‘A pipe. Orient when I’m outside.’

‘My grandfather used to smoke a pipe … I’ve always liked the smell. — In the afterword to your book you twice omitted the subjunctive; as far as I know “as if” is followed by the past subjunctive so you should have written “as if it were” and “as if it were to start”.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Yes,’ Schevola said cheerfully, ‘it was a pleasure to pick out those mistakes after you pointed out that kind of nonsense in my first manuscript that I sent to Dresdner Edition. You rejected it because of those minor slips!’

‘Just a minute, that must be a mistake.’

‘But your name was the one at the bottom of the letter of rejection.’

‘Oh, I see. That does happen. Let me explain. We have pre-printed letters we sometimes have to use for that kind of communication because we’re short of normal writing paper. It can then happen that someone will sign without correcting the name on the pre-printed letter. In your case it was probably Herr Redlich, our senior editor.’

‘The signature was illegible, an “R” was recognizable. I thought of you at once. But surely you’re not going to slip away now. Perhaps you’re afraid I’ll strangle you?’

‘Then the cigarette was an offer of reconciliation?’

Schevola blew out a cloud of smoke, stared out into the garden. ‘Have you seen the dogs? He’s got kennels down there. A funny guy. Sometimes I wonder whether he believes what he says. Or whether he’s only here because they gave him an institute. — Do you like bullfighting?’

‘Only in Hemingway and Picasso.’

‘Do you find it too brutal? Too bloody?’

‘Too cruel. The crowd bawls because a living creature is being slaughtered.’

‘Slaughtered? How melodramatic. The torero and the bull are equal opponents. Each of the two has a chance and the one that dies goes down fighting and in full public view. Neither the torero nor the bull can hide anything, neither a moment of bravery nor one of cowardice. That’s honest and it’s a good death.’

‘Maybe. But I still find the ritual repulsive.’

‘You can’t bear the thought of death. And that we have to fight if we want to live. That is the idea bullfighting makes clear and I find that honest. But many people refuse to face up to that truth. And get outraged instead. And never ask themselves where the leather for the shoes they’re wearing comes from while they’re getting outraged.’

‘It may be honest to accept death and display it. But it isn’t great.’

Schevola looked up and surveyed him in surprise. ‘Then for you to lie is great?’

‘Send me your manuscript.’

Her expression darkened abruptly. She broke out into an ugly laugh. ‘Tell me, do you think I’m chatting to you in order to palm my stuff off on you?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.’

Schevola put her hands to her temples and started to massage them. ‘You’re tired and I’m being a nuisance …’

‘May I join you?’

‘Of course,’ Meno said, ‘Herr Doktor Kittwitz, physicist — Frau Schevola, writer.’

‘We know each other from previous Urania meetings,’ the physicist said. He’d brought three glasses and a bottle of champagne. ‘Crimean champagne, the very best. The old man’s really pushed the boat out. No expense spared. Don’t you want to eat something, Herr Rohde? You’ve earned it and people are already asking where you are. Herr Altberg and Herr Sperber would both like a few words with you, your boss as well. You’ve got a little interview list already. Cheers, Judith, Herr Rohde.’ They clinked glasses, drank. ‘In cases like this Arbogast takes off his watch, puts it down where he can see it and says: Please excuse me but I can’t give you more than four minutes and thirty-one seconds.’

‘You seem to like him a lot again, Roland.’ Judith gave one of her ugly, grating laughs. ‘How’s your project going?’

‘I really do like him. You could say he’s got his little quirks, but you have to give him one thing: he takes trouble. We handed it in for publication. Two weeks later they called to say they couldn’t print it at the moment since their paper allocation is limited and they first of all have to see where they can get some for the next issues. How does this sound to you: In the Institute here we make a fundamental discovery …’

‘Oh, my dear Roland’s getting modest in his middle age and says “we”?’

‘Judith … please don’t. A fundamental discovery! But only something that gets published is recognized, Herr Rohde, and the priority goes to whoever is published first … And do you know what’s happened? There’s a group in Bremen. A few days ago Arbogast took me to one side and told me he’d spoken to a colleague there. They’ve made the same discovery as us, four weeks after us, but it will be published sooner … Just because there isn’t any paper in this country again … I really hit the roof, believe you me.’ He hastily gulped down some champagne and poured himself some more. ‘It was our, it was … my discovery, Judith. And it’s being taken away from me.’

‘Didn’t he tell them, on the telephone, that you were quicker?’

‘Of course he did. Answer: My dear Arbogast, we know the equipment you have at your Institute and, by and large, we know your colleagues … Surely you’re not trying to dispute our right to priority. Of course we’ll have to accept it if you publish your results before we do! Arrogant arseholes! We can’t do any top-level research here, this is the useless Zone … And do you know what we get told here? Funding? For flow research? Of what concrete benefit is that to the national economy? We’re sorry, but we can’t see the benefit. Huh.’ Kittwitz went to the edge of the balcony and grasped the balustrade. ‘D’you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to get away.’

‘There’s supposed to be a billion-mark loan from the Bavarian State Bank coming. In return we’re to drop the minimum currency exchange requirement for children.’

‘How incredibly humane. Yes, our state was always good to children. Franz-Josef Strauss, the arch-imperialist, loans us a billion in hard exploiter’s currency. Suddenly the road to the promised land goes right through Catholic Bavaria … So that’s what their principles are worth!’

‘Moreover they say they’re going to make it possible for citizens of the GDR and foreigners to marry, also for them to make a complaint if that should be refused. Now if that isn’t progress!’

‘Then you can hook yourself a capitalist millionaire at the Leipzig Trade Fair. Shouldn’t be difficult with your charm, Judith. And if you don’t get your class enemy, you can write a complaint. Or how about a gunrunner, buying supplies for Iraq from us. Cheers.’

‘You’re drinking too much, Roland. Just remember: “But scarce those words my lips had ’scaped —” ’

‘ “I wished I’d kept them in my breast.” Schiller, or something like that. As Herr Rohde knows. No offence meant.’ With a black look, he raised his glass and drank to Meno.

‘Oh, there you are, Herr Rohde. Do come in, you’ll get cold out there.’ Frau von Arbogast waved from the study window. ‘And Fräulein Schevola and Herr Kittwitz. Young people stick together, of course. But do come and join us, otherwise they’ll be talking of nothing but politics, cars and prostate glands in here.’ She closed the window.

‘Fräulein!’ Judith Schevola muttered indignantly. Kittwitz laughed. ‘For some reason she seems to like you. Come on, we’ll finish this bottle together.’

‘My God, lilac-coloured hair. Do you know what she asked me, Roland? Why I didn’t have mine dyed. Whether it was some disease. Of course I said it was just that there was too much ash in the air.’

Inside, Frau Knabe, a tall woman with short black hair, morello-cherry lipstick and a necklace of blue wooden beads slung several times round her neck, was talking about the advantages of matriarchy and the Feldenkrais method. Her husband was standing beside her, head bowed, fingers intertwined, staring at a pineapple that Professor Teerwagen and Dr Kühnast had approached to within a few fractions of an centimetre. ‘… all it comes down to is the oppression of women, for centuries and centuries, oh, since the beginning of time. And of course it’s a woman we have to thank for the expulsion from paradise and there’s this rule I’ve learnt: mulier tacet in ecclesia! Women are to keep silent in church, it says that in the Bible. The cheek!’

‘Perhaps the prophets will have had their reasons?’

‘Your smile doesn’t improve your joke one bit, Herr Däne. What do you have to say about it, Frau Schevola? Isn’t it about time to put an end to the rule of men? Especially of old men!’

Judith Schevola raised her glass.

‘Aha, and there is Herr Rohde. We were just talking about connections and breaking through the barriers between me and thee. As you were saying earlier on, about those nerve spiders or whatever: something is injected. It makes me think of anaesthetizing the nervus mandibularis. — Open wide, a little prick, wait five minutes and all quiet in the upper storey. But this in-ject-ing’ — Frau Knabe drew the word out, eyes wide — ‘this sting, pleasant pressure then something from outside dribbles into us, the bitter or the sweet poison … Toxic! I couldn’t help thinking about sex when you described it.’

Those around grinned.

‘Not with you, Herr Rohde, you’re too skinny for me and you’ve had too much of a classical education. Do you know that some patients find the sharp pain, when you use the three-finger grip and gently push the needle into the mucous membrane, energizing?’

‘I have to say that I recently read something like that by a doctor, Georg Groddeck —’

‘That’s right, Herr Däne, so did I.’

‘The Book of the It, Herr Dietzsch?’

‘Yes! And I thought it was interesting what he had to say about successful treatments, every treatment of patients is the right one, they are always and under all circumstances correctly treated, whether according to science or the method of a shepherd skilled in the healing arts — the cure doesn’t come from the prescriptions but from what our “it” does with the —’

‘You’d be the ideal doctor for our medical services here,’ said Frau Knabe, returning to the fray. ‘But, you know, recently I got terrible twinges from my musculus latissimus dorsi and unfortunately my “it” made absolutely nothing of it! It demanded painkillers and a correction of the wrong motion grid that caused it … Grid’s an interesting word, isn’t it? A mot juste. Thought grid, experience grid and motion grid, of course. Which takes us back to Feldenkrais. You interrupted me.’

‘But there’s always an incalculable element to humanity, Frau Doktor Knabe. Science can’t count or measure everything or even mark it on a grid.’

‘Who is saying it can, Herr Däne? But Feldenkrais doesn’t simply put forward unproved assertions. All it comes to in the end is that they say “it” — is a man.’

Meno went to the buffet. Judith Schevola was standing, laughing, in a group of scientists in white coats from the Institute, Sperber, the lawyer, was nearby talking to the Baroness and Teerwagen. Slices of cold roast meat, ham, Hungarian salami cut wafer-thin, several kinds of cheese, all appetizingly set out on plates with a garnish of lettuce leaves, hard-boiled egg halves, caviar and tomatoes, crispy fried chicken, Margon mineral water, beer, wine, Crimean champagne and bread giving off a nice smell. In addition, large bowls of fruit salad, Waldorf salad, grapes, bananas, fruits Meno didn’t recognize.

‘Not bad, is it?’ That was Malthakus, with a faint smile. ‘What you’ve got in your hand there’s called a kiwi fruit. Comes from New Zealand.’

‘Never seen one before, Herr Malthakus.’

‘Me neither, not until this evening. That is — just a minute. On a New Zealand stamp … Or was it a bird on it? You have to peel them or spoon them out. Have you tried the potato soup yet? A treat, really herby. Those are the things I like best. Simple dishes. Ones you even get in wartime. Bread, jacket potatoes, cream cheese, stew, potato soup. Though I suppose bananas aren’t to be sneezed at either.’ Putting his hand over his mouth, he laughed a quiet, bubbling laugh. ‘I’ve already polished off five and purloined a few more.’ Malthakus gave Meno a sly look. ‘For the kids. There’s nothing in the dump down the road.’ The ‘dump down the road’ was the greengrocer’s on the corner of Rissleite and Bautzner Strasse, across the road from the Binneberg café-cum-cake shop, and ‘nothing’ was Golden Delicious, salsify, sugar beet, beans, carrots, cabbage and a large tub of dirty potatoes. There was also juice, a red fizzy drink known as ‘Lenin’s sweat’.

‘It’s genuine Malossol caviar, by the way. Would you like a bagful? I always take some back with me when I’ve been to Arbogast’s. He’s on the supply programme of those over there. The Michurin kitchen complex. It completely bypasses normal shops.’

‘I know.’

Malthakus glanced up in surprise, a look of suspicion flitted across his face. ‘Oh yes. I see … My girls were friends with Hanna, when they were little. Later on they weren’t allowed to be with her any more. Haven’t seen her for ages.’

‘She’s in Prague, working as a doctor in the embassy.’

‘In Prague is she, and a doctor in the embassy …? Yes, well, tall oaks from little acorns grow. I can still remember you and Hanna coming to the shop and buying picture postcards. You of Prague and London, Hanna always of Paris. Always of Paris, yes, yes.’ Malthakus adjusted his glasses, surveyed Meno reflectively. ‘You quoted a poem just now. That kind of thing doesn’t usually mean much to me, most of it’s above my head. I’m sure our modern poets are all very cultured and advanced but I’m sorry, I just don’t understand them. A simple line by Eichendorff or Mörike, that’s my limit. But the one you quoted —’

‘A Japanese haiku. “Oh, this sultry heat! / The spiders’ webs hanging hot / on the summer trees.” The poet was called Onitsura, he lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’

‘Aha. Don’t you think it’s terribly hot in here? But that’s what I can’t get out of my mind: the hot spiders’ webs. You’ll have to forgive me if I couldn’t concentrate properly on the rest of your talk, it was going round and round in my head all the time. You get taken in by this Mr, what did you say? — Mr Onitsura. You believe in his hot spiders’ webs. Until you realize that it’s only a body that can get hot. But a spider’s web doesn’t have one, so it can’t get hot! … And yet you trust the fellow, somehow the line makes sense and that irritates me. Oh, I think the Baron would like to talk to you. In the meantime should I … act on your behalf?’ Malthakus looked round quickly and pulled the corner of a plastic bag out of his pocket. ‘We have the same way home as far as Wolfsleite — then the hand-over of the goods in question.’ Meno had to laugh at the stamp dealer’s innocent blue-eyed look, the words whispered behind his hand.

‘Well, Rohde, my friend, have you thought over my offer? Your boss would have no objection.’

‘I need a little time, Herr von Arbogast.’

Schiffner raised his champagne glass and drank to Meno. ‘We also have to have a talk about the Association conference, my son. The regional office has already been on the line asking where our response to the meeting on the election report is. And there’s some work coming your way soon. From our talented up-and-coming young writer.’ Schiffner nodded in the direction of Judith Schevola. Arbogast and he exchanged glances, grinned. Sperber and Altberg came to join them. ‘She wants to publish a book with us. Have a look some time. I mean at the book.’ Arbogast, Sperber and Schiffner began to laugh. ‘And just you be careful, my son, talent can be infectious.’ The three of them laughed even louder.

‘My God, Knabe’s shooting her mouth off again. How can you stand her, Ludwig, her and her feminist twaddle?’ Sperber rocked up and down on his toes and looked across at the dentist, who, gesturing all the time and rolling her eyes, was arguing with Däne, Jochen Londoner and Kittwitz.

Her husband was standing there, disconsolately holding the stalk which was all that was left of the pineapple. ‘That limp-dick Knabe really ought to give his old woman one for once.’

‘D’you think that’s what she needs?’ Schiffner stuck his hands in his pockets and began to rock on his toes as well.’

‘No, she swings the other way. She does it with that Julie from the riding school, that’s why they don’t have any children.’

‘The woman who lives on Rissleite, where Heckmann, the carter, used to have his business?’

‘The very one! She once gave one of my physicists a good thrashing because he’d had the audacity to pick a cherry that was hanging over the fence of her property.’ Arbogast tapped his walking stick, rocked on heel and toe. ‘Pity about Knabe, really. Tall woman, splendid hips … Junoesque. Or what do you say, Heinz? You’re the specialist here.’

Schiffner stroked his face, his habitual gesture for introducing a joke. ‘Dear ladies, if you only knew how gladly we see you among us and that it is our greatest pleasure to dwell in your midst …’ The three of them giggled, Meno turned away. The Old Man of the Mountain drew him aside. ‘Let’s have a drink, Herr Rohde. What is it to be?’

Meno shook his head.

‘Oh, come on, Rohde. It’s terribly hot in here … That power cut just now, during your talk, perhaps it has something to do with that … But in here’ — Altberg placed his hand on his chest — ‘it’s freezing. And that brandy warms you up, I can recommend it. VSOP — yes, in that respect he really does splash out.’ Altberg poured three glasses, held one out to Meno, downed the other two as if they were water, filled them again. ‘You beware of Arbogast. — Come on, let’s walk up and down, Sperber and Dietzsch are watching us … I think he’s a spy.’

‘Dietzsch?’

‘Sculptors can write reports too. Especially when they’re short of money — and of the success other sculptors enjoy … And this bottle’s coming with us, this warming, coppery liquor, it’ll be a corpse by the time we’ve finished, we mustn’t let something as good as this go to waste. — I had it from Malthakus and he heard it from Marroquin …’ Altberg emptied the fourth glass, gave Meno a horrified glance, suddenly started to breathe heavily. ‘You think that’s just rumour and conjecture? Do you know what? You’d be right! You’d be absolutely right! Pure supposition, that’s all … the imagination of a man whose business is literature has run away with him. I’ve spoken to Schiffner again, he actually does reject the book …’

‘Don’t you feel well? Would you like to sit down? Or get some fresh air?’

‘No, no, I’m all right, Rohde. Thank you for your letter. One has to be a bit careful with you … Do you know something? There’s no harm in a bit of gossip. After all, we make a living from that delightful fare.’

‘Please forgive me, Herr Altberg, I didn’t mean to, er, tread on your toes —’

‘That’s the problem! No one wants to tread on anyone’s toes, everyone’s polite and quiet and keeps their distance. I’ll make a start, for I have to admit … I love gossip.’ He took a sip and laughed. ‘Don’t use that against me if I should … well, crop up among your lot. As an old brandy spider, for example, heheh.’

Meno felt uncomfortable and yet he listened in fascination to the stories the old man recounted with relish — without appearing to be drunk; Meno had noticed his slight swaying before, during his visit to him at 8 Oktoberweg, it could just as well be ascribed to weakness or tiredness. Against his will he was gripped by the old man’s halting and disjointed delivery, soaked up his words with a craving previously unknown in himself, at least not in this connection, and it surprised him; he really ought to have withdrawn at once with some polite but empty phrase. Was Herr Rohde aware that Judith Schevola had had affairs with several of those present? She’d already been married four times — and was only thirty-five! She literally hunted men down, which didn’t necessarily do them any good. She must have had some bad experiences. ‘Do you know what her first husband said when he found her after she’d attempted suicide? — “Oh, then I’ll soon get my collection of prints back.” There was blood everywhere, the bathtub was full of it —’

‘Now then, Georg, talking scandal again?’ Teerwagen, the low-voltage physicist in his mid-fifties with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and an imposing belly, over which a watch chain stretched, took a sip of a glass of red wine, his other hand casually stuck in the pocket of his elegant suit. ‘Are you coming along afterwards as well, Herr Rohde? — To look at the stars. From midnight onwards. It’s fairly clear tonight and astronomy is one of the main points of our social evenings. Arbogast will have the large observatory opened. We won’t, however, he able to see the Spider constellation. If you’d been here on 15 December you’d have been able to observe a relatively rare spectacle: an eclipse of the sun.’

‘Oh, come on, Heiner, it was only a half-eclipse. What we deserve, heheh, in this country with its half-people.’

Teerwagen slowly twisted his glass one way and the other. ‘Today we’re going to look at Pisces.’ He gave Altberg a swift glance; by this time the old man had emptied the bottle.

‘Yes, Heiner. The mute fishes,’ Altberg murmured.

‘It’s good that we’ve got to know each other a bit better, Herr Rohde. There we are, neighbours, but we don’t have a real conversation until we meet here. Funny. I quite often see you taking your evening walk, you’re pretty unmistakable with your hat. My wife wants me to ask you where you got it.’

‘Present from my sister. The Thälmannstrasse Exquisit, delivery from Yugoslavia.’

‘My wife thought it must be something like that. Lamprecht, the hatter, is still off sick, who knows if he’ll ever go to our heads again, so to speak. His son doesn’t seem interested in taking over the business. — But you need the right face to go with it. Mine’s too round. By the way, I’m also one of your readers. Our librarian gave it a blue card. I have to say that his feeling for quality is seldom wrong, at least for my taste. — Oh, thank you.’ Alke had come and, eyes lowered, was holding up a tray with ice cream.

‘Do you like ice cream, Herr Rohde? I’m mad about it. And it’s excellent here.’ Altberg rubbed his hands in delight and took two tubs.

‘Yes’ — Teerwagen loosened his tie — ‘the ice cream — and the heating.’

Meno was tired and wanted to leave. He gave Alke a surreptitious sign and she responded with a slight bow. He saw Malthakus attempting to slip out of the conference room with a bulging bag and the Baroness, who was close by, turning away at precisely that moment to take the person she was talking to by the arm and stroll away, chatting, as the stamp dealer grasped the door handle.

‘The Herr Baron wishes to speak to you,’ he heard Ritschel’s equally emphasizing voice murmur behind him. They went into the study. ‘I really would like to have longer to think your offer over,’ Meno said as he went in. Arbogast raised his hand, nodded to Ritschel, who closed the door. ‘Don’t worry, my friend, I don’t want to press you. Just a few formalities. A receipt for your fee. Sign by the red cross please.’ Arbogast handed Meno the form and an envelope across the table.

‘A thousand marks?!’

‘That is what our speakers generally receive. Good pay for good work. The reverse is true as well, something that is unfortunately too little understood in this country. I beg you to excuse the little power cut, there have been more and more recently. I don’t think it will have distracted you too much; you were speaking without notes anyway. Oh, and there’s one more thing …’ Arbogast opened a drawer and handed Meno a heavy, leather-bound tome. ‘Our visitors’ book.’ He picked up a fountain pen and slowly unscrewed the lid. ‘With a joke if possible, please. You should know that I collect jokes.’ There was a knock at the door. Alke came in, whispered something to the Baron.

‘Oh yes.’ Arbogast drummed his fingers on the desk. He drew the visitors’ book to him, leafed through it, took the pen, looked at Meno reflectively. ‘In the garden, you say?’

‘Yes, Herr Baron.’

‘Has anything been affected? The heating plant? The greenhouses?’

‘As far as we could tell, no, Herr Baron.’

Arbogast screwed the lid back on the pen, stroked the visitors’ book. ‘Herr Londoner asked me to tell you that he and his wife would be delighted if you were to visit them again. Once more, many thanks for coming, Herr Rohde. We’re going to the observatory now, but you’ll be tired.’ He stood up and shook Meno by the hand.

20. Dialogue about children

‘To have children is a great responsibility …’

‘They aren’t toys one can acquire when one feels like it and throw away when one doesn’t like them any more.’

‘One has to think about these children. Wouldn’t one be prepared to give them everything? To do everything for them? So that they are brought up to be decent people. Can blossom out?’

‘Well, Herr Doktor, I’m not telling you anything new there, although it’s difficult to be a good father to all one’s children at the same time.’

‘You don’t know what I’m talking about. But we know where you go … On Thursdays. — Your wife, does she know too?’

‘We were talking about children. Do you smoke? Would you like something to drink?’

‘We want to try and keep this conversation calm. Calm and matter-of-fact. Part of that, however, is that in future you must be more careful with our invitations. When a letter’s left opened, it does invite people to read it, however ordinary it might look, it’s the way things are, a natural human instinct.’

‘Some nurses, some colleagues are interested in whom their senior doctor corresponds with. And a secretary’s job is to deal with letters, opened and unopened ones …’

‘Are you a hundred per cent sure of your secretary? — We are talking calmly, perfectly calmly, Herr Doktor. — Look, among other things I’m responsible for the hospitals in this district. The health services are — you know that as well as I do. But how can one improve something?’

‘That is the question. Grumbling and grousing will get us nowhere, your boss is absolutely right there. That’s something else you know just as well as I do. But perhaps there are disruptive influences?’

‘I’m a qualified electrician, you know, and if one thinks of one of these hospitals as a complex circuit … You only need one break and the current stops flowing.’

‘The current is still there, the circuit is the right one, but somewhere in this complex network there’s a blockage, whether it’s arisen by chance or not …’

‘Do you think that hospitals that work, factories that work are not in our interest? There was a time when you thought differently about these things — about interests. Once you were completely on our side. Oh, no, no. As a student one is no longer an child, no longer a silly little boy …’

‘At nineteen one is grown up, responsible for one’s thoughts and actions … You studied and were active in Leipzig, we know that. And you knew that lip service is not enough, that fine words are nothing in themselves.’

‘You were ready for more. May I show you something …’

‘That’s right, Herr Doktor. With your declaration of commitment. And reports. Most of them are rather wordy, in that I agree with my colleagues in Leipzig. But these reports definitely contain substantial information.’

‘At nineteen … you were a good observer; at nineteen others were officers in the war, partisans, I knew one person who at nineteen was a commander in Budyonny’s army … How angry you could get! What a low opinion of the workers you had, in nineteen fifty-three … And by then you were twenty … And a fighter, Herr Doktor, fully on the side of our cause. If you had had your way, Herr Weniger would have been thrown out of the university.’

‘Fortunately my colleagues were rather more circumspect than you and have kept a good gynaecologist for our country. You hated him, him and his secure position, him and his defeatism, that wasn’t consistent, since Herr Weniger stayed here after all, his naked realism that refused to believe in anything … Just as much as you adored his girlfriend of the time. But then you didn’t write anything about that, about the four times you went to see her … If you should happen to be interested in what Herr Weniger was doing during that time …’

‘Quite right, he was being questioned. Not for his diploma. That was the version his girlfriend told you. — But we digress. If these children have particular talents, it would be negligent of a father not to support them to the best of his ability. Just suppose your sons were musically gifted, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to obtain the clarinet or cello for which they show such talent? See that they have lessons?’

‘And then it is often the case that children who are musically gifted have talents in other areas as well, they’re not stupid, they have no problems at school.’

‘Perhaps they could become outstanding scientists. Engineers. Technologists.’

‘Or doctors. Of which our country has such great need. — You would like what? Well we do need a little light, Herr Doktor.’

‘But that kind of university course costs money, a lot of money. And the senior high school beforehand. Money that belongs to our state and that it generously disburses for those who, through their qualifications and profession, will at some time in the future occupy privileged positions. Does our state not then have the right to find out who it is who wants to go to university, where they come from and so on?’

‘Whether he intends to employ the knowledge he has acquired here and, as I said, at the state’s expense for the good of that state and in the service of the people who, by their work, have made his studies possible. We consider that a legitimate interest.’

‘So we ought not to be in such a hurry to close your file as our colleagues in Leipzig believe. Your wife seems to have diverted you from our course … Think my proposal over, sleep on it.’

‘Take your time. Oh, and one more thing: as you know, doctors are needed in our country. It would be a betrayal of the patients in your care. — Comrade Sergeant, show the Herr Doktor out.’

21. Caravel

The Santa Maria had lateen sails with red crosses, the Nina was fat-bellied, curving over the waterline like a Turkish sabre, Robert said: It’s floating on its hump, and then came Magellan’s ships, sea spray splashing up at the bow, yards torn off in the horse latitudes, the Roaring Forties, masts eaten away with salt and rigging leached dry; Magellan with his telescope on the afterdeck and it was the void into which he was staring, the void explored by Spain and Portugal, wave-torn rocks, dead bays, black holes that kept on swallowing up horizons, suns, moons, signs of the zodiac over the wind-creased sea, and despite everything Magellan looked like a man who had time, that struck Christian as odd and he would spend ages observing the Commander as he circumnavigated the world on a poster opposite the bed. His journey was a string tied round the globe, the equator a cord holding the world together at its fattest place; once right round, from then on there were borders. And beside the bearded seafarer, Gagarin was waving, a man in a space capsule and that, too, had encircled the earth with an invisible string. The colours were slightly faded already, how old was the photo, had they cut it out of a copy of Army Review, out of Sputnik? Ornella Muti and Adriano Celentano next to them, photos from Film Mirror, Boot Hill with the, as Ina said, ‘incredibly’ blue-eyed Terence Hill; Captain Tenkes, the heroic Hungarian freedom fighter. For a moment the ticking of the alarm clock on a shelf above Christian’s head was as loud as the click of a metronome, tock, tock, tock, or was it the wooden leg of a buccaneer walking up and down on the deck of his death-trap of a ship, staring at Tortuga, a sharp-tongued parrot on his shoulder? … It must be hot on Tortuga, the mysterious island off Venezuela, as hot as in this bed: Christian threw back the quilt and put his arm over his forehead. Doctor Fernau had come on Sunday afternoon, had auscultated and percussed him with fingers flattened by a hundred thousand percussions, the pleximeter middle finger on the left, the percussion middle finger on the right, as Richard explained (and no one understood), and all of Fernau’s fingers had bristly hair, they had felt or, rather, kneaded Christian, which hurt quite a bit on his muscles so that Fernau had frowned, told him to Shut His Trap, and continued to knead unmoved, to examine his lymph glands, which he did unexpectedly gently so that Christian, who had anticipated being short of breath, swallowed in astonishment. Then Doctor Fernau scratched his unkempt, iron-grey hair, put his hand to his left breast but found nothing, since he wasn’t wearing his white coat but a loose jacket to go with his grey flannels with the broken zip and coarse felt slippers: he lived not far away from the Hoffmanns, on Sonnleite, the road that wound its way down the steep slope on the east side of the district. Keeping two fingers between Christian’s jaws, he rummaged round in his worn doctor’s bag that was coming apart at one of the seams, growled, ‘Right’, when he found a wooden spatula and rammed it, grunting ‘Aah’, into Christian’s mouth. ‘A bit furred, the lingua. But, my God, as long as it’s not festering … What have we here …?’ and screwed up his right eye, the left turned into a blue eyepiece behind the lens of his glasses, peered down his throat, the look presumably microscoping round his uvula, that was jiggling up and down apprehensively; Fernau tapped the spatula on his tonsil: ‘Out with the rubbish!’ Christian gave a rasping cough, saw Fernau’s gigantic eye as a monster’s and laughed on the doctor’s lenses, the Cossack moustache widened and slanted: ‘What we have here — clearly nothing at all. Spots of irritation, Waldeyer’s ring inflamed, but what of it, no need for the hospital, the lung’s rattling a bit, is there an important class test in the offing, young sir?’ Dr Fernau said, handing the spatula to Anne. ‘The lad has a bit of a temperature, it happens at his age, hormones sloshing round, you know, and so on. Keep him in bed, if you like, Frau Hoffmann, the compresses on his legs were a good idea, tea with honey, yes, something to bring his temperature down, yes, has he been sick? Well there you are.’

Influenza infection, Fernau had written, two or three days in bed on a light diet. ‘Could I have an appointment with you, Herr Hoffmann. I’ve got an ingrowing toenail that’s bothering me.’

‘A bit of a temperature?’ Anne asked in a quiet voice once Fernau had left. ‘He’s got forty point three. He calls that a bit of a temperature? Shouldn’t we get them to examine him at the clinic?’

‘Fernau’s been a general practitioner for thirty years, I think he knows what he’s doing,’ Richard replied. — The grandfather clock chimed: a quarter past ten. Anne had let the blind down, but arranged the slats so that a dim light seeped through into the room, pale grey and dismal, in which the heroes of the sea on the wall lost their attraction and Tortuga all its mystery; no ship’s hull bobbing along lethargically in a lagoon with the brass of a sextant glinting on the seabed, no roar of the waves against the prow of the building, as he had sometimes imagined he could hear on windy nights, no navigation lights to starboard or port; and the expressions of Robert’s football heroes said that Italy against Germany, Mexico ’70, had not been a truly world-shattering event, just a football match, in the days when Italy didn’t just play defensively; Uwe Seeler’s expression was blank, not that of a folk hero; World Cup, ’74: Paul Breitner’s hair looked like an electrified feather duster.

Christian got up, put on his dressing gown, staggered into the kitchen to have a drink of the tea Anne had set out for him in two Thermos flasks. In the larder he found an opened packet of Hansa biscuits, he tried one, the biscuits were damp and tasted like soggy cardboard. In Waldbrunn they would be having physics with Herr Stabenow. He didn’t look much older than the pupils with his boyish face and metal-rimmed glasses that kept on slipping down his nose; he would push them back up with the middle finger of his right hand, to which the class, despite its closeness to the gesture of giving someone the finger, paid less attention than to the set-up for the experiment: two chromium-plated spheres on slanting rods, a rubber band and a crank-handle, and when Stabenow turned it, sparks crackled between the two spheres — middle finger, metal-rimmed spectacles; magnets the size of ice-hockey pucks, Stabenow scattered iron filings between them that formed patterns of the electromagnetic field and glittering sheaves at the poles — middle finger, metal-rimmed glasses; but at some point or other they forgot the gesture, forgot their grins and followed, spellbound, Stabenow’s operations that never seemed uncertain; his experiments, which he set up and tried out meticulously in the little preparation cubicle next to the physics room, always worked and that naturally impressed them, for they could put themselves in Stabenow’s place and sensed their own cruel sharpsightedness that no teacher’s idiosyncrasy could escape, they knew that he could well be thinking that they were secretly waiting for him to make a mistake. Christian drank Anne’s strong fennel tea, annoyed that he was here in bed, sick, while the others could do experiments. At the high school he hadn’t liked physics, it was a subject that had too much maths for his taste; it was only when they got onto nuclear physics that he sat up and took notice, but only as long as it didn’t involve calculations — and when Arbogast, as patron of the Louis Fürnberg High School, had come and talked about his own life and about leading scientists he knew. With Stabenow it was different. He was passionate about his subject, the pupils could feel that. His whole body doubled up when he explained the principles behind the construction of a radio and, almost incoherent with enthusiasm, followed the tortuous route of the human voice through all the tubes, transistors, coils and resistances. At the end of the lesson his tie had slipped out of place — one of the so-called ‘bricklayer’s trowels’ you could buy in Waldbrunn and which, so it was said, his landlady chose for him as she did his socks: Herr Stabenow rented a room in one of the lanes leading off from the market. The blackboard was covered with sketches and formulae in his genius’s scribble and the remnants of several pieces of red and white chalk were scattered at an exuberant distance around the classroom. He had sparked off a real fever for physics among the boys, they all suddenly wanted to go in for splitting uranium, do great things in the field of microelectronics, invent pocket calculators with a hundred functions … first of all, however, to learn to smoke a pipe, for all the physicists of genius they saw in the photographs Stabenow brought smoked pipes: Einstein, Niels Bohr, Kapitza … Max Planck had smoked a pipe … or was it Heisenberg? The Nobel Prize at thirty-one … that left them fourteen years, that was piles of time, they’d surely manage it too. They just had to smoke a pipe all the time and learn to be significantly absentminded, like the physicist who one morning leapt onto his bicycle and, eyes fixed, pipe in his mouth, started to pedal, until someone asked him: Where are you going? — I’m going to the Institute. — Without a chain?

The fennel tea tasted horrible, Christian poured it down the sink. He looked out of the window, at Griesel’s garden, which was still in bare hibernation; Marcel, the Griesels’ black poodle, was jumping up and down in his kennel, barking, because the neighbours’ fat, grizzled tomcat, Horace, accompanied by his feline lady, Mimi, white with black paws, happened to be sniffing at the tomato sticks in the bed in front of his run and Mimi was elegantly licking her rolled-up right paw; Marcel howled and savaged his toy, a long roll of rags, but it had no effect.

Briquettes were being shovelled in the coalyard behind Griesel’s garden, familiar noises: shovels digging sharply into the pile, metal rasping over concrete, then the coal clattered into large metal scales, the shovels, briefly tapped to clear them of dust, scraped up slack, took a slithering run-up, dug sharply into the coal again, a little angrily, a little deviously, a little obsessively in the self-assured horny hands of Plisch and Plum, as the labourers were generally called in the district, after Wilhelm Busch’s mischievous pair of dogs, Christian had never heard their real names, one was tall and spindly, the other short and square, a suitcase on two legs, as Aunt Barbara said; and when there was a full hundredweight, the briquettes rumbled down the shiny chutes into gunny sacks that Hauschild, the misshapen, gnarled coal merchant with watery blue eyes shining in his blackened face, would lug round to the shed at the front, on Rissleite, where the customers were waiting.

Christian went back to bed. The light had moved on, the cloud-loom that since Saturday had been weaving a blanket of grey wool over the sky tore open in one place, sending sunbeams into the room: there was Robert’s table, the scattered football pictures, the Olympic photo books he’d borrowed from Niklas, beyond it, placed at a right angle to the window, his own table with the sloping writing top on it he’d made himself from left-over bits of wood and two drawing boards he’d bought from Mathes’s, the stationer’s on Bautzner Strasse, and immediately behind the table the case with his books, hardly three feet away. The tall, solid wood-veneer cupboards, standardized house furnishings, the RUND 2000 model from the state-owned Hainichen furniture works, five of which stood along the walls, leaving just enough space for a sofa, the desks and the bed — Robert’s had to be pulled out — weighed down on the room in their dark solidity. He didn’t like the room, consisting as it did of these heavy cupboards arranged square-on to each other and the carpeted void between them that could immediately be seen into from the door; there was something of a cage about it, the contents of which could be grasped at a glance. The posters on the wall seemed like foreign bodies, tolerated rather than welcomed by Anne, similarly the net with footballs, handballs and Robert’s football boots hanging from a hook over the end of the bed nearest the door. Christian closed his eyes, listened, must have fallen asleep, for he woke with a start when the living-room clock struck the hour. The garden gate slammed and immediately the Griesels’ bell rang: that was Mike Glodde, the mailman with the squint and the hare-lip who was engaged to the Griesels’ middle daughter and brought their mail to their apartment, but only theirs, for the others there were the central lockers at the far end of Heinrichstrasse that the Post Office had set up to make their delivery men and women’s route shorter; anyway, who wanted to be a postman now, in this phase of transition, according to the law of dialectical materialism, from ‘Soc.’ to ‘Comm.’? Christian smiled when he heard Glodde calling for ‘Mar-tsel’; eleven o’clock: the physics lesson was over and Stabenow would be closing it with his standard concluding exhortation: ‘And just think all this over — why! Why! Why!’

Music was fluttering round the building, a tune full of melancholy and bold sentimentality, sung by male voices: that was the 1930s close-harmony ensemble, the Comedian Harmonists. The tenor’s voice swept upwards, Ari Leschnikoff’s supple timbre, smooth as silk; Christian leant over, put his ear to the wallpaper, now he could hear the lower voices better as well. That was the Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone and at the same interval the record always made a little swerve, soft as butter. Steps and thuds mingled with the music, probably the Stenzel Sisters doing their gymnastic exercises … In their younger days they’d been acrobatic bareback riders in Sarrasani’s Circus. My little sea-green cactus — out on the balcony — hollari, hollari, hollaro … He lay down again. The fever had come back, the weakness in his limbs. Two of the three Stenzel Sisters lived upstairs, the third, the oldest, had a room with the Griesels, and that was something that made Griesel disgruntled: that he, as the officially appointed block superintendent, had had one of his rooms allocated to another person and the Hoffmanns hadn’t, and because there’d been telephone calls about it and remarks about square metres per head and number of children, a few months ago Richard, after a discussion with the Rohdes in the Italian House, had attached a sign, ‘Ina Rohde’, to the door. ‘She only pretends to live here, she never gets any letters,’ Griesel objected. Anne said, ‘Young girls nowadays just get their love letters slipped to them, Herr Doktor Griesel.’ Will we be going to the Baltic again this August, Christian wondered, together with the Tietzes as we did last year? Ezzo had been given a new, one-piece rod, made of very soft fibreglass and with a Rileh ‘Rex’ fixed-spool reel. The Tietzes would presumably go to Rügen again and if Ezzo was lucky the fishermen would take him with them to the lagoon off Greifswald, where there were the biggest pike. Only recently he’d sent a card to Christian in Waldbrunn, telling him he’d bought a spoon-bait, a wobbler and a cod-wiggler from Press’s, the specialist angling shop down in the Neustadt district, as well as some fifteen-pound line, green, they could try it out on the Kaltwasser some time.

Veroonicaa, Veroonicaa … The Stenzel Sisters were small and shrivelled, like old princesses, in the summer they always wore short skirts so that you could see their white calves with the angular lines of their muscles, their thick hill-walkers’ socks rolled down over their ankles. The sisters’ heads were covered in fine, soft hair that was so thin their parchment-pale scalp shone through; they braided it into buns the size of tennis balls on the back of their head, holding them together with hairnets, green, blue and red, that had shopping lists, reels of thread and safety pins stuck in them. They would greet him with ‘Krest-yan!’ when he went up the stairs to look at the photographs behind the glass door; and there was Magellan again, on the landing outside the two second-floor apartments, and his ship, this time on the Hoffmanns’ floor, a caravel with a high afterdeck, lateen sails and gossamer shrouds etched on the frosted glass of the door, the waves under the ship’s hull snaking back like a Malay dagger or Poseidon’s locks, dolphins swimming transparently to the walnut frame of the door that separated the landing from the cylindrical stairwell; and when it was dark and the apartment door was open, the lines of the ship were filled with the corridor light, it was as if an etching needle were engraving constellations on a black sheet of metal: the Ship, the Dolphin; in the glass door of the upper ground floor there were a wind rose and a Hanseatic cog; a windjammer and a relief etching of the Atlantic and South America with a fine broken line running round Cape Horn as far as Chile on the floor of the Stenzel Sisters and young André Tischer, who had moved in only recently … and alone, at that, a lad who was hardly twenty and his own apartment already, no wonder that there were rumours about him going round. He was the son of a high official, people said, who had gone off the straight and narrow, which you could tell from the fact that he had a boxer that he took for walks without a lead or a muzzle, always wearing black leather and his hair either close shaven or long and shaggy — a drop-out! Aunt Barbara declared, I tell you: he’s a drop-out! — a studded belt and cowboy boots, that made Robert green with envy, for where, ‘damn it all!’, was there even the least hint of boots like that in the whole of Dresden — so there! He’ll be one of the ‘Firm’, Niklas opined, he can’t even say hello, that in itself’s a symp-tom! — On top of that every Sunday an opera singer came to see him, cleaned the stairs for him with a steaming hot cloth that slapped on the steps like a great big eel, then went up, at which there was some crashing followed by a profound silence, a silence that Anne tried to fill with an embarrassed expression, a loud clatter of crockery, the noise of the radio and the abrupt observation that there wasn’t enough coal, at which Robert said, ‘If you insist’, and went to fetch some coal; a silence in which, slowly and irrefutably, the asthmatic creak of a bedstead arose, to be joined by the intense quivering of the Hoffmann’s hall light and, finally, the urgent cries of a female voice that sounded as if it belonged to a coachwoman who, thrown to and fro on the box seat of a carriage by wild horses and a bumpy road, still managed, screaming, to hold her course, accompanied by the yowling of the boxer and the rhythmical groans of the mattress springs, intermingled with the grunts of a coachman from a rival firm, ‘Last orders’, ‘Closing time’, the cry of the nightwatchman, and sometimes the opera diva would squeal because the dog was trying to rescue its master. Some thought André Tischer was a mysterious West German because he didn’t speak in dialect, but Richard waved that away and told a quite different story: young Tischer was the son of a couple who were both doctors and had lived in Blasewitz; one day, about a year ago, when the parents were sleeping after a strenuous period on duty, André’s younger brother had been playing with matches and set the house on fire, André had been away with friends; the neighbours, a violinist in the state orchestra and the aforementioned opera singer, had noticed the fire and tried to put it out; in vain. At first André, who had no relatives, had been taken in by the opera singer, but then the city had allocated him this apartment. He was currently working as an ambulance driver at St Joseph’s Hospital.

Voices, upstairs: sometimes the Stenzel Sisters would sing in their husky soprano voices, O take my hand, dear Father or All glory be to God on high, it sounded like cautiously establishing contact with a child and when the windows were open it could happen that Griesel would take the electric cable out of the cellar that gave onto his garden and attach it to the frog-like lawn mower. He might be thinking of the quotation about the shepherd feeding his flock, and if the shepherd looked like Pastor Magenstock, it could be all the more unforgivable for little lambs to put their hands together and pray, accompanied by mellifluous tones and blue-eyed unctuousness from the pulpit; for grown-ups to turn childish. The Stenzel Sisters went in armour-like clothes to hear Pastor Magenstock’s Sunday sermon, having taken off the rusty brooches — orchid flowers studded with paste gems, cranes’ crests dotted with red glass beads — they usually wore on their much mended crêpe-de-Chine blouses: It is a sin to enter the Lord’s House adorned with anything other than His Sign, and raised their wrinkled and gnarled rheumatic fingers according to that strict and chaste command that impressed Christian; and the Stenzel Sisters went to church with, on their breast, just a large, plain silver cross that would softly tap their blouse buttons to the rhythm of their energetic steps. With peaceful smiles on their faces, they nodded to those who came towards them then swung away to avoid them. — Yes, Saxon melancholy, it does exist! Christian heard Aunt Barbara say in a whisper, when they encountered the sisters, and her fingers would open like the seed capsule of old woman’s purse; she silently nodded her head and could be thinking of neglected duties, of opportunities beckoning from the sisters’ flat hats, from the veils of wide-meshed muslin with white spots the size of moths, under which their red lipstick blazed, from their hairnets and their mauve-gloved hands raised in greeting; Aunt-Barbara-secrets smouldering in the teeth-revealing smile, in the sketched nod of the heads. The sisters would straighten the pictures on the staircase with delicate, touching carefulness, as if they came from lovers or brothers in spirit; on Saturday mornings, once they’d finished their exercises — Kitty, the oldest sister, would do her ‘Müllers’, as she called her exercises after a gymnastics teacher from before the war, in the Hoffmanns’ garden — once their down pillows and quilts were airing on the windowsills, they would go down the stairwell to clean the paintings and display cases; for that they used dusters made of ostrich feathers (‘the best there are, Krest-yan, from Renner’s old department store’), that were discoloured and felted from forty years of trapping bits of fluff; it was only when it came to cleaning materials that the sisters were more modern, they would let one drop of Fit plop into the cleaning water, that was sufficient for the elaborate frames of bronzed limewood irreverently riddled with wormholes which, after washing, were rubbed with bergamot oil — as were, on the top floor, the leaves of a dieffenbachia, which was turning a palish green from lack of light, and the frames of the signed photos — and Christian sometimes wondered, when he was fetching coal, for example, and saw one of the Stenzel Sisters dusting a picture, whether she was interested in what was to be seen inside the frame, or whether the important thing for her wasn’t to dust, to look at the frame, but to immerse herself in memories for a while, for which she wanted to be alone, away from her sisters for an hour.

Christian had asked Malthakus, who collected not only stamps and postcards but also stories about the houses up there and the people who had lived in them: Caravel had belonged to Sophia Tromann-Alvarez, who was a native of Dresden; her husband, Louis Alvarez, had worked for the African Fruit Company in Hamburg, which was in partnership with the Laeisz shipping company, and had developed banana plantations in Cameroon, but later he had set up independently in the tropical fruit trade; after his early death in Africa, on an expedition with the Swedish entomologist Aurivillius, Sophia Tromann-Alvarez had returned to the city of her birth, had acquired Caravel and had spent her years of widowhood in memory of her husband and their time with the African Fruit Company; he could remember her well, she was tall and wore clothes made from floral cloth in exotic colours and went for walks with an umbrella and her three basenjis on a long lead, tapping the road audibly with her stick; her dogs bared their teeth and growled at every passer-by. There was a butterfly in Louis Alvarez’s display cases that Christian particularly liked looking at: Urania ripheus was written in Roman capitals underneath it and how delighted he was when Meno was with him and said, ‘Let’s practise a little.’ That meant something was going to be demanded of him, but that wasn’t what he was pleased about, for to describe to Meno something he’d observed was often to answer a question that had not been specifically asked, but indicated clearly enough with gestures: a wave of the hand, a raised eyebrow, the lower lip stuck out, and sometimes, as now when he was thinking about it in his unpleasantly warm sickbed, Christian wondered why he didn’t resent Meno’s demands, why he didn’t get angry with Meno when he gave him to understand, in a friendly but uncompromising way, that he was a poor observer and didn’t put his impressions into words precisely enough. He could feel resentful at school, even in subjects that didn’t attract him: he often got angry at the arrogant indulgence with which Baumann regarded his, admittedly poor, performance in mathematics; the feeling could be directed at classmates, for example recently when Svetlana Lehmann had rubbed his nose in a spelling mistake he’d made. Not with Meno, strangely enough — when Meno criticized him, it spurred him on to take the criticism to heart and correct it, he didn’t retreat, sulking, into a corner or harbour dark thoughts, as he had with Svetlana, who, though, had made sure as many as possible had heard what a howler the oh-so-self-assured Christian Hoffmann had made. With Meno it stayed in the family and his criticism was the admonition of his own inner voice, which Christian had suppressed in the hope of getting by without having to make an effort, spoken out loud. The point was not just to say: this is a medium-sized butterfly wing, but to respond to Meno’s question as to what that ‘medium’-size was related to by being more precise: this butterfly wing is matchbox-size. Then Meno said: Check your ideas of beauty; but when he told Christian with scientific coolness that it was a beautiful thing to be able to measure colours with a ruler, to fix something as softly ephemeral as this cyclamen-coloured moth from the central Congo in an inscribed circle and on a millimetre scale, then Christian felt reservations about following his uncle, a withdrawal, a loss of clarity: it was as if he were seeing a clear geometrical figure sharply drawn by thousands of quartz fibres focused in a beam, but suddenly some of those light fibres had broken off, giving the figure a slim parallelogram, frayed edges, jagged contours, and for a few moments Christian wasn’t concentrating on the moth any more but on Meno. At the sight of these butterflies in the display cases Alvarez had had constructed simply, but out of lignum vitae — they even had locks, but the keys had evidently been lost, none of the tenants had them — he was often caught up in a dream-like experience: he regarded the neatly arranged butterfly mummies and saw not only them, the specific outlines arranging themselves into the sense impression ‘moth’, the pigments, shades, patterns on the wing scales gleaming in the colours of scrap metal, but perceived, the longer he observed them, a kind of liquefaction in the area round the creature that seemed to him more exciting than Meno’s intention to describe here and now the butterfly, Urania ripheus, the Madagascan Sunset Moth, as exactly as possible. If Meno had said: to label it with words, Christian’s mind would perhaps not have needed to stray, but as it was, at the concepts Meno let fall with measured deliberation he was thinking of the pins the assistant preparing the butterfly had used to fix it, saw him in his mind’s eye place them with the delicacy of a precision engineer; but that was little in comparison with the delight Christian felt when, at a term such as ‘to impair’, which the tongue of his memory suddenly spoke, the Veronese green on the wings of the Urania moth suddenly started to move. This patch of Veronese green on an African butterfly, a diurnal moth, as Meno explained and Christian didn’t quite understand. His dictionary described moths as ‘night-flying butterflies’ so if this moth was diurnal, how come it was a moth and not a butterfly, but the scientists would presumably have their reasons for this apparent contradiction. A particular light at a particular moment, Meno’s face in profile: that was the experiment set-up that remained motionless as long as the catalyst had not been added; a state of expectation dripping with possibilities and Christian was excited by the idea that for precisely this chemical — as you might say — combination it was, of all words, the somewhat out-of-the-way ‘to impair’ that was the catalyst that, as if drip-fed from a pipette, released his state of inertia in a flash and made it pour into something new, which immediately, mysteriously, like the process of the coagulation of blood, calmed to form a new constellation. Dead-dry bodies behind display-case glass were transformed into prisms before widely varying realities: Urania ripheus was a symbol admonishing him in the darklight of a jungle, sleepy from treetops transliquefied with airglow, and ‘to impair’ was firmly sewn with threads of association to the green of the guiding wings, a colour of which Meno said ‘drunk to the last drop’ and Christian, remembering a visit to the Army Museum, ‘powder green’ because he couldn’t see anything moist about it, which it would have needed if it was to be connected to ‘drunk to the last drop’, at which Meno tilted his right hand, which had been reflectively under his chin, and held the palm horizontally upwards, which was as if to say: accepted, not bad, you could see it like that. This ‘you could see it like that’ was a touch different from the ‘if you say so’, which he expressed with the same gesture, but with a more slackened body, containing sadness that one couldn’t get through, perhaps only on that day, to the other person, that something seemed to have been confirmed, unfortunately, something that one had felt but had tried to banish from the temperature of the conversation, to stop the premonition from turning into the feared reality. ‘If you say so’ was, in the usage not just of Meno but of most of the Tower-dwellers Christian knew, a polite way of shutting oneself off, though initially only one door among many that were kept open, and even that door, if one had a closer look, was still ajar, the latch hadn’t clicked shut; and the perhaps politest form of these restrained little burials, expressed with a momentary lowering of the eyelids, was enthusiastic agreement. Magic was a word Meno did not like. He was in awe of what it stood for and what it expressed, only inadequately in his opinion and somewhat helplessly, ‘a label on a preserving jar in which the things are, if we remember’, as he said when Christian, furious at his own wordlessness and tortured by the effort to meet Meno’s demand for descriptive precision, tried to short-circuit it by using that word to characterize something that fascinated him in a way he still couldn’t explain. ‘You use it like a flyswatter, of course, walloping something on the head is one way of exorcizing it,’ Meno would comment, ‘but in doing that you just go round and round your own helplessness, as bad writers do who are not capable of generating a phenomenon — which would be the actual creative act — but are only able to talk about the phenomenon; to say “magic”, that is, instead of making something out of words that has it.’ At such moments Christian was overcome with a feeling of alienation and it oppressed him, he didn’t know why Meno had to be so strict and he couldn’t see the affection in the relentlessness with which Meno kept him and his thoughts, which yearned to be elsewhere, tied to this display case, the contents of which, during the hour or more of Meno’s drill, no longer transmitted to him the breathtaking contact, the sense of a hunt, that he felt when he walked past and let his eye wander over the colourful pharaohs. That silent flash which hit him as he was about to walk past but something opened up, making a large gate sucking into it everything he’d been thinking of at that moment: school, a football match, the Tomita disc, his application for a place at medical school after he’d completed the eleventh year, sometimes the shape of a drop of milk that had been spilt or the figures on the numberplate of Tietze’s Shiguli. All that was drawn out of him, leaving him with eyes wide and mouth open — and even forgetting to breathe. Christian did sense that Meno wanted to get beyond this phase with him, the invisible lips that were whispering to him were to be sealed once more, the images invisible, but he saw no sense in letting the colours go dull and the little symphony of shapes go flat. Often it was Meno who broke off. In that second, when his uncle let his head drop and rubbed his closed eyes with his thumb and index finger, the affection returned all at once, as if it had just been pulled away, like a piece of elastic, and let go again. There must be something other than just being overpowered by a commander of the moment and that was what Meno appeared to be looking for with the instruments of his precision. It seemed to Christian to be a deliberate distancing of himself from deeply rooted convictions, precisely because they were deeply rooted convictions. Perhaps they could no longer bear their load, or Meno wanted to progress and saw it as greatness, not as capitulation, to pay any price for it. He sensed that the reason his uncle was so unrelenting with him was that he saw those convictions in him, Christian, as well, something that came back, unconcerned, and that he knew all too well himself and had long wanted to combat, from the perspective of a different conviction. Which, because it wasn’t innate, took on something of a heroic air. And could contain suspicion of the ‘language of the heart’, as Meno, wooden-lipped, called it, pronouncing the quotation marks as well. Perhaps it was an occupational disease of scientists and editors, for to Christian the ‘language of unsentimental observation’ that Meno wanted to set against it — did he really want that? — seemed alien, even though he sometimes thought about it, for ‘as big as a matchbox’ was indeed more vivid and more accurate than ‘medium’-sized. Yet what always fascinated him first were the colours and not the tones, what was apparent burnt its mark into him first and not what was obscure, and that seemed logical, for what was obscure would not have been obscure if you had perceived it immediately, so what mattered to him was what made an impression on him and the rarest and, of its kind, strangest moth that looked unremarkable left him unmoved if he saw one beside it that looked like a flying paintbox, even if, as far as its frequency was concerned, it was the cabbage white of the tropics. Meno criticized his attitude, he was less fond of those specimens that, as he put it, ‘have all their secrets, if they have any at all, stuck on their coats’. He preferred the unremarkable ones, of which Alvarez had also collected a few; they were hung in a second case outside the Stenzel Sisters’ floor, where the staircase came to the glass door. It was a place of grey brightness that diffused through the high window over the stairwell: a seven-petalled glass flower in the middle of which hung a candlestick like an excessively stretched stamen. It was a row of moths, wood-coloured saturniids with eyespots on their wings; ‘from the race of the God of Lead and there: those are their watermarks’ — Meno pointed to the grain of the paper-thin wings, which reminded Christian of the rings of ripples after a stone has been thrown into a calm pond. They seemed to continue across the individual butterflies, combining them into a larger picture, of which they were only a part, as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. They looked very alike, only when you looked closer did the tiny differences between the individual moths appear. ‘Those are the orchestral parts over which the composer took the greatest care, even though the audience hardly hears them; but they are the ones that are particularly important to him, and you can pay him no greater compliment than to listen carefully, for what is the point of music if not to be listened to. These patches of crimson, moss-green and lilac, this blue that’s so intense it could appear on a lemon: these are high points, such as Italian bel canto composers love, as do the average opera-goers, who don’t go to the theatre to listen but to see, to promenade during the intervals, to get annoyed at the prices of the sandwiches and cocktails, and to be seen; who know in advance the “famous passage” where the tenor gathers all his strength to weightlift the top C and what comes after it; but what I’m interested in are the inconspicuous tissues, disguises, transitions; camouflage and mimicry; the construction of the beds in which the motifs, those “beautiful”, sometimes all-too-beautiful princesses lie. I’m not just interested in the bel étage, but in the coal cellar as well, the kitchen and, to extend the image, the servants in the composition.’ Thus far Meno. Christian thought about it. In the same way as, all those years ago when they’d been visiting the painter, Vogelstrom, in Cobweb House, and he’d heard the names Merigarto and Magelone and not forgotten them since, something of these conversations with Meno stayed with him, continued to have an effect on him, he could feel it like a foreign body that had penetrated him and was changing him, and at times such as these he searched in order to isolate, feel, observe it, to see if it would be harmful or useful.

The Stenzel Sisters’ gramophone had fallen silent. The Westminster chimes sounded four times, then two strokes: two in the afternoon. Anne would be home from work soon and Robert back from school. Then there would be voices, noises, unrest; Caravel would drift back into a far-off dreamland, memories in Magellan’s telescope. Christian closed his eyes. He thought of Verena.

22. Enoeff

In the evening the Rohdes came over. ‘Ill, are we?’ asked Ina, bringing a whiff of Koivo deodorant with her and Christian felt ashamed that he hadn’t aired the room. Ina sat down on the edge of the bed, ran her eye over Robert’s footballs, Terence Hill and Ornella Muti, crossed her legs, jiggled her foot. She was wearing high-heeled court shoes, fishnet tights and a miniskirt. ‘And how are things?’

‘Not bad. And you?’

‘Lots of stress at the university. Useless room.’

Christian was sweating but he pulled the blanket up over his chin because he had a spot there. Voices sounded in the corridor; Ulrich came in. ‘What’s that Fernau prescribed for you, the drunken wretch?’ Ulrich stretched out his hand, his left hand, and, as so often, Christian fell for it and grasped the back of his hand; Ulrich liked that kind of joke.

‘Dad.’ Irritated, Ina raised her eyebrows, which had been plucked to thin arches. ‘That’s defamation, you know.’

‘Who cares … that schnappshound … I’m furious with him, furious, furious! I can’t tell you how furious I am. Look.’ He showed Christian his inflamed right index finger. ‘He treated it as a “swelling of unknown origin”, differential diagnosis: “result of an unremembered hammer blow” — does he think I’m off my head?’

‘Well, you should have gone straight to Uncle Richard.’

‘And now it hurts, it’s throbbing and I can’t get to sleep. I’ve put some aluminium acetate on it, but it’s not done any good … And I’m furious!’

‘Dad.’

‘It’s all right for you to talk, you’ve no idea what it’s like when you’re this furious … and your finger’s this sore!’ Ulrich slapped his right hand across his face, which was fleshy and dark blue from his heavy growth of beard. Ulrich was bald on top; lower down, his head was wreathed in thick, rampant Latin curls that Wiener, the barber, cursed because they blunted his scissors; he had hair on his back and on his impressive belly, which Christian knew because in the winter Ulrich liked to stomp around in the snow wearing bathing trunks, to fall down, howling, and make an angel, though he preferred to call it an eagle, that is to make fan-shaped marks in the snow with his outstretched arms. Afterwards he would have a toughening-up shower with the garden hose, if it wasn’t frozen. His eyebrows were so thick they shone like two slugs; his only similarity to Anne and Meno was in the colour of his eyes: brown with green speckles. ‘Unremembered hammer blow, have you ever heard such a stupid diagnosis … Especially as I’m not left-handed.’ Ulrich started to stride up and down the room. ‘That lousy puffball, I’m furious. I’ve got this great fury inside me and I’m not going to let it go to waste!’ He looked for an empty space on Robert’s desk and slapped it several times with the flat of his left hand, accompanying it with strangled cries. ‘Out with it, out, out!’ He grasped the tops of the table legs and shook them, at the same time moaning with pain, for he was using his swollen index finger, squeezing the table leg as if it were one of the long Borthen potatoes he was determined to squash; he went red in the face from the strain of trying not to break anything while at the same time giving free rein to his fury, like a berserker whose frenzy threatens to increase because it is not allowed to be really frenzied and therefore provokes laughter.

In his mind’s eye Christian could see the impression in the iron balustrade on the Brühlsche Terrasse that was supposed to have been made by August the Strong with his thumb … Bored, Ina jiggled her feet. Ulrich seemed to have calmed down, for he was staring at the football pictures on the table, arms akimbo. Now there would be a special footballological quarter of an hour: Ulrich could always talk about football and knew simply ‘everything’ — at least he knew as much as Robert, and that was saying something.

‘What’s this, Chrishan? Laid up again, are we? In Fernau’s firm hands? And feeling more bitter than better, closed now those songster’s lips of yours?’ That was Aunt Barbara, known to the family as ‘Enoeff’ — she pronounced the English word ‘enough’ as if it were Saxon and used it, together with a determined karate chop, to indicate that some matter had been decided once and for all. ‘How are things at school, apple of my eye?’ Robert was the potato of her eye. Christian didn’t answer at once and Barbara was immediately worried, sat down on the bed and waved Ina and Ulrich away.

‘I was just going to have a chat with him about football, Bubbles.’

‘Enoeff!’

‘Dynamo against BFC!’

Christian shot up. ‘When?’

‘Enoeff, I tell you! Out!’

Ulrich gave Robert’s net of footballs an appreciative thump with his fist. His face twisted. ‘You’ll have to get a move on, Cuddles.’

‘Don’t call me that, Dad,’ Ina protested, ‘how often do I have to tell you?’

‘Out you all go. There’s a sick guy here, he needs some peace and quiet. — Did he lose his temper again? He’s impossible. And I’m married to him. Shows no consideration whatsoever and here you are, ill in bed. Men! … I tell you, Chrishan … You’re young and foolish and you meet them and before you know it, whoops! you’ve got a bun in the oven! I’m only telling you this because I hope you’re not like that. And don’t start something with Ina, that … wouldn’t be a good idea. Where would it lead, cousins …? I recently read an article about the risks with incest. You mustn’t let it go any farther, believe you me. I’ve already had a hint of the odd disaster. God, I’ve lost any influence over that child. She does what she wants and the guys she brings home, they’ve all got long hair and smoke! And listen to that horrible music. Chrishan’ — she took his hand and leant over him, her blue-grey eyes with the fine mascara lines round them looked like porcelain discs — ‘listen to me. You know what I always say … you mustn’t be a pipsqueak in this world. No, definitely not. We’re not big shots, no, not by a long chalk. But we’re not pipsqueaks either. — So, how are things at school?’

‘Quite good —’

‘You’re saying that out of modesty, aren’t you? You Hoffmanns have a tendency to keep things in a low key. Quite right too. What do you think of my new hairstyle? Sorry for putting you on the spot like that, but no one ever tells me anything. — You don’t have to say anything if it embarrasses you. I have great sympathy for the male psy-kee. You know that. And you read such a lot and people always say the more a person reads, the more problems he has with words. If you think my hairstyle’s good you can, for example … just give my hand a squeeze.’ Barbara smiled and shook her head proudly.

‘Were you at Schnebel’s?’

‘What an idea! I don’t go to that cheap hairdresser. Chrishan — it can’t look that bad, can it?’ The expression on Barbara’s face was the one she had when she stroked Chakamankabudibaba’s back and said, ‘You looovely cat’, as if she were checking what part of the coat she was working on at the moment its soft fur could be used for. ‘You do give a person a fright! I went to Wiener’s, of course. He’s the only one who understands women’s hair. It’s so difficult to get an appointment with him … Even those women from East Rome want to go to him, despite the fact that in ’56 … I think he even went to jail, down there in dear old Hungary. If only they knew? But I’m sure they do know, those … tarts. Yes, that’s the word. Wiener’s an old charmer and a bit eucalyptical as well — I mean, that toupee! He really shouldn’t, especially one that’s as black as liquorice — and he’s sure to be well into his fifties. And the hairnet as well. I mean — a man! And a hairdresser into the bargain. With a hairnet and that hussar’s moustache! At his prices … And then he walks in such a lah-di-dah way’ — Barbara had got off the bed and was imitating Lajos Wiener’s gait — ‘his hands raised as if he had to waddle along on them, and then he wiggles his hips and lisps, “I hope we shall see you again soon, dear madam.” My God, with his waiting list?! Then he gives you such an outrageous wink, screwing up the whole of his cheek, you have the feeling there must be a gypsy band lurking in the background and someone’s going to start hammering with those thingies on the what-d’you-call-it … You know, those little hammers that look like the spoons in the milk bar and those … zithers. Yes. Those boards with strings over them on which they … magyarize!’ She sat down again, stretched out her fingers with their generous complement of flower-rings, regarded her nails with their raspberry-coloured paint. ‘You know, Chrishan, I’m not just asking you for fun. The women at work are just jealous, you can’t talk with them about that kind of thing. They don’t tell you whether it looks good, for if they say that, they’d say it would ’ve been better if they hadn’t said that. Of course Ina thinks: the aged parent’s gone off her rocker. And of course I could ask Snorkel’ — that was what Barbara called her husband — ‘but he’d just mutter, “That’s really great, Bubbles”, but wouldn’t even look up from his SoWe — Soccer Weekly or whatever the magazine’s called. But you: I can ask you. I know that. You have an honest opinion and eyes in your head as well. Wiener, the man who won’t admit to fifty, just tells you what you want to hear because he wants you to come back. — I can see you’re too embarrassed to tell your aunt how much you like it. It’s nothing to cry over. After all, we’re all going to end up in communism and then we’ll have to cut off our hair anyway. Enoeff, my dear. You mustn’t talk so much, it’ll just tire you out. Have a good sleep.’

23. Breathing

Richard went into the cellar, to the workshop he’d set up in the old laundry. It was quiet down there. He was going to switch on the light, but then he didn’t bother; the twilight in the room calmed him down; the outlines of the objects had already blurred into the darkness, which seemed to be spreading out from the unpainted walls. It smelt of damp, mould and potatoes. He knew that it wasn’t a good idea to stay down there too long, especially not now, at the cold time of the year; in the spring and right through to the late autumn, on the other hand, when you could leave the window open, there was a smell of turpentine and dry wood, of paint and benzine. He had to change when he came to work down here, his clothes absorbed the acrid cellar smell and it was difficult to get rid of it. Despite all the disadvantages of the room, Richard liked being there — apart from the fact that it was a privilege to have extra space available for his hobby; he would have been happy with the smallest of attic rooms and would even have let Griesel have a corner. In his study he could be undisturbed — down here, on the other hand, he was alone. As in the operating theatre, the language was not that of words, but that of hands, which was familiar to him and in which he felt secure. He turned on the light, enjoying the clack as the black Bakelite rotary switch engaged; the carbon filament bulb that some predecessor had left cast an ochre tent over the room. His tools were his pride and joy and when he thought of ‘possessions’ then the first thing that came to mind was not a bank statement, the furniture in the apartment, the record player, the paintings by Querner or the Lada, but the wall cupboards with their rows of ring spanners, open-jawed spanners, the sets of cylinder wrenches, thread cutters and screw-stocks, the chisels. Not rubbish from some state-owned factory, but heavy, pre-war steel goods drop-forged in the Bergisches Land south of the Ruhrgebiet. He saw the thirty screwdrivers in the canvas roll with the broad leather straps, a present from his boss when he’d completed his apprenticeship as a metalworker, hexagonal bars, one blow from which could kill a man, forged from a single piece, the toolmaker’s seal punched into the handle; he saw the old drillbits made of solid brown iron, greased for the winter and wrapped in oiled paper as well, sitting in their birchwood case, in the compartments made to size for the thinnest to ones as thick as your finger. Meno often talked about poetry and Richard couldn’t always follow him, at such times Meno seemed to have gone off into regions that had nothing to do with Richard, had nothing to say to him, but one thing he did understand: when Meno told them that it was hard work and that something like the poems of Eichendorff — deeply moved, he recited them enthusiastically — couldn’t be tossed off in a day, that behind them was an intimation of something that Meno called completeness. And when Meno went on to say that in his experience simple people only rarely had access to that realm, though he begged those gathered there not to misunderstand him, he didn’t want to sound arrogant, but it was a fact that everyone knew but didn’t dare to say out loud because then the Party would be faced with the question as to whether their cultural policy, their image of the reading worker, was not based on false assumptions, Richard simply couldn’t go along with that, he didn’t like what his brother-in-law was saying about workers’ relationship to reading. He knew of enough counter-examples, and Meno’s assertion denied their sense of beauty and quality, and thus of poetry in another but not shallower sense. Oh yes, he understood very well what Meno was saying, even if his brother-in-law would not always accept that. The same feeling of profound satisfaction, of happiness perhaps, and perhaps also of release — that here for once there was a product of the human mind and the human hand that could not be bettered — this feeling that he could see in Meno’s face was something he, Richard, knew as well, only it wasn’t a poem that set it off but this workbench, and for his father it had been the inner life of a mechanical clock from the great period of clock-making in Glashütte, a testimony to craftsmanship and a meticulous technical ingenuity. Meno might well mock and think him a philistine who seriously dared to see poetry in a set of screwdrivers, but his brother-in-law was an odd guy, stuck in his world of the mind and letters but not seeming to know much about people. Hid himself away behind his desk and researches — then talked about workers and their appreciation of higher things … nothing but waffle, waffle. Richard felt tired, went over to the washbasin in the corner, behind the huge tub in which the washing used to be done. Now potatoes were kept in it. He washed his face, then stayed leaning over the washbasin, listening to the drops of water falling from his face and plopping onto the enamel of the basin — like bubbles bursting, unreal in the growing sound of his breathing. He felt so drained that he couldn’t understand how there could ever have been anything inside him: his childhood, his experiences during the war, the bombardment of Dresden, getting burnt, Rieke, his apprenticeship, university, Anne, the children. Perhaps we had a receptacle inside us that gradually filled in the course of our life but his, now, had sprung a leak and everything had run out. He washed his face again. The water was so cold his forehead and temples ached, but after he’d dried himself off with his handkerchief he felt better. He looked at the workbench, which went back to Alvarez’s time, the smooth wood of the work surface, polished by the touch of countless hands. It was so hard the woodworm didn’t attack it. He didn’t know what kind of wood it was, it was a coppery red, unusually solid, unaffected even by damp and mould. On it he’d made the table for Meno, the desks for Christian and Robert, the hundred-drawer cupboard in the study that had even earned the approval of Rabe, the singular, cigar-smoking cabinetmaker, tough as old boots, who, as he would say, couldn’t stand ‘amateurs’. Richard had made the cupboard from the two plum trees that had died during the autumn gales two years ago. What great pleasure the work had given him: planing, cutting to size, fitting the joints, and before that the laborious, detailed design work, repeatedly based on errors, for which he’d studied plans in museums and the Department for the Preservation of Historical Monuments. How he loved the resiny smell, how he’d been delighted when his plane had revealed the strong grain of the plum-wood, the look on Rabe’s face when he’d bought some bone glue that was bubbling in a washpot on an open fire in the cabinetmaker’s workshop — and how Rabe’s expression had brightened when he saw the cupboard and examined it, how the look of suspicion and contempt had turned to appreciation; that was something he would never forget.

There was a knock. Anne came in. ‘What’s the matter with you, Richard?’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me,’ he replied irritatedly.

‘But I can tell there’s something the matter. You’re not yourself, you’re running around like a bear with a sore head, hardly have you got home than you disappear into your study … you yell at Robert for some trifle, you’re grumpy …’

‘Problems at the hospital, that’s all. The usual stuff, for God’s sake. They’ve got this idea about the collective of socialist work, Müller’s demanding overtime from the assistant doctors, and from us as well, of course, the senior doctors are to set a shining example … And then the never-ending struggles in the hospital management meetings, we’re not doing enough to influence our colleagues to bear society in mind in their work and then it’s the Karl Marx Year and we’re supposed to “seize” some stupid initiative with our students —’

‘It’s not that. I know you. You’re different when it’s that kind of thing.’ She went up to him. He was turned away, leaning over the workbench, closed his eyes when she took his hand.

‘Is there something you’re keeping from me?’

They’d made it a rule not to discuss serious problems in their own home but on a walk. These walks were a general custom in the district. Couples were often to be seen walking in silence and with heads bowed or in a discussion with hurried gestures — one could only assume it was being held in a whisper, since it immediately broke off as soon as others came within hearing.

‘Is it another woman?’

‘No. What makes you think that? No.’

‘So it isn’t another woman?’

‘No. No! I’ve just told you.’

‘You hear this and that. People pass rumours on to me.’

‘Rumours, rumours! Are these rumours worth anything? It’s just people making things up.’

‘A colleague of mine has a sister who works in the Academy, another was recently a patient in your orthopaedics department —’

‘Stupid gossip!’

‘So it’s not another woman.’

‘How often do I have to tell you: no!’

These problem walks seemed to have become more frequent recently. There were days when it seemed to him as if all the inhabitants apart from the children had left their apartments and were walking round the streets, murmuring, so that the whispered conversations were constantly being interrupted to say hello, raise your hat, wave. How grotesque it was! He couldn’t help laughing — broke off. That he was still able to laugh! Anne gave him a disturbed look. She had wrapped up warm and was grasping the collar of her coat with her hands.

‘And you believe this scandalmongering! They’re trying to pin something on me, perhaps out of jealousy —’

‘They? Who’re they?’

‘Not your colleagues.’ Richard leant against a fence. ‘They’ve dug up the old business. When I was a student. Back in Leipzig.’

He started to tell her about the discussion, at first hesitantly, disjointedly, by fits and starts, then more and more urgently.

‘But what reason could they have …? After all these years …’

‘I don’t know.’

Sometimes several couples could be seen leaning against a fence, sometimes Arbogast turned up; he had a strange sense of the comic, would greet them silently with his stick and if it was a fence on Holländische Leite he would have chairs brought up from the Institute.

‘This old story … did you tell me everything back then?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And Weniger … does he know about it?’

‘No. No he can’t know about it.’

‘He’s your friend … The way you treat him, pat him on the shoulder, sometimes I watch you and —’

‘Do stop it!’

‘And I’m afraid. You can’t tell, not at all. Perhaps you’re deceiving me, perhaps you’ve been deceiving me all these years, just as you’ve deceived Weniger —’

‘Anne! Can’t you understand? Can you really not understand? I … I was different then, the fifties in Leipzig, you never went through that, the mood there was then, and I was honestly convinced as well —’

‘So honestly that you shopped your friend to them. My God, I’ve been living with —’

‘Anne!’ Richard had gone white as a sheet. He grasped her by the shoulders, shook her. ‘We’ve talked about this already, talked until we’re sick of it, right down to the very last detail, don’t throw it at me again now. That’s what they want! They want it to drive a wedge between us, they want to use it to destroy us because … because they’re afraid of love, yes, that’s it. Because they’re afraid of people sticking together and …’

Anne burst out into a shrill peal of laughter. ‘Afraid of love … What nonsense you’re talking. You ought to hear yourself, how … sentimental and ridiculous you sound. That isn’t you at all and I don’t want to hear any more of your pseudophilosophical analysis … My God, Richard.’ She raised her hands, shook them at him, burst into tears.

He embraced her. They stood like that for a while. Richard stared at the street, shadows moved and came nearer. He closed his eyes, opened them again, the shadows had disappeared. Treetops and hedges, their branches still dead and bare, were hanging over the fences; there was a mild breeze and a smell of grass trailing through the air that smelt of coal. In his mind’s eye he saw the sheet of paper with the figures on that Lucie had given him for his birthday, the seven wearing a hat, the five smoking a cigar. He tried to repress the image but he couldn’t, it kept coming back, the figures seemed to be alive, malicious creatures that kept on bouncing back up. Lucie coming in through the door, carrying her teddy bear, complaining she had tummy ache. The smiling dolls in the hall. Then he felt as if Josta were looking at him. He shook his head, but that image wouldn’t disappear either. ‘Let’s move on.’

They headed for Turmstrasse, walking in silence for a while. He observed Anne. She wasn’t crying any more, was staring straight ahead. Again he remembered one of the evenings when the whole district seemed to be on the move. People embracing each other had been standing, silent and motionless, out in the streets. The lamps cast a pale light, which suddenly went out, it was dark in the houses all round as well. A power failure. Then something grotesque had happened: Julie Heckmann, generally known in the district as Julie-the-horses, standing with Frau Knabe, had burst out laughing, a hoarse male laugh, swelling into a piercing screech such as he had never before heard; it had gradually infected all those out there, even the ones embracing each other, and set off an outburst of laughter that seemed strangely liberating, vital, now sobbing, now roaring, spreading down the streets; you could hear windows in the houses all around being opened, suddenly someone shouted, ‘Bureaucracy!’, in response someone else shouted, ‘Individualism!’ and another, ‘Socialism!’ — ‘I’m frightened,’ a woman cried, another, ‘Me too!’ and still the laughter echoed round the whole street, interrupted by shouts of ‘Shh!’ and ‘Be quiet’; ‘Soon there’ll be zilch left to scoff,’ someone brayed in a disguised voice, ‘There’s no meat left in Wismar,’ came a squeak out of the darkness; ‘Is there a war on in Poland?’ — ‘Don’t tempt fate, for heaven’s sake!’ — ‘Are they frightened as well?’ roared a female voice Richard thought he recognized as Frau Knabe’s. — ‘Sure they are! Of us!’ and once more the street shook with laughter, and it came from the buildings as well. ‘Marx-isn’t!’ — ‘Stalin-isn’t’ — ‘Hey: generalism.’ The barking of dogs could be heard, immediately the laughter died away and the people quickly dispersed. Someone came towards Richard, stopped close beside him, scrutinized him, hesitated; it was Malthakus, he tipped his hat with his cane, whispered with his sly smile, ‘Well, neighbour, and what’s your problem?’ then quickly disappeared in the darkness.

Richard pulled his coat tighter round him, the memory of the incident had made him uneasy.

‘So they’re trying to put pressure on us,’ Anne said; he was grateful for the ‘us’, but she didn’t take his hand. ‘We must think what we can do.’ Her voice was firm again. That gave him back the power to think clearly. ‘There are two alternatives, either I play along with them — or I don’t play along with them.’

‘It’s not a matter of playing,’ she replied quickly and tersely. ‘Exit visa. We have to get out of here. We can ask Regine about making an application.’

‘What are you going to ask her? How to fill out the form correctly? It won’t work. They made it quite clear to me that they won’t let me go. Doctors are needed in our country … it would be a betrayal of the patients in your care …’

‘They can’t simply hold us here!’

‘That’s precisely what they can do. Then we’ll be stuck here and I’ll be chucked out of the clinic — it wouldn’t bother me, but there’s Robert and Christian to think of … We wouldn’t have got anywhere.’

‘But we don’t have to report people!’

‘And the price we’d pay would be our children’s future?’

‘But spying on people, is that a price we want to pay?’

Richard didn’t reply.

‘One possibility is that we stay here — and Christian and Robert can apply. As soon as they reach maturity.’

‘Do you know what you’re saying, Anne?! What would happen? Christian would be chucked out of the senior high school and Robert wouldn’t be accepted for it.’

‘Christian will be eighteen this year, Robert in two and a half years. They’ll lose time anyway. In the army. So if they have to wait for this or that —’

‘You’re assuming everything will work out the way you imagine. And if it doesn’t? If they don’t give them a visa? If the boys can’t leave the country? Do you know if they want to, anyway? We’re talking without taking what they think into account, it might just be too much for them?’

‘And perhaps not. We should discuss it with them.’

‘And what are they to do while their applications are being processed? Regine’s been waiting for two years and you know what a state she’s in. Sacked from her job with the city administration, branded as an agent of imperialism in front of all her colleagues —’

‘— and now she’s an unqualified secretary at St Joseph’s and she only got the job because you’re acquainted with the medical director. I know that.’

‘And the boys? They’d take their revenge on us by leaving them to stew much longer, you can be sure of that! Then they’ll be stuck here, no school-leaving certificate, unable to go to university; they’d have to do an apprenticeship … Christian — what trade could he learn? And perhaps they’d never get out anyway. Stuck here, their lives thoroughly mucked up … Do you think they could forgive us that?’

‘One of my colleagues has an application being considered. Despite that she’s still working with us and her daughter can finish school.’

‘They treat some people this way, others that way, but you can’t guarantee anything. I think it’s pretty unlikely we would be dealt with in the same way as your colleague. Do you want to try and see what comes of it?’

They walked beside each other, heads bowed.

‘What about Sperber? Couldn’t he do something?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know him particularly well. And I don’t trust him either, to be honest. We’d be taking a huge risk if I were to go and tell him everything. What would happen if he’s one of them … or collaborates with them? Don’t you think he must have one foot in their camp? Perhaps he’s a kind of front man, a lure they set out for us?’

‘Meno says there’s a few authors he’s helped.’

‘Could be. But even if he’s not one of them, would he help us? Who knows which authors he’s helped and in what kind of situation? At the least inconvenience to any reasonably well-known author, the press over there screams blue murder. But for us? For a doctor and a nurse no one’s ever heard of? Do you think Sperber can do anything if they give him to understand there’s no interest over there?’

‘I’m tired … Shall we sit down for a moment?’

Richard nodded. They’d walked as far as the ‘October View’ as the little circle surrounded by a pergola in Mondleite Park was officially called; the locals still called it by the old name of Philalethes’ View, after the nom de plume of King John of Saxony, the expert on Dante. In the middle of the flat hilltop was an obelisk with the names of people from the district who had died in the world war.

‘Should we drop in on your brother?’

‘No … I don’t want to. He’d think there was something wrong right away. — And there’s one thing we have to sort out: how do we tell the family?’

‘We have to think very carefully about whether we tell them at all.’

‘For me there’s nothing to think about. Of course we must tell them.’

‘Even at the risk that we can’t be sure whether Ulrich for example …’

‘He may be in the Party but he’s not an informer!’

‘What makes you so sure? Didn’t you warn me against him yourself? You remember, when we were walking home from the Felsenburg.’

‘But he’s one of the family … He wouldn’t go that far!’

‘Because he’s your brother — and my brother-in-law? Because he likes the boys and takes them to football matches?’

‘I don’t know. I just can’t imagine he would be capable of informing on you. Still … Yes, perhaps I can’t imagine it because he’s my brother. Father brought us up to be neither moral cowards nor informants. Do you know what he used to say? You know what’s the lowest form of life? A man who’d inform on his friend or his wife.’ She quivered, slumped forward, started crying again. Richard sensed that she didn’t want him to comfort her and went to the edge of the paved area, which had a wrought-iron balustrade with a stylized nautilus, eaten away by rust, worked into it. Beyond it the park fell away steeply. There were lights on in the House with a Thousand Eyes and in the Elephant opposite, at the Teerwagens’ a window was opened. Scraps of music, voices, laughter. There seemed to be a party going on. How carefree … Richard suppressed the thought. ‘Shall we go and see Regine?’

‘No … not now,’ Anne murmured. He rummaged round in his pockets, found the twenty-pfennig piece he kept for emergencies. ‘I could call her. There’s a phone booth at the crossroads there.’

‘It’s kind of you to try and distract me but … no. I want to go home. I’m very tired.’

He went over to her, sat down beside her on the bench. ‘Anne, it might be helpful to talk to her. Perhaps she can see possibilities we’ve overlooked. And we can trust her.’

‘Her, I agree, but not the bugs in her apartment. — Are you going to tell your colleagues?’

‘No. At least not for the moment. I can’t trust them any more than I can Sperber. Most of all Wernstein, but who knows, sometimes it’s the most trustworthy … I can do something else before I confide in my colleagues. I can accept.’

‘You really want to do that? You want to work for those bastards?’

‘Anne! — I’ll only pretend to. Give them trivial stuff, play stupid — and I’ll go on like that until they realize they’ve got a poor catch in me. I have to be no use at all to them, perhaps that will give me a chance.’

‘Don’t you think they’ll notice?’

‘I’m sure they will notice. But what can they do? Even a senior doctor doesn’t get to hear everything that goes on in his clinic. And isn’t it logical that the assistant doctors will hold their tongues in my presence?’

‘And if they set a trap for you? What if one of your operating-theatre nurses says something incriminating and you behave as if you hadn’t heard it, but that nurse is one of them and the next time they ask why you’ve been withholding information?’

‘That would be a mistake on their part, don’t you think? Then I’d know that nurse was one of them.’

‘And if they don’t ask you about it? But quietly draw their own conclusions … Then one day they present you with the bill —’

‘If, if, if! Do you see any other alternative?’

‘Get out of the country.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Anne. Surely you’re not serious. Even the attempt is a punishable offence. They’d nab us straight away and we’d end up behind bars … Getting out! How do you imagine we’d do it? With the boys? Or would they stay here? Should we dig a tunnel? Swim across the Baltic —’

‘Your student friend managed it.’

‘He was a serious swimmer, Anne, took part in competitions. He lived alone and knew exactly what he was taking on. If he’d been caught he would have been the only one to take the consequences. Do you know that they falsify our maps? A patient told me recently. According to our maps, you think you’re in the Federal Republic — in reality you’re still in the GDR. Rivers don’t go where they’re supposed to go according to the map, in the border area the roads and paths aren’t marked —’

‘Yugoslavia —’

‘Anne.’

She burst into shrill laughter. Richard looked at her. ‘Let’s go home.’

They lay next to each other, awake, in the beds they’d put together when they were first married; each listening to the other’s breathing.

24. In the clinic

He was still fascinated by the noises in the building; sometimes he would open the door of his office to listen and the gap would seem to him like the bell of an ear trumpet, like the connection between the middle ear and the pharynx, lined with mucus and cilia (it reminded him that he ought to get the paediatrician to have a look at Lucie, she kept swallowing and complaining that it hurt; protracted inflammation of the middle ear was dangerous); once he’d opened the door, he would close his eyes and listen, for you could not only tell the things that were going on in the clinic from the noises, but also the mood in which they were taking place, what the atmosphere was like and how, as if the clinic were a collective organism like a swarm of bees, it would change with the slightest disturbance, the least excitement. It was the time when the clinic prepared itself for the evening; an in-between time: the day’s work was now largely over; the patients who had been operated on were back in their beds, had been examined during the afternoon rounds and had had the attention they needed, the early-shift nurses and the patients’ visitors had left; there were no more lectures or seminars at this hour either. The solidly built carts that looked like cabin trunks, with the insulated boxes for hot meals, and that the nurses pushed from room to room to distribute the food to the patients, were not yet clattering along the PVC of the clinic’s corridors. The castanet click-clack of head nurse Henrike’s clogs doing the evening inspection tour of her realm could still not be heard. She lived alone with her mother, who needed looking after, and her son, who had broken off two apprenticeships, in a cramped apartment on Augsburger Strasse, not 500 metres from the Academy, a chubby, maternal-looking woman who had shown childlike delight at the Hufeland Medal that had been awarded her on ‘Health Service Day’. Phones rang, washing carts rumbled along in the bowels of the building; the doors of the offices beside his banged open and shut. Most of his colleagues were still there, they’d finished their visits to the wards and would now be going to the laboratories, to the libraries, or writing assessments or reports on operations. Richard had gone to his room to have a rest, it had been an exhausting day. He had been in the operating theatre from seven in the morning until five in the evening and had had no more than three cups of coffee and the sandwiches Anne made for him in the morning. He was on duty but he wouldn’t be called for every minor matter; Dreyssiger and Wernstein were experienced specialists, he could rely on them.

He lay down on the examination couch, rolled over and over. Then he lay on his back and stared up into space. Ambulances arrived, sirens wailing, he heard an ambulance of the Emergency Medical Services thunder up the hospital ramp: cries, hurried steps, the clatter of trolleys. They’d call him if he was needed. He couldn’t relax, stood up. He felt dazed with dizziness and tiredness, he went over to the window for a breath of fresh air. He grasped the window latch and leant his forehead against the glass. Then he tried some knee bends, perhaps his tiredness came from a lack of movement, the unhealthy posture in which one was frequently obliged to carry out an operation, recently he had often become exhausted very quickly. He sat down at his desk, on which a few specialist periodicals lay open. He was interested in an article on a new method of operating on Dupuytren’s contracture, a progressive condition affecting the tissue of the palmar fascia; he had intended to study it thoroughly, since the disease seemed to be increasing in frequency. In the last three months alone he had had fourteen outpatients suffering from the condition. Eventually it could lead to the hand being completely deformed, nodules developed in the connective tissue, causing it to shorten; in the final stage of the illness the hand cannot be opened. Who were the authors of the article … Of course, the Hamburg group under Buck-Gramcko, the high priest of hand surgery. He could have bet it would be him. It was the fifth publication since January he’d seen by that team and it was still early in the year. And what did they do here, in this country? Mostly they just copied what they did over there, they evaluated the developments but didn’t determine them themselves, they thought about how other surgeons’ results could be applied creatively to conditions over here; that is: they improvised … He read the few sentences from the abstract of the study. When he’d done so he knew that they’d be unable to use any of the results because they lacked the technical resources. The old story. And they were surprised that people got out … Why hadn’t he got out while there was still time? He couldn’t concentrate any more, pushed the article to one side. How tired he was, he couldn’t even be bothered with his hobby, hand surgery. He couldn’t be bothered with anything since his discussion with Anne … But he mustn’t let himself go, he’d always abominated that. If the world consisted entirely of people who let themselves go as soon as things got difficult, they’d still be living in caves as hunter-gatherers … A couple of coffees and a decent meal would be enough to perk him up again, he decided. As he went to close the window, he saw Weniger coming from the Gynaecological Clinic.

‘Richard.’ Weniger waved. ‘We’re both on call, great! Perhaps we can chat for a bit.’

‘Aren’t you going home?’

‘Then the duty assistant would be left on her own. We’ve got a few difficult births due. Once it starts they’ll fetch me anyway, so I might as well stay here.’

‘Are you coming over for a bite to eat?’ The suppers that the nurses made for those on duty in the Surgical Clinic had a good reputation in the Academy.

‘That’s exactly what I was going to do, old chap.’

‘I just want to go round the wards first —’

‘I’ll join you, if you have no objection.’

They told Casualty they’d be doing a round together. These rounds with colleagues from other clinics were standard practice in the Academy; in that way you learnt the most important innovations and problems of the other field from an expert, as if in a private lecture. In general the hospital routine didn’t leave enough time to keep staff informed about the state of things in neighbouring disciplines.

First of all they went round the general surgical wards, for Richard hardly knew the patients there at all. If he was called during the night, it was useful for him to have at least a rough idea about them. From the duty rosters he saw that capable nurses would be on night duty. He gave the late-shift nurses a routine and preoccupied ‘Good evening’, got them to show him the files of the tricky cases and studied them while Weniger joked and chatted. ‘Well then, Karin, how’s the house coming along?’ The nurses emptied the medicine basket, set out the evening doses.

‘How do you think it’s coming along, Herr Weniger? If only you could get some decent craftsmen. Recently I called the electrician because the geyser wasn’t working. “Payment in Forum cheques, is it?” And he wouldn’t come after six in the evening anyway — at that time he’d be enjoying his well-earned rest.’

‘He wanted a Forum cheque from you? The scoundrel!’

‘Or Western currency, Herr Weniger, which comes down to the same thing.’ The deputy ward sister on South I shook her head in outrage. ‘Recently my neighbour had the plumbers in to install wash-basins and when they heard he couldn’t pay in West German marks, they tipped concrete into his drains!’

‘They ought to be reported to the police, the whole lot of them!’ Weniger thumped the table.

‘Then you wouldn’t get another tradesman for the rest of your life.’ Sister Karin sighed. ‘That’s the way things are. The only solution would be — aren’t you feeling well?’ She looked at Richard, concerned; he waved her question away. ‘It’s all right now. Perhaps I should eat something. And a coffee wouldn’t be a bad idea either. No, that’s all right. I’ll get some in my own ward, thanks all the same. Shall we go, Manfred?’

He could feel their eyes on his back.

In North I they had a coffee; the nurses had put Richard’s mug out ready, an extra large tin mug with his name and the transfer of a laughing swordfish on the enamel; the coffee revived him, it was lukewarm and bitter (everyone he knew thought that was revolting); it was his favourite way of having it because he didn’t have to waste time waiting, he slurped the coffee down, like a drug, in a few greedy gulps. Weniger observed him, taking little sips, very precise, very practised, Richard found it slightly affected.

‘Problems?’ Weniger asked as they were going round the ward.

‘The usual, you know. On top of that I’ve had an exhausting day.’

‘Müller?’

‘No, no. You mean our jokes at the birthday party? Water under the bridge. We’ve other worries.’

‘Should I stop bothering you?’

‘I didn’t mean it like that. Come along, I’ll show you something.’ They went into a room; there were eight beds, each with a white-haired woman in it. A nursing auxiliary was just taking one of them off the bedpan; there was a smell of urine, faeces and Wofasept disinfectant. The women didn’t look up when the two doctors came in, they lay there, apathetic, staring into space or sleeping, their wrinkled hands on the white blankets. The auxiliary cleaned the woman with a few energetic wipes, picked up the bedpan, nodded shyly to them and scuttled out. That patient seemed to notice them. ‘Herr Doktor, Herr Doktor,’ she cried in a thin, pitiful voice, stretching out her arms. They went to her bed, sat down. Richard took her hand.

‘Herr Doktor, is my daughter going to come?’

‘She will come.’

The woman sank back into the pillows, gave a satisfied nod, leant forward again and, with a roguish smile, waggled her index finger at them. ‘You doctors are always telling fibs. Can’t I phone my daughter?’

‘When you can get up. And you can only do that when your broken thigh has healed properly.’

‘Oh, if only I could walk, Herr Doktor —’ She turned her head to the window, began to murmur; her fine, silver-white hair was like spiders’ webs round the old woman’s face.

‘Your daughter will come, I’m sure of that,’ Weniger said.

‘God bless you, Herr Doktor, God bless you. You know,’ she whispered with a sly smile, ‘I’m not mad, as they say in the old folks’ home, I … I’m just so thirsty.’

‘Sit up now.’ Richard picked up the feeding cup from the bedside table and gave her a drink, Weniger supported her.

‘Such a long life …’ She felt for Weniger’s hand, put something in it. He shook his head. ‘Keep it. You have greater need of it than I do.’ He put the mark coin on the bedside table. ‘It’s very kind of you, but please keep it.’

‘Thank you, gentlemen. Will you come again. Oh, it’s not good when you’re old and alone.’

‘We have to go. Here, take this, in case you need anything.’ Richard put the bell in her hand and attached the cord to her sheet with a safety pin.

‘They come from the care homes,’ Richard said outside. ‘They fall over when they’re going to the toilet during the night, break their femur, are operated on and have to stay in bed here until the break’s healed. Two to three months, depending on how quickly it heals. Then they lie in bed and get pneumonia. And that’s what they die from.’

‘Just like in our wards,’ Weniger said. ‘Women from the care homes, with bedsores, undernourished, confused because they’re thirsty. They’re dismissed as old and senile but they’re not, all they need is a bit of liquid. Here they’re looked after, revive — and go back to the care home.’

‘It’s the natural cycle,’ said Richard. ‘They come to you as young women and give birth, they come to me as old women and die. They haven’t got enough staff in the care homes. There’s never anything about that in the newspapers.’

‘Is there no method that makes it possible for them to put their full weight on it and stand up immediately after the operation?’

‘Not yet. Various teams over there are looking into it. I read something interesting recently. The idea is a kind of oversized nail inserted between the head and the neck of the bone. I showed the article to the technical director of the factory that supplies our equipment. Just out of interest, a general inquiry, no obligation. He phoned me: “Impossible. We haven’t even got the machines to make the machines that could make this thing.” ’

Weniger went over to the window, stuck his hands in the pockets of his white coat. ‘Cancer’s on the increase, significantly. Breast and the neck of the uterus, and the patients are getting younger and younger. — By the way, are all your patients so docile?’

‘She was a communist. Worked on the Red Flag, then, after the Nazis came to power, was active underground, went to Spain, to support the Popular Front. Emigrated to Mexico just before the end. Came back fairly late, when those returning from Moscow already had everything under control. Then she helped with building the Republic, once departed from the official Party line and was transferred to a subordinate position in the transformer and X-ray factory. And then she grew old.’

Weniger nodded, gave Richard a sidelong look; he noticed it, but avoided eye contact.

‘Let’s see what your famous supper’s like.’

The start of his spell on duty was unusually quiet. ‘No acute cases?’ Richard asked in Casualty.

‘Not so far.’ Wernstein spread his arms wide. Dreyssiger was looking after a sprained ankle, routine. The nurses were making swabs.

‘Slack tonight.’ Weniger replaced the telephone. ‘My difficult births are — asleep.’

‘Then let’s go over to my place,’ Prokosch, a senior doctor in the Eye Clinic, suggested; he’d been eating in the corner and filling in forms. He was another of the old Leipzig students at the Academy, though he’d qualified two years before Weniger and Richard. He was a brawny, stocky man who looked more like a wrestler than an eye specialist. No one could believe his short fingers, fat as cigars, had the sensitivity and delicacy of touch needed for operations on the eye that often enough, as Prokosch used to say, were as exacting as cutting a tuning fork out of a hair.

‘I’ve got a few cases that’ll interest you two. And we can always get some sleep.’

‘The god of night duty willing,’ said Wolfgang, a male nurse with thirty years’ service behind him. ‘What’s rule number one after it gets dark? Get as much sleep as you can. And be wary of those minutes of quiet — they’re the calm before the storm.’

The three doctors walked together in silence, deep in thought — what was there to discuss? They’d known each other for a long time and at work it was not usual, unless you were friends like Richard and Weniger, to cross a certain boundary in conversation. Private matters were kept out of it, not through lack of interest but through a sense of tact that appeared as fellow feeling which, according to an unwritten code, would have been violated by too confidential a conversation between colleagues. You knew whom you were dealing with, you knew who you were (or appeared to be), gave a silent nod and that was all, that was sufficient.

They heard hurried steps behind them, Nurse Wolfgang waved to Prokosch.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘Ward 9D. Your on-call presence is required in Dermatology. The god of night duty doesn’t like sleep.’

‘There’s no point in kicking against the pricks.’ Prokosch shrugged his shoulders in resignation. ‘We’ll see each other later, I should think. Off we go, then.’

An ambulance was approaching from the Academy gate, but without its blue light; they watched where it was going; it turned off to the right beyond the car park, heading for the Stomatology Clinic.

‘Not for us,’ Weniger said. They walked slowly back along the road.

‘May I ask you something, Manfred?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Have you sometimes thought of leaving?’

Weniger gave Richard a quick glance, then carefully looked all round. They moved to the middle of the road.

‘I imagine we all have. — At the last Gynaecological conference I was offered a post.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘They’re not good thoughts.’

‘But you get them.’

‘Every person’s different. I don’t think you can live with them.’

‘Did you never think, when you were a student, what it’s like to be a father, to have children with a woman, bring them up —’

‘I can’t remember. I don’t think so.’

‘To love one woman in all —’

‘You know that.’ Weniger stared into the darkness.

‘And —’ Richard broke off. A woman was approaching; even from a distance he could tell it was Josta. His first impulse was to turn off onto one of the side paths, but she was looking at him and Weniger had seen her as well. ‘Still here this late, Frau Fischer? Is there something special going on in Administration — something we ought to know about?’

‘No,’ she said tersely, not using his name or saying good evening. ‘Just a lot of work. But nothing special. Construction plans and applications, Herr Doktor.’

‘How is your daughter?’

‘Oh, she’s in the middle group in kindergarten. She loves drawing. I think she ought to go and see the paediatrician, she keeps complaining about earache.’

‘Who are you with?’

She named a name. She avoided looking at Richard.

‘Are you happy with him?’

‘Well, it’s a general hospital, there are long waiting lists and I don’t want it to drag on —’

‘I’ll have a word with Professor Rykenthal, if you’re agreeable. Give me a call tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do that. Thank you, Herr Doktor. — But I won’t hold you up any longer. I wish you a quiet night. Goodbye.’

‘Pretty woman,’ Weniger said when she’d gone. ‘If only I were twenty years younger — and’ — he ran his hand over his bald head — ‘wasn’t as hairy as an ape. God, I can still see her little girl, umbilical cord cut and wrapped up warm, and her face when the midwife gave her the baby. That’s always the best moment.’ Weniger looked at his hands. ‘Then you know why you’re here and what these paws are for. I’m sure it’s the same with you.’

‘Was it a difficult birth?’

‘Yes, pretty difficult. But she didn’t say a word. You don’t often get that nowadays. You used to, out in the country.’

‘We were interrupted.’

‘You want to stick to the topic? — We really ought talk about it some other time, not while we’re on duty and can get called away any moment and have to break off things that would be better made crystal clear.’

‘Agreed,’ Richard said after a cautious glance at Weniger.

‘No, no, that’s OK, no one’s calling us yet,’ Weniger replied with a faint smile, ‘and we’ve known each other long enough to be able to set what’s being said against the situation in which it’s being said.’

‘You’re right there, of course.’

‘I should think so!’ Weniger exclaimed cheerfully. ‘But to go back to what you were saying … You can think about it, but that’s merely theoretical. Thoughts don’t have consequences; you can play with them, like children with building blocks, and if you build a house with them that you don’t like, then you change it … Tell me, aren’t you getting cold? I can lend you my coat.’

‘No, I don’t feel cold … It’s fairly warm.’

‘I saw it was eight degrees on the thermometer just now. — You can change the house any way you like, and with no consequences.’

‘Which isn’t possible in real life.’

‘It’s perhaps possible, Richard, but some people have the problem that they’re never satisfied with the houses they build, they keep building houses and discarding them, they do it their whole life long and never have a house that’s finished, while their neighbour, to whose house they paid no attention because it’s crooked and perhaps not very distinctive, because it’s made of cheap materials, lives in a house that’s finished —’

‘A nice way of describing renunciation.’

‘No, I wouldn’t say that. He’s made a decision, a decision to make the best of what he’s been given — and not to waste his time looking for things he can’t have.’

‘How does he know he can’t have them?’

‘By a sober assessment of his situation.’

‘How do you bring up your children?’

Weniger didn’t answer immediately. ‘I tell them they’re free.’

‘Free? In this country?’

‘In that sense I don’t think people are free anywhere. What I mean is free to find out about themselves — and to build their house. — I have to say, you don’t look well.’

‘Could be. I’ve not been sleeping very well.’

‘It happens to all of us,’ Weniger said with a smile.

‘For example, when something happens to you that makes you furious; something that, let’s say, gives you the impression you’re pretty helpless —’

‘Has something given you that impression?’

‘No, I just mean … As an example, purely as an example to put these thoughts in context. So, if something like that happened to you, would it be better to hit out at once — or to wait and see?’

‘It depends very much on what kind of thing has happened to give you that impression. And what you mean by “hit out”. In this country the opportunities for “hitting out” must be limited. If you aren’t one of them.’

‘Just a minute, I’ve probably not put it very well. “Hit out” really does sound a bit over the top —’

‘Another time, perhaps,’ Weniger said calmly.

25. The Leipzig Book Fair

Philipp Londoner lived in a seventy-square-metre apartment in a working-class district of Leipzig. The building bordered on a canal, the water of which had been turned gelatinous by the effluent from a cotton mill. Dead fish were floating in it, slowly decomposing, flakes of white flesh sliding off the bones; single fins, blind eyes were swept against the bank where they bobbed on the grey foam with the bare elm branches stretching over it, occupied by thousands of crows that found rich pickings there. The inhabitants of the district had a name for the factory: ‘the Flock’; within a radius of several kilometres the streets were covered in cotton flocks that were trodden down, forming a slimy, decomposing crust in which the smell of all the dogs of Leipzig seemed to be concentrated. Drifting cotton got caught in the undergrowth, blocked the chimneys in the summer, floated up in the breezes warmed by the extracted air, formed whirling veils over the roofs, drifted down into puddles and onto railway lines, so that passengers could tell with their eyes closed when the train entered the district: suddenly the sounds were muffled and the general murmur of conversation in the compartment stopped.

Meno went to the Leipzig Book Fair every year. Philipp put him up for those days and continued to do so after Hanna and Meno had separated, for the two men felt a liking, a quiet respect, for each other, what Hanna had once called ‘a kind of awkward friendship’. The crows were still there, their numbers seemed to have increased over the years until there were legions of them. Worse for Meno than their squabbling and squawking, their sputtering and chattering, was the moment in the evening when the gates of the cotton mill opened and the workers went home: then the crows fell silent, you could hear many shuffling steps, rhythmically interrupted by the sound of several time clocks punching cards, now and then by the grinding of a tram going round a bend or accelerating. When the wind in Leipzig turned to the north, bringing the fine brown-coal dust from the open-cast mines of Borna and Espenhain that slewed in broad sheets round the houses and dust devils the height of a man — the ‘cypresses’ — appeared in the streets, the crows would sit, silent, in the jagged black trees that were like veins of ore against the brighter sky, and look down on the workers, most of whom ignored the birds and made their way, head bowed, with sluggish gait, to the bus stop or the central bicycle racks outside the mill. Sometimes a woman would raise her fist and scold the crows in the silence or a man would throw a stone at them and swear, at which a raging, discordant swarm, an avian giant consisting of clamorous take-offs, cries of fury and the clatter of feathers, would swell up over the factory in pulsating rings that circled round in the sky, screeching, and then slowly sink, appearing to be sucked into funnels that gathered together in a thin swirl, like a storm spindle, back down into the elms; individual birds separated from the fraying downflow, folded their wings, came to rest. Meno would observe all this from the window of the little room Philipp had given him, the cotton mill was opposite; in the morning, as he was getting ready for the Book Fair, he could see the workers of the early shift at their machines, silhouettes with swift and measured movements under fluorescent lights.

Meno unpacked his suitcase. In the study a young woman was sitting beside Philipp.

‘This is Marisa.’ Philipp lit one of his cigarillos, Cuban; perhaps it was the only privilege he took advantage of. ‘I’ve already told her who you are.’

‘You haven’t shaved your moustache off,’ Meno replied.

‘She says it’s modern in Chile nowadays. One for you too?’ He handed Meno a silver case.

‘Not something we get every day. With pleasure.’

‘When your Spanish is a bit better,’ Marisa said, winking at Philipp, ‘we’ll accept you as a compañero. I’ll go and make some tea.’

Philipp waved this away. ‘No, don’t bother. I’ll make it.’

‘No, you’ll stay here and talk to him. Talking is men’s business. I’ll make the tea. That’s women’s business.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘When the time comes to fight, I will fight. Fighting is women’s business as well. But now it’s time to drink tea.’ She lifted up her head proudly and went out.

‘Don’t think I support that. But lots of our Chilean comrades are the same. These remnants of bourgeois attitudes —’

‘They’re not bourgeois … whatsits. You’d be surprised how many members of the bourgeoisie in our country have long hair like you! If I go for you to bring you the tea it is out of emoción. And la revolución needs warm hearts and not the one most German comrades have —’

‘Corazon del noviembre?’ Philipp tried out his Spanish.

‘November hearrts,’ said Marisa.

DIARY

Discussion between Schiffner, Schevola and me before leaving for the Fair. We still have to discuss the title, The Depths of These Years. A title like that claims something that the text doesn’t yet match up to, it’s trying to meet the specification and sometimes that just doesn’t happen because the book has different ideas about itself from the author. I don’t know who it was who said that a book should be named after its ‘hero’, anything else was mere journalism — the longer I’ve been in this profession, the more I’m persuaded by that statement, though it does have its problems too, for who can say for certain that this method avoids ‘mere journalism’ and that where ‘Anna Karenina’ is written on the cover, Anna Karenina is also inside it. So Schevola’s book is to be published by us, something that was a surprise to me. Usually when Schiffner decides on a book, he puts detailed instructions in our pigeonholes — and doesn’t remain silent, as he has done in this case. Everything’s still vague, of course — as always with printed stuff in general, especially with Schiffner and especially especially with the PLAN. Frau Zäpter, his self-assured secretary — she makes the decision on unsolicited poems — was noisily making coffee as Schiffner sat down opposite Schevola and invited me to join them. He regarded his fingernails, the manuscript in front of him with two pages sticking out that, as the kettle started to whistle, he tried to tap back in. Madame Schevola seemed calm and reserved, she had put her fingers together, was staring at the table and was pale.

‘So you’ve written something here and now you want to publish it. Well, I’ll explain the philosophy of our publishing house, my child.’ I hate these moments — and enjoy them at the same time, strangely enough, for how an author feels when they’re greeted with stuff like that as the very first sentence — not even a ‘Good day’, that’s what the outer office is for, Schiffner just stands up, straightens, briefly runs his hand over his hair, glues the author’s wandering gaze firmly to his fatherly publisher’s gaze, extends his right hand and, with an inimitable waggling gesture, mutely indicates the penitential chair at the conference table opposite his imperial throne studded with yellow upholstery pins the size of coins — how Schevola, who looks controlled, is feeling is something I can appreciate.

‘We publish authors, not books. We don’t even just happen’ — he raises his chin and gently waves his left hand — ‘to publish a book, my child. No.’ The way he shakes his head as he says that! The way he says that ‘No’, not with emphasis, not with a dismissive raising of the voice, he lowers his chin and shakes his head, forbearing, as if he were talking to a badly behaved pet, his hand comes down, flat, like a seal’s flipper, gently through the air, as if there were nothing more to say apart from that soft ‘No’, and as he does this he purses his lips. Tasting the effect. And when he then raises his left eyebrow, Frau Zäpter knows it’s time to serve the coffee, with a little bobble of cream for him that sputters out of a vigorously shaken syphon, and then, after he’s taken a sip, raising his eyebrow a little higher, it’s the time for: ‘Just come over here, my child.’ Now he shows her the prints and paintings on the walls between the shelves, portraits of writers, all done by renowned figures from the Artists’ Association. He flicks out his right index finger, which has a ring with a green stone on it, stabs it in the direction of the first picture: ‘Who is that?’ — ‘X.’ Second picture: ‘Who is that?’ — ‘Y.’ Third picture: ‘And that?’ — ‘Z.’ He pats her cheek and says, ‘Wrong, it’s A.’ Then he takes a mirror off the shelf, holds it up to the baffled Schevola’s face: ‘And who is that?’ — ‘Another one?’ — ‘That’s an author who can’t write.’ He watches her closely, waiting for her response, eyes slightly screwed up, his tongue feeling its way along his left teeth; he spins the mirror round as he puts it behind him, then pauses, like a gunslinger slipping his Colt, still smoking, into its holster, then he places the mirror, carefully, precisely, as if it were a precious object, back on the shelf.

‘If that’s your opinion why did you even bother to ask me to come here?’

‘Ah, my dear, it’s good that you’re furious. In general the talent of authors who can get furious is capable of development.’ He contemplated his fingernails, then looked at me: ‘That is a task Herr Rohde will undertake; you are already acquainted with him. An experienced editor of great tact and sensitivity. One more thing.’ He took a book down off the shelves: ‘You make inflationary use of the semi-colon. Here is a book by Gustav Regler. Do you know Gustav Regler? — Well you ought to. You’ll sit down now and study the way Regler uses the semi-colon in chapter four. It is’ — index finger raised, the green stone flashes — ‘a substitute for a full stop! One can also discuss the rule for using it before “but” with a following main clause. Study the old grammarians. And nota bene: German is a complex language with some features that don’t appear to make sense, but when you look more closely there is a good reason for everything. Come and see me again in an hour.’

She does so. In the meantime Schiffner has made a telephone call, leafed through folders of prints, ruminated out loud on the three rules about starting a complete sentence after a colon with a small letter, eaten an ice cream from the office freezer with great relish and freshened up by rubbing his temples with eau de Cologne. He takes the book from her and puts it back on the shelf. He looks at her breasts, gives her a pile of books worth a thousand marks and dismisses her.

We spent weeks preparing for the Leipzig Book Fair. We didn’t go there just to pick up a few books, open then close them; we went to look through a window into the Promised Land. The window could be in sextodecimo, octavo, quarto and folio format but most often it measured 19 × 12 cm, had no hard cover, but three fishes or ‘rororo’ on the front, was in a rainbow-coloured row, or was white and had drawings in pastels: then Niklas or someone would say, we’re in the right place; then the covers were by a man called Celestino Piatti and the books with his scrawl on it became the subject of many a plan. 19 × 12 cm: paperback format. The measurements were established with a ruler and Barbara used them to tailor the inner life of Book Fair coats, for paperbacks needed a pocket into which they fitted snugly.

DIARY

Today I, as a zoologist, learnt something: the African desert locust has an East German relative, the book-grasshopper (Locusta bibliophila), a two-legged species wearing Wisent or Boxer jeans, hand-knitted roll-neck pullovers and olive-green or earth-brown ‘habits’ (parkas) that come down over their calves (special models from the Harmony Salon furrier’s on Rissleite, undertaken during free time or by arrangement with the boss — he too has preferences in his reading — after which Barbara and, depending on demand, a colleague are diverted from their contribution to the realization of the socialist to that of the individualist plan). Locusta bibliophila feeds on books, though only on those from the Non-Socialist Economic Area. Locusta bibliophila’s attack is planned like a military operation weeks before the Leipzig book-feast and I, happy to be the advance guard in the cyclically recurring paper comet, was given strict orders: ‘Where are they? When are they coming? You must prepare them. For us. You must take lockers at Central Station. We have to think about a system of signals. Perhaps a handkerchief on which you blow your nose at the approach of danger. What d’you mean, it’s the time of year when everyone gets a cold. Of course you have work to do there as well — but you can do that once we’ve left.’

The book-grasshopper’s combat gear (the aforementioned parka-style Book Fair coat) is subjected to a thorough examination about two weeks before the campaign; right interior: two parallel rows of five pockets each, sewn in from breast-top down to about the knee (partly overlapping), size: 21 × 14 cm, the ease of insertion is checked using the Harmony Salon’s copy of Heinrich Böll: ‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa …’, which has to go

‘smoothly’

‘fully covered’

‘with minimal bulge’

into the pocket. The habit is two sizes too big and not fitted with the standard Solidor zip (the zip gets stuck at the bottom too often, also in this version of the habit it is so low down that the wearer would have to bend, which might perhaps be detrimental to the desired minimality of bulge), but with snap fasteners that can be closed more quickly — and at different points. On the left-hand side are two large pockets for coffee-table books or others of unusual format. On the outside of the Book Fair coat there are more large snap-fastening pockets and, in addition, over each hip a snap karabiner attached to a sturdy leather loop: they are to take the many plastic bags into which it is intended to slip ballpoint pens, brochures, books, chocolate, catalogues, bananas, even more ballpoint pens, Western cigarettes and even more books — leaving the hands free and the bags can’t be appropriated by fellow citizens and sufferers.

The approach of the book-grasshopper takes place in carpools: Anne and Robert in Rohde’s Moskvitch, Malthakus and Dietzsch in Kühnast’s Škoda, Prof. Teerwagen and his wife take the Knabes, whose Wartburg is being repaired, Trüpel, the owner of the record shop, with the Tietzes. Conversations: Oh, look at that magnificent opera book, oh, and that magnificent Picasso book (Däne, the music critic, and Adeling, who arrive by train); the strategy for outwitting the people on the doors (the ‘fall-guy’ system: one starts bellowing and the others take advantage of the subsequent confusion to get their spoils out). I’ve prepared things for my colleagues, I’ve managed to lease two (!) lockers in Leipzig Central. — ‘Only two?’ Däne’s despair comes from ignorance, even after all these years of attending the Book Fair. He should know that lockers in Leipzig are handed down from one generation to the next.

The attack of the book-grasshopper comes in waves, a keen observer will recognize that it is about to begin from the way its eyes, which have a greedy look anyway, narrow to hungry slits. Its hunger is mainly for colours. The more colourful its booty, the better. And the more of it there is, even better. What most arouses its lust are red covers. They spark off the suspicion that it must have something to do with us. Once the hunger-slit has noted the name of a dissident, action must follow immediately. The editor on sentry duty is to be engaged in strategic conversation by book-grasshopper B while book-grasshopper A, heart pounding, breaking out in a cold sweat and blind with courage, trots like lightning over to the shelf (the claw must embrace the book like a soft caress, then comes the decisive pause, the moment of happy fear: I’VE GOT IT! My fingers are enclosing it, the cover is smooth, it’s from the West), now:

release studs on Book Fair coat

glance upwards elegantly, wet dry lips with tongue

feign coughing fit

bend down

intensify coughing

open Book Fair coat

close eyes and

one

two

three –

(‘Hey, you there, what d’you think you’re doing?’ — ‘But you … usually always look the other way?’ Uproar. Form a barrier. Take care not to be recognized as a unit, otherwise a Book Fair ban. Book Fair ban = catastrophe. Catastrophe = drive home with ‘You could have got it if you hadn’t been so stupid!’ Barbara cries out, sinks to one side. Emergency. ‘Thank you, I’m all right now.’ Malthakus and Teerwagen slip away. Spoils: Isaak Deutscher: Stalin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago, Part 1. An anthology of writers against atomic weapons. Friedrich Nietzsche: Why I am So Clever. Outside. End of round one. Tranquillizers from the first-aid kit in Ulrich’s car.

‘A close-run thing, Professor.’ — ‘Worth it, though.’ — ‘Have you a list of who gets to read what when?’ A mouthful of tea from the Thermos. A comparison of the contents of the plastic bags. Check the coats. Take a deep breath. Back for round two.)

It was the year of the apocalypse. Almost all the books on display dealt with global catastrophes. The forests were dying. Rockets were being deployed, Pershing and Cruise missiles, there was SALT II and a programme for a war of the stars; the total of explosives in the world was sufficient to blow up the Earth several times. The mood at the Book Fair was gloomy — editors, publishers, authors: all were grimly determined to perish. One raised his glass, hoping he would at least see the end of the world in the evening glow outside his cottage in Tuscany: You don’t feel so afraid then.

When editors from Western publishers came to the Hermes stand, Schiffner would wave them over, give his enterprising smile and whisper, pushing the intimidated Judith Schevola, whom he’d summoned to the Book Fair, forward, ‘One of our most talented writers. We’re going to hear a lot more from her.’ But the editors would just lower their heads sadly and sip the red wine resignedly. Schiffner would pat Schevola on the shoulder and tell her it meant nothing. But the apocalypse made people hungry, the bars and restaurants were crowded, no places left in Auerbachs Keller, Zills Tunnel, the Paulaner restaurant. It was only when they tried the Jägerschänke, not far from the Fair building, that the members of an important Frankfurt publishing house managed, with freely convertible arguments, to persuade a waiter to release the regulars’ table with the ‘Reserved’ sign, in the corner next to a stove, surmounted by a stuffed capercaillie. Hermes-Verlag had been invited: Schiffner was a friend of the Frankfurt publisher Munderloh; they’d both written theses on Hermann Hesse and in a letter to Munderloh, which mainly concerned typographical errors and two passages with incorrect German in a book from their autumn programme five years previously, he had told him that his whole Frankfurt publishing house was nothing other than the Glass Bead Game writ large. The two men formally opened the Book Fair drinking session.

Schevola, taking nervous puffs at her cigarette, was grateful to Meno for offering her a chair next to him. Eschschloraque, the playwright, came in, giving Meno the opportunity to observe him. There was a certain unproletarian grandeur about him. Despite the cool conditions in Leipzig at that time of the year and despite the air that was dirty from the exhaust fumes and brown-coal particles, which was the reason why one seldom saw people in light-coloured clothing in Leipzig, Eschschloraque was wearing a lightweight cream suit of a cut and quality that made its bespoke tailoring apparent. He had a trench coat over his arm and a red cashmere scarf wound several times round his neck, the ends of which, with their long fringes, hung down elegantly, enveloping the writer’s slim figure in a way that was both becoming and discreet. Enveloping — the word seemed appropriate. No, the ends of his scarf did not ‘flatter’ and certainly did not ‘bring out’ Eschschloraque’s slim figure. He took off his hat, stood in the half-light of the large chandelier at the entrance, upright, proud, not part of the noisy, beer-drinking, cutlery-clattering tavern-throng. He scrutinized one table after the other, calmly but with the swift assessment betokening the alertness of an experienced observer. He was still holding his hat in his hand, his right arm half raised in a gesture characteristic of distinguished petitioners or actors who have grown old and know what success they have had but not whether the person they’re facing does, and now, with this politely nonchalant gesture, are attempting to conceal the fact that they have to beg for a part less from the other person than from themselves and, since their internal commentator is not open to bribery and makes ironic remarks, at least execute the gesture perfectly: futile but perfect — they owe that to themselves. Eschschloraque stepped back a little, perhaps he felt the spot where he was standing was too bright: it could be indiscreet to draw attention to oneself in that way, it was platitudinous to say the least; a gentleman does not intrude and it would have been an intrusion if Schiffner or Redlich had felt obliged to leap up and greet him, the author of dramas and poems in the classical style (What does the ‘classical’ style mean here? Meno wondered, for him there is no other style, one ought to say: the author of dramas that have style), profusely and with attention-drawing ceremony. At the same time Eschschloraque could see better in the gloom, wasn’t dazzled. Slowly he lowered his hat. It was a brown Borsalino, an expensive hat scarcely obtainable in shops in this country; Meno remembered having seen a similar one in Lamprecht’s hat shop, it cost 600 marks and was reserved for Arbogast. A waiter jostled Eschschloraque and the way he stood there at that moment: trench coat over his left arm, hat in his right hand, a look of uncertainty in his eyes for a few seconds, Meno felt a sudden upsurge of sympathy for this man who was surrounded by a known but well-glossed-over aura of loneliness. In order to give a reason for his movement (that it was ‘giving a reason’ seemed indisputable to Meno), he gently tapped his hat with his left hand to dust it, accepted that this made his trench coat waggle rather a lot (the unsatisfactory gesture would distract attention all the more because of its unsatisfactory nature), shook his hat as if there were raindrops or snowflakes on the brim, but since it had been neither raining nor snowing and a possible observer would know that, he once more corrected his improvised gesture by rubbing his fingers over the hatband, as if he’d just noticed dust on it. At that moment he seemed to sense that he was being observed, not seen but observed, by someone who knew him, for he abruptly looked across at Meno’s table and, as he passed through the light, he made no attempt to conceal himself: to conceal himself would have been the reaction of an inexperienced person who thus betrayed his suspicion. He went to the coat stand and hung his hat on the hook beside Meno’s, stopped short, looked round quickly, took the other hat, read the name on the inside. His head shot up, Eschschloraque eyed Meno coolly, slowly hung the hat back on the hook. There were no seats free at the table and Meno waited eagerly to see how Eschschloraque would solve the problem. He strolled over, compensating for his uncertainty with exaggerated body movements, staring at an imaginary point — as if he didn’t want another’s eyes to meet his, arousing embarrassment, shame, perhaps even annoyance at their discourtesy in failing to give the dramatist Eschschloraque preferential treatment. The people from the important Frankfurt publishing house had their backs to him. Munderloh was holding a glass of raki, thumped it on the table in the course of an argument with Schiffner, licked the drops off his wrist. Schevola and Josef Redlich had noticed Eschschloraque, Redlich nudged Schiffner, he waved. Now Eschschloraque was at the table, in a kind of stand-to-attention posture, no one stood up. The conversations died away.

‘Could you possibly move up closer?’ Eschschloraque asked with a smile, a smile he managed very well, Meno thought. It was slightly sceptical, with an admixture of modesty and dignity, with no hurt pride and no condescension. Room was found for him on the bench, in the corner where Meno and Schevola were at right angles to him, beneath the carved figure of the nightwatchman with his lantern, French horn and eyes eaten away by woodworm. Schevola leant over to Meno, whispered, ‘Have you read the article he published about your book?’

‘No.’

‘No?’ She seemed to be astonished. ‘He attacked you. You, Altberg and I, he said, are a dubious Romantic faction.’

‘No. For him it’s medicine, for me it spoils my day. So why should I read it. I’m not a masochist.’

‘But if you have to deal with the things he writes?’

‘Then I can’t avoid it. But only then.’

‘And you can bear sitting at a table with him?’

Meno gave a pained smile. ‘That’s the way things are in this little faculty, you see. Jousting by day and in the evening you have a beer together. You’ll have to get used to it.’

‘And that doesn’t bother you?’

‘Who says it doesn’t bother me? But —’

‘You’ve a family to feed,’ Schevola said with a dismissive wave of the hand.

‘You’re rather quick to jump to conclusions.’ Meno finished his beer. ‘Beware of that, if I may give you a piece of advice. It’s very attractive in moral terms and gives you a good strong heartbeat, but it’s not good for literature. We must talk about that when we discuss your manuscript.’

‘What’s not good for literature?’ Eschschloraque’s voice was hoarse, perhaps it was the thick cigarette smoke filling the room. He had a silk cravat that he had tied in a dashing knot in the open collar of his white shirt.

‘Moralizing,’ Meno replied and looked at Eschschloraque. ‘To put it another way: knowing all the answers.’

Eschschloraque gave him a searching look, gently rubbed his carefully shaved cheeks. Munderloh leant forward.

‘I’m interested in you, Herr Eschschloraque.’

‘I call that a chivalrous lifting of the visor. I thank you for that and for your courage in admitting your shyness with such a direct approach,’ Eschschloraque replied, raising his glass to the publisher. ‘Fräulein Schevola for example, about whom our friend Schiffner had such nice things to say to you, is not at all shy. That’s why her black thoughts are initially hidden. And I will be bold enough to make a further psychological leap: the problem, my dear, is the censor, who is right. — Incidentally, Herr Munderloh, what about me? Your publishing house, so full of wit and without me?’

‘I meant it personally — if you’ve no objection. Stalinism and esprit, how can the two be combined?’

Eschschloraque smiled. ‘Sleep quicker, comrade, your bed is needed. Well, Herr Rohde, memories of your days living in a kommunalka?’

‘But surely you can’t … all those who were killed,’ said the Frankfurt press officer, incredulous.

‘People have to be killed,’ Eschschloraque replied coolly. ‘Don’t behave as if people didn’t die on your side too. Enemies have to be eradicated, that is a sensible, tried and tested custom of ages that achieve great things. And it is definitely better to die for a great cause than to live for a mediocre one. The genuine democrats among you should protest before the main course; sharp wits avoid the digestive process.’

‘Let’s talk about football.’ Redlich squinted across at the Frankfurt press officer, but he refused to play along.

‘You are trying to be polite, my dear Redlich, and to save us embarrassment. Look, the way it is with enemies is this: Herr Rohde, whom I respect, is a subtle wag and recently permitted himself a — let’s say — employee’s joke. As an editor who knows what’s right and proper, he marks up a manuscript in pencil; however, when he encounters a passage that is ambiguous, he inserts a red comma. You’ — Eschschloraque smiled — ‘have put a red comma after socialism. Is that supposed to mean something? That socialism is perhaps not the last word.’ Eschschloraque gave a short lecture on monks who commented on the works they were copying out in an equally subtle way, by emphasizing certain letters, over several pages and chapters, so that in a collection of noble love songs the Latin for ‘Troubadour thou art a dead loss’ was hidden, though clearly visible to the philologist’s practised eye.

Schiffner took out his genuine buffalo-horn comb and ran it through the white quiff over his striking features, bronzed from holidays in the Crimea. ‘That’s why you sounded so terribly calm on the telephone.’

‘Rossi was great! He more or less won the World Cup for the Azzurri on his own,’ Redlich cried.

‘You can write?’ Munderloh leant over towards Judith Schevola.

‘I try to,’ she replied, jutting out her chin defensively.

‘She tries to!’ The publisher slapped his hand on the table. ‘Could you kill a dolphin?’ Once more the conversations round the table fell silent.

‘That would depend on the situation, Herr … What was the name?’

Munderloh stared, first at her, then at Schiffner, who was enjoying himself. Eschschloraque clasped his hands under his chin, observing, alert to every nuance, his expression that of a scientist waiting for the result of an interesting experiment that is immoral but unavoidable.

‘The name is Munderloh. I like you. Though your answer that it depends on the situation was all too predictable. It always depends on the situation.’

‘I hate dolphins,’ Schevola said coldly. ‘They’re always so nice and kind, they save shipwrecked sailors and come to the help of the poet Arion, they dance round Bacchus’s boat and bask in the early light of the sun … but I don’t trust them.’

‘There is a school of evil dolphins,’ Redlich muttered. ‘Black dolphins who are not favourably disposed towards us —’

‘What are you on about, Josef?’ The Frankfurt press officer waved his hand in displeasure.

‘I’d like to kill a dolphin once, just to see what the other dolphins do. Whether they’re still so nice and kind, whether the cliché’s correct — or whether they’d then show their true character,’ Schevola said, not avoiding Munderloh’s hard look — from eyes that seemed like light-blue stones, a look like a rod, like a surgeon’s blunt probe, Meno thought.

‘I will read your manuscript,’ Munderloh said after a pause during which the table had been silent, the only sounds coming from the front of the Jägerschänke. ‘I will read it if Hermes will let me have it. — Do you like swimming?’ He took out a visiting card, scribbled something on the back and pushed it across the table to Schevola.

‘Only against the tide,’ she replied after she’d read what was on the card and given Munderloh a long, hard stare.

‘Great. — So it’s not just slaves you produce in this country.’

‘Don’t say that, Herr Munderloh, please don’t.’ Redlich was leaning forward. ‘They have dealings with the darkness, Lichtenberg, Waste Books, notebook L. And feel the pressure of government as little as they do the pressure of the air, notebook J.’

Munderloh nodded. ‘Perhaps you have the wrong idea of conditions in our country. Perhaps I have of conditions here. Let us drink a toast to what unites us.’ He raised his glass, which he’d filled with red wine, and drank to Redlich.

‘We, who know what a valuable thing truth is … And it is also a truth to present language in its purity …’ Redlich sank back onto the bench, his chubby face with the moustache and puffy eyes that reminded Meno of Joseph Roth’s face was in shadow again. Schiffner placed his hand on his arm.

‘However that may be, you, all of you’ — Redlich indicated the row of Frankfurters with a sweeping gesture — ‘are much better dressed than we are.’ He laughed, put his hand over his mouth.

‘You don’t like swimming, with or against the tide, is that right?’ Munderloh leant forward, clasped his hands. They were strong, peasant’s hands with hair on the back of the fingers; Meno was sure Munderloh would be able to crack walnuts between his thumb and forefinger. He would survive the camp — that angular head, the nose that looked as if it had been hewn with an axe, that lumberjack’s back, the liberators would see all that when they opened the gates; he’s a man that survives, Meno thought and frowned because he was irritated at connecting Munderloh’s appearance with the camp; it seemed a perfidious thought. Redlich didn’t reply to Munderloh’s question. The party broke up. Philipp Londoner was waiting outside the Jägerschänke and greeted Eschschloraque and Schiffner familiarly, Schevola had disappeared.

It was warm at Philipp’s, Marisa had turned the heating up; Meno and Eschschloraque soon took their jackets off. Philipp seemed to feel cold, he walked up and down restlessly, rubbing his hands, occasionally doing a knees bend when he stopped beside the little Azerbaijani copper table in front of the wall with the thousands of light-brown, blue, white and red spines of Reclam paperbacks. Eschschloraque knew about Meno’s relationship with the Londoner family but had still expressed surprise that he was spending the night at Philipp’s place. Meno had said nothing and on his part was wondering why Eschschloraque was there. Jochen Londoner knew him, Meno also knew that he was a frequent guest in the house on Zetkinweg in East Rome but was surprised at the familiar relationship between Philipp and Eschschloraque.

‘That nightwatchman,’ Eschschloraque said, slowly turning the glass of tea Marisa had given him round and reflectively watching the particles floating in the red liquid, ‘that nightwatchman in the Jägerschänke. Anyone who can write about spiders will notice a nightwatchman as well. What do you think, Philipp, does communism need nightwatchmen? I’m sure friend Rohde here would say yes, he relies on the immutability of certain affairs, especially those of humans — but who knows?’

‘Nightwatchmen? Rubbish. We’ve other problems.’

‘But it would be a rewarding question for your institute. It’s not as humorous a one as you might think.’

Philipp shrugged his shoulders, started walking to and fro again. Marisa came in, made herself comfortable on the sofa beside Eschschloraque, lit one of Philipp’s cigarillos.

‘Tell me instead what the evening was like, with the people from Frankfurt.’

‘A pretty mixed-capitalist soirée. They look on us with both pity and envy. Pity because we are so terribly naive and refuse to give up our belief that the written word can change the world. Envy because, at least in this part of the Fatherland, we are absolutely right. There’s also an element of fury. They don’t like it when we catch them slackening off. Their manufacturing conditions are not determined by the state. The fact that they keep going on about our generally mediocre paper confirms your thesis that under free-market conditions the spirit is like a cow grazing on superficialities. How are things at the Institute, anyway?’ Philipp worked as a lecturer at a Leipzig branch of the Institute for Social Sciences.

‘Nothing special. I’m not getting anywhere.’

‘Because you’re too young?’

‘No, that’s not the problem.’

‘Didn’t you apply for a professorship?’

‘I’ll probably get one but … the Institute’s losing its influence, it’s hardly taken seriously any more.’

‘Then go into politics.’

‘It’s a good thing to know your limits. I’m better off on the theoretical side.’

‘Which doesn’t necessarily say anything against you. Which doesn’t necessarily say anything for the practical side either.’

‘Yes. Theories can be powerful agents of change. And I’m not a demagogue, as old Goatee was, despite everything.’

‘A little more respect, if you please. He wasn’t that bad a politician, taking everything into account. Much better than him up there.’ Eschschloraque jerked his shoulder at a portrait of the General Secretary on one of the shelves.’

‘As a politician — maybe. As a human being … My department’s being cut back a little.’

‘What’s the reason?’

‘My name, I think, paradoxical as it may sound. And probably also because we were in England.’

‘Do you think so? A bit simple, if you ask me. Still, it is possible. They’re not exactly philosemitic, the comrades in the Politburo.’

Philipp broke off. ‘No more of that.’ He looked across at Marisa, who was calmly smoking and staring out of the window. ‘What did you mean with that about the nightwatchman?’

There was something of the clown about Eschschloraque’s face when he smiled. His wrinkled cheeks and the clearly defined bags under his eyes seemed to be part of a mask behind which cunning features were just waiting to leap out like jacks-in-a-box and perform somersaults in the momentarily clear space; also Meno had the impression that, for all his fine speeches, Eschschloraque’s greatest desire was to get up and do a backflip over the table. ‘So he’s made you think, has he, our nightwatchman? Well I’ve got one in the play I’m working on at the moment. I believe a nightwatchman is an idealist out of despair. There’s no one out in the streets any more — at least not officially — apart from him and the darkness. I don’t know, perhaps I’ll have a cat appear as well. His lantern is the only light in the dark. For it is dark, of course, — and not some cosy fairy tale in which the stars turn into silver thalers — and he’s awake. He carries his lantern through the darkness. And has to make do with that. He denies nature, more than that: he hates it — in his official capacity.’

‘Is that another of your defences of classicism against Romanticism?’

‘Why should I defend classicism against something that was cooked up by the English secret service? Unfortunately stupidity seems to be … a metaphor for immortality.’

Philipp burst out laughing. ‘Do you still keep dossiers on your enemies?’

‘That doesn’t concern friend Rohde,’ Eschschloraque replied. ‘Thank you for the tea, madam.’ He stood up and bowed to Marisa.

26. Clouds in April

‘Do you believe truth exists?’ Verena adjusted the pullover that she’d tied across her chest by the sleeves. Siegbert took his time replying. It was warm, April seemed to have taken out a loan from May. They were lying in the grass on a slope above Kaltwasser reservoir, Christian was watching the changing characters inked on the apple-green of the dam by wind and waves. A train of the Erzgebirge railway, small as a model train, was chugging along the opposite bank, steaming up the fir trees along the line.

‘Hey, Verena, I believe in Pink Floyd,’ said Jens Ansorge in bored tones, pulled one hand out from under his head, took the blade of grass he’d been chewing out of his mouth and inspected it suspiciously. ‘You know everything, Chrishan, can you tell me what that is? Tastes as bitter as anti-fever pills, yeuch.’ He pulled a face and spat out.

‘You watch what you’re doing, you mucky pup! Your slobber almost landed on me.’ Reina Kossmann threw back her head in disgust, Jens smirked, bursting imaginary balloons with this forefinger. Falk Truschler let himself fall onto his back and laughed his soft, hoarse, shoulder-twitching laugh. His movements were so shambling Christian felt as if Falk had only borrowed his body for a while; Christian tried to think of the mot juste: clumsy came to mind, and then he remembered sports lessons and Herr Schanzler directing a green-and-white-clad horde round the sports hall with geometries of Prussian precision; Falk’s angular movements as he drew back to throw the Indian clubs for hand-grenade practice, his way of running: legs sticking out sideways like a girl’s, his expression, wavering between despair and self-mockery, at the moment of releasing the club, his hands and fingers waggling, as now at Jens Ansorge’s little joke. Ungainly, he thought, that actually describes him even better than clumsy. But, as Meno said, ‘actually’ is a word to be avoided.

‘Truth,’ Siegbert said, drawing the word out, ‘I don’t know. Just watch out that you don’t turn into a blue-stocking. Intellectual women don’t get no men, then no children, my old mum always says, an’ then they’re unhappy. There’s a truth for you.’

‘You arrogant male chauvinist pig!’ Verena exclaimed indignantly. ‘It’s my mother who’s right: what this country needs is a women’s movement.’

‘Ooh, no one’s got anything against women’s movements,’ Jens Ansorge interjected coolly, ‘as long as they’re nice and rhythmical.’

Grunts of laughter came from Falk and Siegbert.

‘Stick to the point for once.’ Christian felt himself blush as Verena looked up, immediately turned his eyes away and stared at his shoes. ‘What do you understand by truth?’

‘Certainly not Schmidtchen Schleicher’s class standpoint —’ That was what they called Schnürchel after a character in a pop song: Schmidtchen Schleicher with the ee-lastic legs …

‘Ansorge showing off his cynical side again,’ Reina Kossmann mocked, ‘it’s just courtship display, Verena. What was it Dr Frank told us about peacocks fanning their tails?’

Jens Ansorge leant up, gave Reina a worried look, puckered up his lips. She slapped her forehead and blew a kiss back.

‘So there you are,’ said Jens, satisfied.

‘Have you heard? The commitment rigmarole is going to start up soon. Fahner wants it done before 1 May. Then we’ll get a heavy roll-call —’

‘And turn into nice and tidy, frigging statistics,’ said Jens, cutting Siegbert short. He frowned, threw the blade of grass away, suddenly serious. ‘Three wasted years … God knows how awful it’ll be, guys. “Every male graduate of this school commits himself to voluntary service in the National People’s Army,” ’ he said, imitating Fahner.

‘Not me,’ said Falk.

‘It’ll be good for your muscles.’

Christian was surprised at how coolly merciless women could be, especially since Reina then pinched Falk’s biceps. Women for whom we did everything — oh the heroes in books, in films! — who mourned us when we fell in battle, who before that wept handkerchiefs full of tears for their beloved on the famous platform to the hiss of steam from the engine preparing to depart — and then this callousness from Reina, whose pale, delicate features with the mouth turned down slightly to the left, he liked looking at –

‘Hey, you look horrified,’ she said, brushing back her hair in a challenging gesture. ‘We don’t often see you look like that. I must have been really good.’

‘She’s keen on you, Chrishan,’ Jens drawled, holding up his hand for a high five with Falk.

‘Get lost, you idiot,’ Reina snapped, throwing up her arm. ‘I don’t want to catch pimples.’

A thrust with a bare bodkin; Siegbert and Jens surveyed Christian, he had the feeling his face had been set on fire, tried a smile.

‘You can leave my muscles out of it,’ said Falk. ‘I’m not going to enlist. Three years … I’d have grey hair by the time I got out. And then … all those tanks and guns … I’m not going to shoot at anyone.’

‘Just let Chief Red Eagle hear that,’ Reina said quietly and Christian realized she’d said it to him as a kind of offer in the group that had fallen silent, an offer he rejected because he didn’t see why he should make the effort to break the silence; he stared down at the bay below them, wondering whether it would be worth coming fishing here with Ezzo and Meno, he’d have to join the local section of the German Angling Association; funny, these nicknames. They had inherited the name ‘Red Eagle’, as they called Herr Engelmann, their civics teacher and principal of the senior high school, from long-departed generations of pupils and accepted it unquestioningly. Did that indicate their lack of imagination or the aptness of the name — Christian decided in favour of the latter. It was true that when Engelmann spread his arms wide and told them, his lips moist with enthusiasm and his fiery red jug-nose shining above them, about the Great Socialist October Revolution, in which his father had taken part under Trotsky’s leadership, when he started to wave his hands, his eyelids behind his thick lenses drooping so he could immerse his gaze in the great times of the past, at such moments Engelmann did resemble an old, ponderous eagle that swept round the class dictating April Theses with words appearing to fall out of his colourless, bubbling chain-smoker’s voice and plop like early plums on the pupils’ cowering heads.

‘First Red Eagle will put the squeeze on you, then Fahner … I’m going away for four years anyway.’

Verena stared at Siegbert in alarm; he was picking up pebbles and, unmoved, flicking them up into the bright blue sky.

‘Four years … Are you crazy?’ Jens scrutinized Siegbert as if he’d been wearing a mask all the time that had now slipped to reveal the face of a monster. Siegbert smiled coolly.

‘Just realistic. I want to be a naval officer. I was in Rostock last summer. They don’t take anyone who hasn’t done a period of service in the People’s Navy.’

‘I thought you wanted to join the merchant navy?’

‘Unfortunately that doesn’t make any difference, Montecristo.’

‘The Count of Montecristo.’ Her lips pursed affectedly, Verena imitated Christian’s habit of brushing his too-long quiff out of his face: she put her head on one side, turned her eyes up and, with an exaggeratedly camp gesture, pushed back an imaginary quiff, a kind of habitual tic that he had and that he would have to get rid of immediately if it looked the way Verena had demonstrated. ‘What an appropriate title for His Dresden Highness —’

‘Shut it,’ Christian growled. The two girls snorted with laughter.

‘Take it easy, old man,’ Jens said soothingly, ‘the women are going through puberty and the nickname won’t last anyway. Much too long and too much trouble to say. — But, my God, Siggi: four years!’

Siegbert shrugged his shoulders. ‘I want to go to sea. They want four years in the navy. So I go into the navy for four years.’

‘Oh, great,’ Verena said. There was a touch of contempt, it seemed to Christian, in her voice, a touch of anger. He thought about Siegbert’s answer, as the others appeared to be doing, they’d fallen silent. He imagined Fahner, who summoned the boys one by one to the principal’s office, which was guarded by his wife at a heavy Optima typewriter; Fahner would definitely be — as he always was when you turned the handle after he had barked ‘Yes!’ — sitting at his desk, writing without looking up, so that you had plenty of time to observe the light cut into strips by the Venetian blinds on the highly polished PVC floor, the severe, shadowed faces of Wilhelm Pieck, Walter Ulbricht and the female Minister of Education on the wall over Fahner’s head, not knowing what to do, for Fahner didn’t say ‘Come in’ or ‘Sit down’; Fahner said nothing at all, just sat there writing, in his elegant suit with the silk oversleeves in the blue of the Free German Youth that he would eventually, with measured movements of his fingertips that spoke of conflicting thoughts, take off and place on the table beside the needle-sharp pencils arranged precisely according to size. In the music class with Herr Uhl they’d recently talked about the English composer Benjamin Britten, and Christian had been amazed at the similarity between Britten’s head and Fahner’s: the same profusion of caterpillar-like locks, the same boyishly soft features; the similarity was so pronounced that Christian had done some research to see whether Britten had had a son in the Erzgebirge … his research had produced no result.

Verena broke the silence. ‘You could just as well say: I want to go to sea, they demand that I kill a person — so I’ll kill a person.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Jens.

‘Just a minute,’ Siegbert said. ‘I’m the one this is about, I’m the one taking on the four years. Anyway, it’s easy enough for you to talk, Verena, it’s not a problem for you, there’s no military district command awaiting you.’

‘Killing people … that can happen to you in the forces … They say the army units on the border are still on high alert and if you end up there … Enlisted today, invading Poland, gun in hand, tomorrow … Or in Angola. My father says Castro’s troops are supposed to be there, the Russians as well … You can count me out,’ Falk said.

‘You’ll stick to that? And if they throw you out?’

‘Now wait a minute, Verena,’ Jens said pretty sharply. ‘It was pretty good recently when you handed in an empty sheet of paper, but you did back down eventually —’

‘You must be out of your mind, Ansorge!’ Reina tapped her forehead. ‘Come on, Verena, what are we doing here?’

‘You’re right,’ Verena said after a while. They looked at each other in surprise, for she’d said it to Jens Ansorge.

Three years in the National People’s Army. Christian knew he would never forget that moment, that 24 April 1983; the day before yesterday. The three of them had been waiting outside Fahner’s office, Jens Ansorge had tried to cover up the situation with jokes, for Falk had come out, a touch paler than usual, his right hand clutching the worn, imitation-leather briefcase with VEB GISAG Schmiedeberg on that he’d got from his father; he nodded and smiled his way past them into the light-grey corridor of the senior high school that was decorated with flags and pennants for the ‘Karl Marx Year 1983’. Jens remained silent, Christian avoided Siegbert’s eye that was trying to make contact with his, none of them called after Falk, asked him to stop, to tell them what had happened; they just watched him, the way he walked: it was a little less shambling than usual, he kept close to the banister, suddenly a fissure seemed to open up between Falk and them, the ball of his hand pounding the rubberized stair rail, the thrumming noise echoing round the stairwell, the trousers that were too big for him with the green plastic comb in his back pocket and its curving handle, shaped like a drop of water, sticking up cheekily over his belt, his angular shoulders under the Free German Youth shirt: it was something they’d let go of, all three of them, though probably each in his own way, and the fissure Christian sensed came from the fact that he felt no pity. It wasn’t just because of the discussion that he would never forget that day.

It had gone differently from the way he’d expected, in an almost friendly atmosphere. Perhaps Fahner had been in a good mood because Siegbert had gone before Christian and signed up for four years, proof of the peace-loving attitude of young citizens with their consciously progressive outlook; once more there was the performance with paper and pencil and silence, the irresolute wait by the door until Fahner, not looking up, murmured ‘Hoffmann’ and, a few seconds later, as if he’d only just remembered his first name, ‘Christian’ and, again after a pause, ‘Sit down.’ Then he’d stretched out his hand and abruptly looked Christian in the face but, with the same motion, pointed to a chair, as if he’d made an error with the gesture, that could be interpreted as impermissible, or at least incompatible with his position as overall principal of the Maxim Gorki educational complex. Christian was embarrassed because Fahner looked good with his tan from holidays in Yugoslavia, his blue eyes and Benjamin Britten hair. ‘From what I hear about you, Hoffmann, you don’t seem to be making a particular effort,’ Fahner had said, his hands clasped over a sheet of paper, at the top of which Christian deciphered his name, below it notes, some typed, some handwritten; among them Christian recognized Dr Frank’s illegible scribble. ‘Medicine,’ said Fahner reflectively, ‘the most sought-after, the most difficult subject. Your marks are good, apart from mathematics. It looks like you’re heading for a disaster there. But grades alone don’t make the medic. What use to us are traitors, who attend the senior high and the university at our cost and then have nothing better to do than to think only of themselves and get out? A sense of social responsibility, Hoffmann, that’s important too. Indeed, it’s more important than anything else. The committed standpoint. The people here make it possible for you to acquire knowledge free from worry, and we have an obligation to those people: you, by doing your best — and me by helping you, if you show goodwill; and by recognizing those who turn out to be parasites, who cannot or will not comprehend what our Workers’ and Peasants’ State is doing for them, by recognizing them as that type of character and treating them for what they are. Our nation invests hundreds of thousands of marks in your training. You must show yourself worthy of that trust and that generosity. That is why I expect your assent to three years’ service in our armed forces, by which you will give back to it a little of what it is doing for you. Especially since, as agitator, you have an exemplary role for your class collective. Your response, please.’ Fahner put down the pencil, the point of which he’d been stabbing at the desk to emphasize what he was saying. Christian had intended to make some objection, to dispute at least one of Fahner’s points, to make it less easy for him, but he couldn’t, he had to agree with Fahner. He could sense that there was a decisive error in Fahner’s arguments, but he couldn’t pin it down, however hard he tried; a discussion would end up with the question as to how he could deny this country a right that all other countries probably demanded, how he could — and at this point the discussion would have become dangerous — make a distinction between the defence of the country over there and here, between the Bundeswehr and the National People’s Army. In his mind’s eye he could see the horrified expressions on the faces of his parents, who had rehearsed this discussion and possible lines of argument over several weekends; he had mentioned the undemocratic character of the armed forces over here that earned him, for the first time after many years, a clip round the ears from his father. You hold your tongue, Christian, understood! And for a moment Christian had hated his father — even though it was Fahner he ought to have been hating; but he didn’t hate him and wondered about that as, sitting in front of him on the edge of his chair, he looked past Fahner with understanding at the faces of the comrade rulers; he didn’t feel hatred, instead he felt a need to agree with Fahner and to do so not only with lukewarm words that the principal would certainly have already heard a hundred times over, their emptiness forming a repulsive combination with the zealous promptness with which they were produced; a kind of bimetallic strip, the fear flowed through it as a current, created warmth, the metal curled and the bulb of the lie lit up. Christian felt the need not to disappoint Fahner, to cooperate with him, to support him. So he avoided the empty phrases and started to lie honestly.

Pale with conviction, he said he’d been going over these arguments ever since he’d applied for a place at the senior high school during the ninth year in Dresden; he knew of a similar case there had been at the time in his class that had aroused controversy among the pupils and then it had been suggested at a school parade that a pupil’s position on that case should form part of all applications for a place at senior high school and he, Christian, had not changed his opinion since then. There’d been pro-peace demonstrations in Dresden in February — Fahner looked up, Christian had no idea why he’d mentioned this, that was taboo in Waldbrunn, why he even went on and brought in the situation in Poland — he said ‘the People’s Republic of Poland’ — and in Afghanistan, Fahner clasped his hands and frowned; given, Christian went on, that the socialist system was threatened by revanchist forces, here Fahner slid the document for the declaration of voluntary enlistment across the table, however Christian didn’t pause to sign, but suddenly found arguments for the three years’ military service that hadn’t even occurred to his father: it was good, he said, for anyone involved in an intellectual profession to live together with simple people for a while and thus get to know them better, what he learnt by this would be especially valuable for someone who wanted to study medicine, for how could one be a good doctor for people if one behaved in a snobbish, superior and condescending manner towards them; at this Fahner looked at the clock for the first time. He had been born here, Christian went on, in this country, twenty years after the war caused by Hitler’s fascism, which had annihilated so many people and had been financed by money from industrial magnates. Never again must there be a repeat of such a terrible war or the criminal regime that had brought it about; medicine was a humane science, the socialist state was humane and humane its army, which was serving peace with its armaments, as could be seen in Wilhelm Busch’s poem about the fox and the hedgehog, fully armed yet bent on peace: once you’ve had your teeth pulled out, I’ll shave my spines from tail to snout. Fahner frowned even more and gave the clock a second glance at the moment when Christian finally looked up, took the pen and signed; the furrows disappeared from Fahner’s brow, his eyes expressed, Christian wasn’t sure whether it was right, a strange mixture of feelings: friendly repugnance. ‘You can go, Hoffmann, I’m proud of your conviction. Send Ansorge in.’

Later Christian remembered again how they’d watched Falk leave; he could still hear Jens’s stale jokes as he lay in his bed in the hostel, staring at the ceiling criss-crossed by the lights of the long-distance lorries on the F170; he could hear the murmur of voices from next door, where the twelfth-grade boys had their room, there was a clatter in the corridor, Frau Stesny was still there helping the others prepare their supper and again he saw Falk in his mind’s eye, his hand thumping the stair rail, his green comb in his back pocket and he, Christian, had just realized that he had crawled to Fahner, had betrayed his principles in the most nauseous way … And yet he hadn’t felt that way about it in the principal’s office, he hadn’t lied to Fahner, as he sat facing him he’d been convinced of what he’d been saying. And as Falk gradually disappeared from sight, none of them made any effort to follow him and ask how the interview had gone, they’d not asked him later either, and so far he’d said nothing. Christian could see himself standing outside the office not feeling any pity for Falk. That was the second surprising experience of the day. What he felt was contempt, even hostility. He didn’t know whether Falk had had the courage to stick to the convictions he’d declared to them by Kaltwasser reservoir, that was probably what had happened and what really shook Christian was that that was precisely why he felt contempt for Falk. To stand upright, even and especially when things got tricky, was that not the way his parents had brought him up? At the same time they practised lying with him … Christian recalled another day he would never forget. It was one of the last days of the holiday before he transferred to the senior high school. His father had brought Erik Orré home with him, Tietze’s neighbour and a colleague of Gudrun’s at the Dresden State Theatre. He had been a patient of Richard’s and had come to express his gratitude in an unusual way, by teaching Christian and Robert the art of lying convincingly, which Richard thought was necessary, especially for Christian; the large mirror was brought in from the hall and the actor had thus practised praising enthusiastically with them — and, at Niklas’s request, Ezzo — had corrected their gestures, showed them how to deliberately turn red or pale, how to flatter someone with a certain amount of dignity, how to say stupid things with a serious expression, to drape them like a disguise over your true thoughts, how to churn out compliments that are empty but intelligently flattering, how to dispel suspicion, how, in some cases, to recognize other liars. Anne had gone out during these rehearsals. Christian had heard her crying in his father’s study. Richard, pale and severe, had watched them, later he’d told Anne that it was hard but unfortunately necessary, especially for Christian. The boys, he said, could only profit from these skills, life was a tightrope and he’d wanted to make it easier for them to keep their balance, to see that it was there, even. At the end Erik Orré had expressed the hope they would recommend him to others, he could well imagine there could be ‘further need for his skills in that district’ and he was sure Herr Doktor Hoffmann knew his neighbours better than he did.

From the other side, from the common room, the voice of singer-songwriter Gerhard Schöne could be heard; he was very popular with the girls. He, too, was singing about honesty … Christian lay there, motionless, tormented by his thoughts. Should he not have felt sorry for Falk? Especially when he wanted to be a doctor — a doctor for whom the feeling of contempt should not exist? Did he really want to be a doctor? Would that be just following the family tradition or did he genuinely want it of his own accord? And why had he felt contempt for Falk? He couldn’t say. He could find no answer to all these questions, no explanation.

He listened in the darkness to see if the others in the common room had gone to eat, then he could go and have a shower in the gymnasium. He’d have to hurry because Frau Stesny would certainly notice his absence and knock at his door to call him for supper. He had to wait for the short period when there was no one in the corridor, then he could slip out of his room and have the showers to himself. It was risky and he had to be quick, quick with his shower as well, he always had to be aware that someone might come, even though there was no sports group using the gymnasium that day. He’d copied out the ‘Gymnasium Schedule of Use’ and learnt it off by heart.

27. Music en voyage. All our strength. The Writing Fairy

On one of his walks Christian saw Siegbert waiting outside Verena’s house. He was looking up at the as yet unlit windows in Lohgerbergasse, which was behind the church. Christian, wrapped in thought and tired from hours of schoolwork, had not noticed him at first and almost walked straight into him; but he suspected Siegbert wouldn’t have welcomed that and turned off into the shadow of the church in time. He observed Siegbert, who seemed impatient, nervously smoking a cigarette. The shops would soon be closing, people with shopping bags were hurrying to the market square, Christian thought he recognized Stabenow in a man wearing a scarf and beret pushing a bicycle, and shrank back farther into the shadow of the protruding wall. Darkness fell quickly. There were no street lamps in Lohgerbergasse, light flickered on in the Winklers’ and some of their neighbours’ houses, scattering dull brightness over the cobbled street. Verena came out, nodded to Siegbert and the two went off together. Christian would most likely have followed them but at the end of the street they turned off along the Wilde Bergfrau; they would soon have noticed him on the long street by the riverbank that ran straight as far as the castle and allowed clear views. They were probably going to the cinema or the Vostok Youth Club, which was in a dilapidated building beyond the castle. It had a discotheque where they played a remarkably free range of music, even though it could be seen from the Party district headquarters. Or perhaps they were heading for the ‘Halls of Culture’, where Uhl, the music teacher, doggedly tried to open the eyes and ears of the citizens of Waldbrunn to the Serious Arts.

Uhl, Christian thought, and again in his mind’s eye he saw Verena coming out and setting off with Siegbert. Uhl was a strange person, at odds with himself, liable to fits of rage, selfless, obsessive. With his glossy black hair, his sickle eyebrows and Wagner beard he looked like a Flying Dutchman from the opera. The pupils were afraid of him because of his unpredictability, his furious outbursts. A restless, often cynical person who could expose a pupil’s inability to sing until they were in tears. He was an excellent pianist, but his lips expressed his disdain for those before whom he had to perform, for their deaf ears. Music was everything to him, he loved it, so it seemed to Christian, more than he did some people; perhaps because everything it said was clear, a language in which there were no misunderstandings. He contorted his face when someone sang out of tune and smiled when, during a lesson, he put on one of the records he guarded like a treasure and Sviatoslav Richter played a piece from the Well-Tempered Clavier. Then another Uhl appeared, softer, milder, a wounded, aware man. In the ‘Halls of Culture’ there was, beside the big hall, another room, which Uhl called the ‘closet’, where, ‘in an intimate atmosphere’ as it said on the posters, there were performances of chamber music, illustrated talks — a few years ago Christian’s grandfather had been there to give an illustrated talk on Amazon Indians — and readings organized by the Dresden District Writers’ Association. These cultural evenings, above all the concerts and performances of chamber music organized by Uhl, enjoyed a good reputation, attracting people from the depths of the Erzgebirge and as far away as Karl-Marx-Stadt; the Waldbrunners were often in a minority in the audience. Subscriptions and tickets for individual events went out to Glashütte and Altenberg, the border towns of Zinnwald, Rehefeld and Geising, even hopped over the frontier to Teplice in the ČSSR, from where a married couple, fanatical concert-goers, regularly came, were posted to Freital and Dresden, from where season-ticket holders came by car and bus, went to Flöha, Freiberg, Olbernhau, to the Western Erzgebirge as far as Annaberg-Buchholz. All that was the result of Uhl’s efforts. During the school holidays there was an agreement with Waldbrunn’s city transport services that put a bus, a rickety IFA model that was no longer in service, plus a driver at his disposal to ‘undertake cultural work’ in the Erzgebirge district. Uhl never went on holiday, no one had ever heard him talk about the Baltic or Lake Balaton, of a Free German Trade Union hostel in Graal-Müritz or the Rest Home for Outstanding Teachers, no one had ever had a picture postcard of the Island of Rügen or the Müggelsee from him. In the summer holiday months and also in the autumn holidays Uhl and his wife, who was a music teacher in Glashütte, rattled round Erzgebirge villages in the IFA bus, generally known as ‘Oswald Uhl’s Music Bus’, also called ‘Music en voyage’ by more poetic humorists, ‘making Classical Music accessible’ to the children there. But Uhl would have mentioned it to Christian if there’d been a concert in the ‘Halls of Culture’, for he had not only grown fond of Christian because of his cello playing but also immediately included him in various of his ventures. Also Siegbert and Verena had been too casually dressed to go to a concert. Christian stood motionless, breathing for a few seconds as if he’d just done some heavy physical labour, then held his breath, only realizing he was doing so from his accelerating pulse.

He was on his way to the library. Feeling strangely troubled he left his hiding place, went across the market square, past the church on the other side and the Luther memorial, turned into Seifensiedergasse, at the end of which was the town library, which was in a half-timbered house with maxims written on the gables, a weathercock and the bronze figure of Hans the Soapmaker over the door; it had previously been the guildhall of the soapmakers. He still had twenty minutes, the library shut at six. In the lobby, where they had the issue and return desk, the grey-haired librarian was talking to an apprehensive young member of the Thälmann Pioneers, who had brought back a series of ‘Digedags’ comics in what, from the sharpness with which the librarian was expressing her disapproval, must be a terrible state: ‘chocolate stains’ and ‘dog-eared pages’ she groaned as she leafed through the copies. She made a note on the boy’s file card and Christian knew that that was it for him, he’d never be allowed to borrow ‘Digedags’ comics from the library again. Sabine Winkler came and took the books Christian had brought back. She didn’t resemble her sister at all, no one who didn’t know would have associated the two of them. Sabine had blonde hair, hidden at the moment under a batik headscarf, outside she’d take it off and show everyone her Mohican hairstyle. She wore studded jeans, a biker’s jacket one of her father’s patients had given her in exchange for an invaluable ABBA disc and a less valuable one of Oscar Peterson from the Amiga jazz series with the orange ‘J’ on the sleeve, and a pair of men’s boots a couple of sizes too big she’d bought in the ‘For the Young Man’ section of the Centrum department store in Dresden. Sabine Winkler called herself the ‘first punk in the Godforsaken dump of Waldbrunn’. For her Christian, just like her sister and her parents, was a ‘bornor’, a ‘boringly normal person’. She called him Chris, which for him was the most horrible of his nicknames; it made him think of Chris Doerk, a pop singer of the 1960s who, with her ‘canned-roses’ voice, sang with the state-certified heart-throb of schmaltz, Frank Schöbel, and acted in two DEFA film comedies. Summer film festival on the Baltic coast, wicker beach chairs in orderly rows, the half-mast red ball of the storm signal. A tent cinema, food counter, buffet consisting of plastic dishes with limp cucumber salad. A provincial group playing in the communal dining room and in a book, Sally Bleistift in Amerika by Auguste Lazar, from the holiday-camp library he’d found a love letter … His memories were interrupted by Sabine: ‘Hey, Chris, we close in fifteen minutes and I’m buggered if I’m going to stay on later, like I did last time, just because you can’t get your arse in gear.’

Christian nodded and went off to the farthest corner of the library, where the philosophers were sleeping. He tried to repress thoughts of Verena and Siegbert by forcing himself to study the titles of the books; they were extremely boring- and dry-sounding titles with lots of Latin words in them; he found what he was looking for, in a dusty corner with especially boring- and dry-sounding titles, but he needed a few of them to prepare for a big class test in civics in which they would probably be unable to ‘waffle’, but would have to ‘present facts’.

‘Hey, Chris, what’s up with you, you’re not yakking on at me the way you usually do!’ Sabine slammed the issue date on the stuck-in sheet inside his books. ‘My god, what dusty tomes we have in here!’

On 1 May the flags were out all over Waldbrunn. A member of parliament and representatives of the district Party committee and of the local base of the Soviet armed forces were standing on the platform that had been set up in the market square; row upon row of the pupils of the Waldbrunn schools marched past the waving representatives of the people. The gigantic Karl Marx head, on which the Association of Young Artists of the Maxim Gorki schools had been working up to the very last minute, was shining on the canvas sheet rising several metres above the platform, a totem skull made from five kilograms each of gold and silver paint, a mythical ancestor on a sail, the sail of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Christian thought, who was walking in a row with Jens and Siegbert. A raft floating towards the sun. They swore at the weight of the banner, ten metres long with the slogan: ‘We dedicate all our strength to building up our socialist Fatherland’ and supported every two metres by a pole. When the wind freshened, the five pupils had to lean against the poles with all their strength, the banner billowed out and flapped like the wings of an unruly dragon. Drums rolled, at the front there was a band of cymbals and shawms with drummers and their oompah-oompah, Christian could see the staff whirling and gleaming. Now fanfares sounded beside the platform; Fahner shouted orders into the microphone and the praise of the future, in which there would be no more exploitation and oppression, never again, brightness for evermore, burst from a thousand young throats. Fahner proudly announced the statistics, the loudspeakers hummed; unmoved, as if separated from the procession by a glass wall, the church bells suddenly rang out; the schoolchildren were sweating.

Now every lesson seemed to consist of demands. Frau Stesny looked at her charges with concern as they devoured their supper in silence, running their forefingers up and down the text of books on the table beside them. When she ordered lights out at ten o’clock, they switched off the lights in the rooms of the eleventh-grade classes and counted to a hundred, by which time Frau Stesny would be too far away to see that they’d switched them back on. Schnürchel demanded essays on Soviet films, sometimes they watched one in class: they were always about the Great Patriotic War, about patriotic women partisans, who, duty-bound, resolutely took up their rifles; about soldiers in an almost hopeless situation that they still managed to overcome thanks to their truly superhuman determination and their unwavering class consciousness. Engelmann fluttered and ploughed his way round the class, checking dates of the Comintern, the differences between absolute and relative truth, the role of productive forces in developed capitalist and socialist society. Uhl demanded they learn to sing ‘The Peat Bog Soldiers’ and ‘I Heard a Sickle Sweeping’. Dr Frank demanded presentations about the reproduction mechanism of ferns. Only Hedwig Kolb, who taught German and French, seemed not to demand anything. She would come into the classroom like an absentminded elf, stand wrapped in thought, her hand still on the door handle, unconcerned by the noise of the pupils hurrying to their desks, look in delicate puzzlement, the class register and material for the lesson clamped under her upper arm, at a patch of brightness on the floor, a little sunlit plate on which she’d perhaps discovered a few goblins sticking out their tongues at her; then she came to again, checked the distance to the teacher’s desk — she made Christian think of a gazelle that some magic spell had placed on a frozen lake — put down her books and took out a handkerchief with crocheted edges to clear her ever slightly runny nose. This was no explosive snort, no trumpet blast such as that made by Engelmann, who didn’t use a handkerchief of normal size but a red-and-white-checked flag that made his trouser pocket bulge as if he had an apple in it; with Hedwig Kolb it was a gentle clear-out, quiet and dry; there was a blue giraffe embroidered on the handkerchief that seemed to be begging their forgiveness. Christian recalled the different ways in which the class would fall silent: with Schnürchel abruptly, a silence that came after murdered noise; with Frank at first the noise grew even louder when he came in because as class teacher he was bombarded with questions and problems; Uhl mowed down the conversations with a thunderous ‘Silence!’ and it was only with Hedwig Kolb that it was a silence that opened up, as if the voices were a tangle of woodland plants that drew back as she stepped forward. The Writing Fairy picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the topic for the class on the board. The class waited; Hedwig Kolb turned round and let her clouded gaze tap along the rows of pupils, as if she had to ascertain whether the class was the same as at the previous day’s lesson, whether a few students had not suddenly changed into grown-ups who would stand up and, instead of talking about delicate things like poems that had to be treated with care, turn to serious activities of direct use to the national economy — hammer a nail into a piece of roofing felt, for example; her eye paused here and there, lingered reflectively above the head of a pupil, as a watering can pauses over flowers while the hand holding it hesitates: one more, two more, or even three more drops? Will they help or harm? Then the eye moved on, concealing its doubts in undifferentiated, though not indifferent, friendliness. Although Hedwig Kohl did not adopt an authoritarian pose, she possessed authority and was respected by the pupils. Things were different, however, with Frau Kosinke, the equally gentle, absentminded, forbearing English teacher. No one took her seriously, the pupils imitated her quirks behind her back and laughed at her. In the other subjects hierarchies had quickly established themselves within the class: Verena and Hagen Schlemmer, a taciturn, gangling beanpole with metal-rimmed glasses and skin that looked as if it was only just out of the home laboratory, were the best in mathematics, Schlemmer and Falk Truschler in physics, in which Verena seemed to have no interest whatsoever, Siegbert and Christian in English, Svetlana in Russian and civics, Reina Kossmann in chemistry, Heike Fieber was the pride and joy of the art teacher, Herr Feinoskar. With Hedwig Kolb, however, all the pupils showed a desire to shine; to write the best essay was difficult, there was a lot of rivalry, to be praised by Hedwig Kolb was like receiving an accolade. Christian’s essays had twice been adjudged the best, perhaps that was what had led to Verena’s allusions to his supposed snootiness. The first time was when they had to write about Büchner’s play Woyzeck; Christian had put the class-war interpretation to one side and showed himself more interested in power and impotence in the play, setting out his essay as a dialogue in blank verse to be acted out. Hedwig Kolb had asked him if she might keep the essay and put a hectograph copy on the noticeboard, which made Christian very proud. Verena, Svetlana and Siegbert too had been annoyed at this and made tart comments on his essay, especially on the lines that didn’t quite work … Siegbert had also twice had his essay adjudged the best; Verena once (‘Reproducing impressions’, she’d written about a picture in the IX Art Exhibition, 1982, in the Albertinum in Dresden; Heike Fieber once, who in German and art woke from the trance-like daze in which she flowed through the other subjects. Like a large, velvet-fingered seaweed, Christian thought, like something transparent spreading out in a clear lake. Fluid, like the paint in a watercolour. Heike fascinated him, her thoughts seemed to run along different tracks from the usual ones. It occasionally happened that she put her hand up; Hedwig Kolb, taken aback by this unusual activity, immediately called on her to speak, but Heike ignored the question set and said, ‘I’ve just been wondering what the consequence would be if everyone had blue ears.’ Then her arm slowly sank down, she shook her shock of hair back into place, a characteristic gesture, as if she wanted to get rid of something, recurrent troubled dreams, something that ran counter to her snub nose and the hundreds of freckles on her face, she looked earnestly and thoughtfully at Hedwig Kolb, who, equally earnestly but with a hint of astonishment, looked back: ‘Yes, Heike … but is that possible, have you read something about that?’ In this essay Heike had taken the option of choosing a topic of her own and written: ‘Everything comes through juices. If something goes wrong, then it is because there is something wrong with the juices. Blood is a quite special juice, Goethe said. There is a vertical juice axis and a horizontal juice axis. Then there are the juice shops and there are also crimes against juice. WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF CRIMES AGAINST JUICE.’ There followed, in the middle of her essay, a drawing, a brilliant tangle of coloured lines, snakes with arrowheads pointing at each other — in the distance the scribbles resolved themselves in a sad bearded face. ‘We must fight against the crimes against juice’ was written underneath. Hedwig Kolb asked to be allowed to keep that essay as well. She had marked it ‘quite outstanding’ but didn’t put it on the noticeboard. In brackets she had added, in red lily-of-the-valley handwriting: ‘Unusual combination of word and image.’

28. Black and yellow

Revolving record, Meno wrote, for a few seconds Niklas Tietze’s hands remain over the bobbing undulation of the disc (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests), it’s dark in the room, only the spotlight over the turntable is on and is dispersed, spun together and dispersed again by the rippling rotation, as if a manikin were sitting at a spinning wheel spinning straw into gold; Niklas takes the needle over the edge of the record, it still pauses, a tiny stiletto ready to strike, a little hook that would grab the music, as I imagined when I was a small boy, by the scruff of the neck, peel it, as I still sometimes think now, out of the groove like a copper engraver’s burin cutting hair-lines out of the metal plate; shadows wandering over the photographs on the music-room wall in Evening Star, where I’m visiting Niklas; photos: time captured in shade and light, pre-war Dresden, the interior of the second Semper Opera House, the chandelier seems to be covered in snow, the Belle Époque sitting in the boxes; then, framed and mischievous, his lady-killer dimples frozen in silver bromide, Jan Dahmen, the Dutch conductor of the Dresden State Orchestra; portraits of singers, Martha Rohs and Maria Cebotari, young, misty-eyed, Torsten Ralf in costume as Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, Mathieu Ahlermeyer as Don Giovanni, Margarete Teschemacher, all the photos signed in faded old German handwriting, we will hear their voices over the surge of the orchestra, over the rustling curtains of dust and oblivion that have settled on the moment of performance, music from the sound archives; voices, Magelone in the well of time; doors open in the faded wallpaper, stained from burst pipes, of the music room in 10 Heinrichstrasse, I remembered: the steam engines in the Museum of Transport were unmoving, the cars and railway carriages and the sedan chair of the town council sedan bearers, Anne and I holding father’s hand, he said: Come on, we’re going to practise our seeing; the Reichsbahn locomotives with their empty tenders and red-painted wheels, the wheels must keep on rolling for victory, the connecting rods spun no more yarns of speed and singing rails, the Blériot aeroplane was gathering dust in the wire fetters by which it was hanging from the roof of the hall, melting in the hiss of the record –

Niklas Tietze was a strange man. He was a doctor, one of the rare GPs with their own practice; it used to belong to Dr Citroën and was on Lindwurmring, next to the Paper Boat, Bruno Korra’s second-hand bookshop, and the Roeckler School of Dancing. After deportation, which he was the only member of his extensive family to survive, and the end of the war, Dr Citroën had returned to Dresden and taken Niklas on as his pupil; he revered his teacher and had not changed anything in the practice after Citroën’s death, with the result that it quickly became old-fashioned. Meno hardly ever heard him talk about medical matters. His interest was in music, especially the Dresden Opera. There were hundreds of photos of singers and musicians, many with personal dedications to Citroën and Tietze, who were known throughout the city as music-lovers, hanging in the rooms of the practice and, like Citroën, Niklas preferred to play opera arias to his patients rather than listen to their complaints. For him the present seemed to be one possibility among others in which one could live, and not the most pleasant; for which reason he avoided it. He possessed a lot of books, they were mostly slim volumes and bore the sign of a ship under full sail in a finely inscribed circle which made Meno wonder why the publishing house, if it had chosen the ship as its sign, was called ‘Island’ publishers: was the ship the island? the island a ship? did the island consist of books the ship was carrying as cargo? Niklas didn’t ask those questions, for the books were something different for him than for Meno: time capsules, their presence alone seemed comforting. In the evening, as the clocks struck and night had fallen, Niklas could sit on the chaise longue and take one of the Insel volumes out of the bookcase that was kept specially for them: Mozart’s Journey to Prague, with a cover of pale-blue silhouettes, Gothic script, the pages yellowed and with the mild smell of bread that old paper has, then he would leaf through it, get caught up in the story here and there, nod, adjust his large glasses with the square lenses, read in a murmur a few favourite passages he almost knew off by heart; no one was allowed to disturb him, not Gudrun, who was in the next room reading Leben-Jesu pamphlets or watching television, nor the children who were occupying themselves at the other end of the corridor.

Mused and listened, Meno wrote, sat leaning forward, his aquiline nose cut out of the darkness, a musician’s posture, attentive and at the same time waiting as if, instead of the notes he had anticipated in his inward ear and often played before, different passages had suddenly come, smuggled into the score on a whim of the demons of the opera, scattered over the familiar melodies as a goblin might drop sneezing powder over a devout and quiet congregation, in his mind’s eye he could see the conductor, Furtwängler, writing his cloud-quiver-script with his baton in the electrically charged air, tagged with treble and bass clefs, drum rolls and harp glissandos, over the heads of the orchestra waiting, spellbound, for their entry; the entry melted out of his loops, somewhere in his conjurations a drop formed, ran into the musicians’ fingers, made the contact for the circuits, which were charged up to trembling point: that is, the entry was accepted, the leader decided to harvest it from Furtwängler’s arabesques: to pick it, and he, the leader who, like a herd stallion, had shaken off the paralysis, pulled the whole pack along behind him in a mighty, sonorous chord, the audience, deeply moved, nodded, put handkerchiefs to eyes, hands over left breasts, held its breath: Furtwängler! The way he’s done it again! The way he gets the orchestra to blossom out, inimitable, that softly cushioned precision, the severely delicate sound, hallowed German profundity! Who has mastered the violin bows, tamed the trombones, encouraged the viola and its often misunderstood elegies, knows the vagaries of the oboe reed, of the horn player’s plight when the water level rises in his French horn, Furtwängler reaching the moment of free will and with it the breath of the orchestra, sound comes into being: gauged with the fineness of precision scales –

When Meno came it could happen that a conversation would develop about the book, which Meno thought overrated, and Fürnberg’s Mozart-Novelle, which he thought underrated and better written than the story by the more famous writer. ‘Fürnberg,’ said Niklas in his sonorous, slightly husky voice, ‘ “The Party, the Party, the Party’s always right” ’ and nodded reflectively. Meno gave him one of the eight copies of the little book that he’d bought before they disappeared off the shelves. Niklas leafed through it, praised the drawings by Prof. Karel Müller, Prague, conventional pen-and-ink vignettes, expressed appreciation of the classic Garamond type, was taken with the oval of faded green surrounding the silhouette embossed on the linen cover: Nice, very tastefully done, really: fine — they put their love into the books — and put it away ‘for later’.

However, Meno wrote, is it Furtwängler? Doors in the walls of the music room (and heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests); there: the ‘Starvation Line’ after the war, the 11 as it pants its way up the Mordgrund laden with firewood and horse fodder, with double basses for the State Orchestra concerts in the ‘Culture Barn’ in Bühlau, the ‘Starvation Line’: like each one of its predecessors, shadows swallowed up in the whirlpool of time that set off up the hill from Neustadt Station pulling goods wagons full of washing, a weary animal, groaning under the burden, to whom the driver shortly before the summit of the climb mutters curses, encouragement, threats, his right hand on the control lever, his left on the brake wheel, his view restricted by the musical instruments lashed to the luggage van, the passengers travelling on the footboards, the musicians, who, in a tight cluster, are clutching the rail of the luggage van, the ‘Starvation Line’ on which it stinks of sweat and sour breath from rumbling stomachs, which won’t be silent in the ‘Culture Barn’ either, admission one briquette, the audience, hungry for culture, emaciated faces marked by deprivation, squeeze up close together, shivering in their uniform coats, in their often-mended trousers, made up out of rags or potato sacks, in Bruckner symphonies the trombonist is so weak his breath gives out; the record surges on, voices from the past will wake, already stained with the rust that has crept over the vinyl disc during the decades it spent resting ‘with the treasures’ — in Niklas’s record cabinet under the Gothic clock, we called it that because the little pendulum looked as if it was swinging in a tiny abbot’s parlour; ‘with the treasures’: hoarded in Trüpel’s archive, under the Philharmonia record shop or with Däne, the music critic of the Sächsisches Tageblatt, who every week in his apartment on Schlehenleite, in which music and paper had grown rampant, played samples of his discoveries to the Friends of Music; the rust in the voices the rose-rust fungus of the Dresden Opera and perhaps that’s Schuch, in a sea-green fantasy uniform, raising his baton, perhaps Hofmannsthal is sitting in the semi-darkness of one of the boxes in front of which reality has put on colourful clothes and a ship with huge yellow sails glides past the window of childhood, where the shadows play –

‘For later.’ After that Meno would sometimes go home depressed, hurt, telling himself that his gifts of books were basically unwelcome to Niklas, at least that was the impression Meno had; Niklas seemed never to read them and they didn’t talk about them the next time they met. He’s not a book person, Meno thought as he made his way home in the dark, he’s only interested in books as beautiful objects, things to fill up his bookcase, in precise rows and nice to look at behind glass, and what is important is that they must have a good binding and fine paper — not the content. Goethe is the most important author for him, but only because he’s the most important one for everyone up here and he’s the most important one for them not because they’ve grappled with him, studied and examined him, measured his sometimes hackneyed aphorisms against their own reality and experience, but because he’s recognized and sanctioned, because he’s the favourite yes-man of the bourgeois, which, deep down inside, is what everyone up here is, their chief councillor, generalissimo of opinion and prince of sentiment; because he’s king of their hoard of quotations. Basically, Meno thought, Niklas is only interested in music and in historical recordings of that music. The deader the better! And that’s what they’re all like up here, most of all they’d like to live in old Dresden, that delicate baroque doll’s house and pseudo-Italian wedding cake. They sigh, ‘The Frauenkirche!’ and ‘The Taschenberg Palace!’ and ‘Oh, the Semper Opera House!’ but never ‘Outside toilets! Those magnificent, cholera-friendly sanitary conditions!’ or ‘The Synagogue!’ or ‘What liberating living conditions they used to have, ten people in a tenement apartment!’ They never say ‘the Nazis’ but ‘the low-flying bombers’ and they love to quote Gerhart Hauptmann telling them it was a ‘morning star of youth shining on the world’ and that ‘anyone who has forgotten how to cry will remember at the destruction of Dresden’ and then Meno would thump a tree with his fist in exasperation. It was true and yet he was being unjust. How terribly vain you are, he thought. Just because he didn’t sufficiently appreciate the book you gave him. How very seriously you take yourself … Not good at all, vanity impedes observation and doesn’t serve truth, Otto Haube used to say when we were using microscopes. When Meno encountered the Kaminski brothers he bade them an exaggeratedly cheerful ‘Good day’ and ignored their nods and smiles. He extended his return to his book- and silence-filled living room, made long detours in order to call up his hours with Niklas — Gudrun was seldom there, nor Reglinde or Ezzo — again.

And in writings about the depths of the ocean, Meno wrote, strange creatures appear outside the windows of the houses, Gempylus, the snake mackerel with eyes that look like metal discs staring in at the window; creatures with blind, milky spheres instead of eyeballs and long beards dangling like dead men’s bootlaces; the shadow of the thousand-armed creature, which writes the depths grey, Architeuthis, the giant that Poseidon chained and whose sucker-armed tentacles wrap themselves round the houses like tamarisks, penetrate the plaster and masonry like ivy, embrace them in order to suck, tie themselves on tighter with each year’s growth ring, edge forward with the same intensity that builds up the silence, scale by scale, into something else and with which the needle comes down after Niklas has wiped the yellow cloth over the disc one last time then turned the lever beside the counterbalance, and I had the feeling I saw a counter-movement at the same time, as if the needle over the revolving record were aspirating the air, which looked like a surface, deepening it to a navel, to a funnel the sides of which continued to grow the deeper the needle went, that had perhaps already stopped but, since the sides of the funnel were curving up and the gyrating current had already reached the part of the room beyond the little Moorish table, on which the record player stood, was touched by the counter-revolution of the disc, an electric fluid out of which single sparks flew; trickling neurotransmitters, as if there were a dam between two bodies which, if they approach within a certain distance of it, comes under immense pressure, cracks and begins to sweat out what it contains; the surface tension of the water bending towards the approaching foreign body, an anticipated contact, the needle was swept away by the disc as it grew into a wave, a moment that Niklas awaited with bated breath, his hand still over the tone arm in a beseeching gesture, ready to intervene swiftly, while my eye was drawn by the intensifying hiss into the room, this beautifully cut room with the green wallpaper that went back to the woman who had built the house, a singer at the Dresden Opera; the wallpaper could well be as old as the century, the submarine fauna worked into the pattern showed glints of copper in the cloudy light that was feeling its way from the record player, Niklas never asked me about the animals I was familiar with from Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, how often as a student had I stood in the Jena Zoological Institute looking at the paintings, done with academic precision, delighting in the colours, the shapes of all the siphonophores, Portuguese men-of-war, of the Desmonema annasethe, which looked like a Belle Époque headdress floating behind the glass-fronted bookcases with bound volumes of specialist journals; the sapphire slipped into the track and, in the spark-spinning of the disc, in the travelling ripples of the light, all the Radiolarians and Amphoridea on the walls began to move, the crystalline floating monstrances and spiky little Gothic chapels deepened, as I was familiar with from Malthakus’s postcards, when the bell over the door had fallen silent and Malthakus, whom it had summoned, had returned to the back of the shop to bend over a catalogue and a stamp collection, his special magnifying glass, sometimes a watchmaker’s lens, over his eye, to estimate its value, London and Prague again, Herr Rohde? he asked when he greeted me, or would Rapallo do? I’ve recently acquired some decent stuff — and he would leave me by myself with half a dozen sepia picture postcards, a bay, Mediterranean vegetation, at the side a house with an oriel window on pillars with an ancient-Greek look, a statue in the garden, I still had snow on my hat and coat, felt I could still hear the street noises, the snow melted and as it liquefied the lines of the house, of the statue, melted too, the sails of the schooner in the bay began to flap, the waves, which looked as if carved out of marble, broke and rolled foaming onto the beach — waves that swell with the orchestra’s first note ringing out from the nightshades of the music room –

Meno crossed Turmstrasse at Lindwurmstrasse, which, running parallel to Bautzner Strasse, bounded the district on that side and bordered the wood on the slope going down to the bridge over the Mordgrund, on which the tram set off for the climb up to the district. On the right, in a dilapidated corner building, was the Steiner Guest House; as with most houses, its plaster was cracked and large patches had fallen off; the red bricks that were exposed looked inflamed, all that was left of the mortar between them was individual lumps, you could pick it out from under the bricks with your finger. The bricks themselves were riddled with holes, as if tiny insects had been eating their way through them, porous as rusks, some gave off gas escaping from leaking pipes, making the plaster that was left bulge and blister, and where dampness seeped through, mould spread like leprosy. There was scaffolding on the Turmstrasse side of the building, it had been there for months, no workmen had ever been seen on it. There was a lot of scaffolding like that round the city and the rumour was that this was a cheap way of supporting the buildings. In the summer the windows of the Steiner Guest House were open, you could hear the clatter of typewriters on the first floor, where there was an office dealing with commercial correspondence, a branch of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid. On the fourth floor, above the rooms of the guest house, Frau Zwirnevaden had two rooms, in one of which she ran a silhouette atelier where she made little figures for the Dresden Cartoon Film Studio. There were rumours about the old woman going round the district, the children were afraid of her and she was rarely seen. She wore black clothes and slipper-like shoes that turned up at the toes, went rat-tat-tat on the road with her boxwood stick with a lion’s head, stopped at the shop windows and now and then would crook her finger enticingly. One of the rumours, put into circulation by the two clockmakers in the district, was that all the clocks would start to chime when Frau Zwirnevaden went past and everyone agreed there must be something to it, for the two clockmakers, Pieper and Simmchen, known as ‘Ticktock Simmchen’ because of his delicate health, were deadly enemies and had no time for each other. But Simmchen, whose cousin of the same name had a jeweller’s on Schillerplatz, had raised his hands in fervent protestation as he said to Barbara, ‘I swear to you, Frau Rohde! All the clocks at once and it was only five to twelve!’ When she passed this on at the furrier’s, Barbara did point out that Simmchen’s nose had been as red as a live coal, but added that during their conversation Simmchen had had to blow his nose several times. Another rumour came from Frau Zschunke, who ran the greengrocer’s, popularly known as the ‘dump’, on the corner of Rissleite and Bautzner Strasse, a woman of around forty, pink and chubby, single and entirely devoted to the extraterrestrial theories of Erich von Däniken, and who was always dropping things because, with an ‘Ooh!’ and ‘Aah!’, she would be terribly alarmed by something and, gasping for breath, clutch her imposing bosom. The young folk of the district took full advantage of Frau Zschunke’s nervousness with plastic jumping spiders, which could be bought for ten pfennigs in König’s toyshop on Lübecker Strasse, preferably when Frau Zschunke was taking fruit out of a basket to put it in a metal pan to weigh it with weights that were kept in rows in a wooden box. One day Frau Zschunke had come running into Binneberg’s cake shop across the road, where, evidently distraught, she had kicked up a great fuss among the customers queuing up for their cake and coffee: ‘that Zwirnvaden’ had ‘prodded’ all her cabbages with her spider’s fingers, muttering angrily about their poor quality (at which some of the more cold-hearted ones waiting by Binneberg’s collection of Dresden custard pies nodded), then handed her two cabbages, one white, one red, at which she, Frau Zschunke, had first gone to the white-cabbage till, then to the one for red cabbages — but suddenly saw faces in the cabbages! One of them looked like the son of Herr Hoffmann, the toxicologist from Wolfsleite! — Dr Fernau recommended she didn't restrict her diet to Golden Delicious since that kind of apple only contained certain vitamins.

In the winter the blinds on the windows of the Steiner Guest House were kept lowered. When you came from the tram stop the lamps were shimmering like green and yellow eyes through the venetian blinds, which were crooked and rattled in the wind, behind them shadows went to and fro. An officer who’d been on the general staff of the Afrika Korps lived in the guest house, next door to a stocky man with a thick moustache dyed black and a shaven head who called himself Hermann Schreiber; rumour had it that in reality he had a Russian name and when he was young he’d been a spy for the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, and at the same time for the Red troops that were still operating underground. Romanians, Poles and Russians often stopped at the guest house on their way to the Leipzig Trade Fair; the parties they held with the foreign-language secretaries of the branch of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid, the Russians sometimes also with officers from the hospital of the Soviet forces, formerly a sanatorium, were notorious. Opposite the Steiner Guest House, on the other side of Turmstrasse, was the Central Depot for Automotive Spare Parts. On days when a delivery was rumoured, long queues formed outside. Meno knew nothing about cars but he’d once joined one of those queues on a kind of heroic impulse, having been gripped by the lust for possession. Among those patiently waiting he’d seen Dietzsch, the sculptor, who’d asked him whether he’d registered an application for a car. That was indeed the case — ‘But you’re never going to drive, are you, Herr Rohde? Sell me your application — I’ll pay five thousand marks!’ For that was the first thing many GDR parents gave their children when they reached the age of confirmation or the secular youth dedication: to register them for a car that they would be able to buy after a wait of fifteen years, when they’d long since finished school, an apprenticeship or a degree and would be earning enough to buy one … A registered application such as Meno’s, which dated back to the early seventies, was worth its weight in gold. But Meno was suspicious (moreover his application was to go to Christian) and in a fit of acquisitiveness had joined the queue and purchased two exhaust manifolds for a Polski Fiat, a Wartburg shock absorber and three complete sets of windscreen wipers for a Saporoshez. After that there was ‘Nothing left’, Herr Priebsch, the sales assistant, raised his arms apologetically, not even one of those wires twisted into a tube with a sucker on it in which an artificial flower from Sebnitz in Saxon Switzerland could be attached to the dashboard of a Trabant or a Wartburg, of which there had actually been a delivery that day. Herr Klothe, who lived above the Rohdes in the Italian House and was next in the queue, took it with the composure people had developed for such cases: ‘I presume you haven’t got any beds left?’ — ‘No,’ replied Herr Priebsch in his blue-grey overalls, ‘we only have no winter tyres here. You’ll get no beds in the furniture shop. And you won’t do any better over there either, since we don’t make beds here any more.’ — ‘You don’t say. And why is that?’ — ‘Simple, they’re not necessary! The army’s on peace watch, for the intelligentsia life’s a bed of roses, the politicians sleep abroad, the pensioners in the West, the Party never sleeps — and as for the rest of us, who wants to sleep on a bed of nails?’

Meno had stored the treasures he’d bought in the cellar. They’d turned out to be hard currency, for Stahl, the engineer, had managed to exchange the Wartburg shock absorber for a new mixer tap for the communal bath of the House with a Thousand Eyes.

— And as the needle, Meno wrote, lifted the music out of the record and Niklas’s expression changed, the tension, the strain giving way to a happy calm, coloured photographs, woven from the fiery threads of the music, began to appear inside my head, slid up with jellyfish-soft outlines, stayed there for seconds in which I saw them clearly, like pieces of a retina filled with life, consisting of life; a tide washing up things, the sea’s furnishings: round pebbles ground smooth, stones with holes in them, a seaweed-entwined lump of amber with an insect trapped inside it, a drowned moth, the swell rises, rolls up its gifts, rears into a glassberg and when it reaches its peak the movement stops, the projectionist presses a button and the breaker curdles; and then I saw the musicians moving, the spider made of violin bows going up and down simultaneously, saw faces, pockmarked with the wine-scale of time, drifting among the Amphoridea and medusas of the room, listened, on another evening as we sat over a hectographed booklet in landscape format, to Niklas putting names to the faces and recounting anecdotes: ‘the one with the long neck, standing with his double bass, that’s the Parlour Giraffe’, ‘that one, a ring with a big stone on every finger, in the orchestra they called him Jumbo-Jewels’, then the ‘flautist, Alfred Rucker’, out of whose silver stick the furies of music thundered, ‘the greeeat Alfred Rucker, called Typhoon, he blew everything away’, and at the word ‘great’ Niklas was already leaning back, extending his chin, half closing his eyes behind his square glasses in order to give the adjective, which came from the depths — of his voice and the history of music — that dreamy quality that I heard from the Tower-dwellers when they wanted to characterize some achievement as unrepeatable and superb, as irredeemably lost in the past, in more glorious and perhaps also more sublime ages, as a ‘marvel’; and I sometimes thought that the Tower-dwellers themselves moved through time in a similarly strange and typical way: their future led into the past, the present was merely a pale shadow, an inadequate and stunted variant, a dull rehash of the great days of yore, and sometimes I suspected that it was good when something sank into the past, when it expired and perished, that the Tower-dwellers secretly approved of that, for then it was saved — it was no longer part of the present, that they shunned, and often it was precisely once something was dead that it suddenly shot up into the heaven of their esteem, while they hadn’t even noticed it while it was still living. — The music seems to be flowing out of the tips of Niklas’s fingers, which are white because he wears gloves; I can see the signed photograph of Max Lorenz on the wall over the piano, his arm pointing, the knight is looking into the distance, his voice, revelling like a bare blade, ascends, makes its thrust, the disc spins, heavy with cobwebs, sparks crackle, the label in the middle a yellow magnet, and as the music rose, I saw Niklas growing restless again, a person for whom it was the elixir of life, who would not be capable of breathing for long without it, and I thought it would be the end of him, of his world, if some circumstance should cut him off from music, from his life of longing to be in music; the fishes in the room surged up and down, moved like handkerchiefs on a line the wind was plucking at, the rose under the bell glass seemed petrified –

The old houses with their crumbling plaster … The outlines began to fade, the goods wagons full of ash from the hospital heating plant rumbled; the deep throbbing noise, the origin of which he couldn’t explain, started up, perhaps it came from a transformer or a ventilation system; he had heard it often before on his evening walks.

‘Still out this late?’ It was Judith Schevola. He started and automatically took a step out of the thin light a street lamp cast over the Lingwurmring/Mondleite junction. ‘You gave me a fright. — What are you doing up here?’

‘And if I were to say, I live up here?’

‘I’d reply: In that case I’d have noticed you.’

‘Aha, people know each other in the gold-dust district.’

‘What did you call it?’

‘It was my grandmother’s name for it. Sometimes she would take me by the hand, we’d come over here and she’d say: When you grow up, girl, you must marry someone from here. From the gold-dust district. Where the professors, doctors, musicians all live. But today I’ve just come for a walk. I take the 11 up here, breathe a few lungfuls of the bigwigs’ precious air then buzz off back home. — I bring greetings for you.’

‘From Herr Kittwitz?’

‘Your tongue’s shedding its needles, be careful when you swallow. Herr Kittwitz lives in Gruna. — No, from Herr Malthakus.’

‘You’ve been to see him. He’s married, as far as I know,’ Meno said with a smile.

‘Now you’ve got that I-don’t-think-that-would-interest-you expression.’

‘And you the men-are-all-the-same look.’

‘Malthakus and I are just in the process of making friends with each other. A nice old bird. He’s very precise, but his clocks have a heart, if I can put it like that.’ She took out a packet of cigarettes, offered Meno one. He declined, gave her a light. ‘May I accompany you to the tram stop?’

‘Thanks but I’d prefer to walk with you a while, if you’ve no objection.’

He accepted that Judith would now be walking beside him without a flicker of emotion and didn’t look back when she went on ahead to the junction, stopped and listened, her face turned towards him, though he would have liked to look round to see where she had so suddenly appeared from; in his mind he went through the building entrances he had passed, but at this hour they were usually closed and he would surely have heard a door creaking; of course, he had been deep in thought, and perhaps she had come silently from farther away. The outlines of the buildings had now been erased, the few lighted windows were patches of yellow hanging in the darkness. Meno crossed the road, the hats in Lamprecht’s shop window, on which the greasy light from the lamp at the junction cast a faint glow, looked like the visible part of beings that had a rendezvous with the wigs in the Salon Wiener but it wasn’t quite time yet. Schevola held her nose: ‘Rotten eggs, yeuch!’

Past Lukas, the tailor’s, past the Roeckler School of Dancing and the drizzle of tremolos from a piano worn to a state of thin-skinned irritability.

It must have had a toothache, Meno wrote, that piano in the dance hall on the first floor, it sounded so out of tune and out of humour, and beside it the Nosferatu fingers of a cellist, carved in stucco from feet to elbows, were twined round the fingerboard of his snuffling cello, the pianist’s bald head glinted in rhythmical harmony with the palm-court-soft upanddown of the violinist’s bow; he was standing apart from the cello and piano, in bib and tucker, in the metallic shimmer of formality, beside a Monstera with mustard-yellow leaves, sending tangos slithering across the chessboard dance floor to the sandpapering steps of the beginner’s course, his left hand churning out vibratos, which elicited from the pianist, with a paper flower in his dinner jacket, blank looks at the ceiling where putti and winged hippopotamuses, which only admitted to being angels at a second glance, were playfully teasing each other amid rosy clouds; the music from Tannhäuser sprouts over the decor and I could touch Niklas now, only his body is present, it’s frozen and would perhaps not feel anything, the spell is upon him and the second Niklas, the one only he knows, that inhabits his body, has gone.

This tremolo at the peak of tunes that had become dull from repetition aroused in Meno memories of his schooldays and of dancing classes he had attended in vain. The fog that had come up from Grünleite, a blind alley off the Lindwurmring beyond the junction and where Arbogast’s chemical laboratory was situated, was now creeping past Guenon House and down Mondleite in the direction of Bautzner Strasse.

‘Shall we go on?’ Meno indicated the fog.

‘Why shouldn’t you smell of rotten eggs when you get home?’ Schevola replied. ‘What do they actually produce there?’

‘No one knows that apart from the Baron and his colleagues. As far as I’m aware it’s being kept secret. There are all sorts of rumours.’

‘Well let's walk on. — Tell me about yourself.’

‘There isn’t much to tell.’

‘You’re very reserved. You don’t say much and observe a lot. People like that often have a lot to say.’

‘That’s your opinion.’

‘You don’t seem to be particularly adventurous,’ she commented when he stopped as they approached Grünleite. Now it was stinking like a rubbish tip.

‘It all depends where you’d look for adventure.’

‘I bet you won’t seek one here and now.’

‘Don’t bet too much on it.’

‘How about there?’ She pointed down Grünleite, to the steaming building of the chemical laboratory.

‘And if there are guards?’

‘Then I could have bet quite a lot on it.’

‘We have to be cautious, I don’t know what’ll happen if we get caught.’ He had a quick look at what they were wearing. ‘You’re too well dressed for what we’re about to do. And your coat’s too light-coloured, people will see you.’

‘No they won’t. This is a reversible coat. Just a mo.’ She took it off and turned it inside out so that the dark lining was showing. ‘Do you know your way round here?’ She put on a provocative smile.

‘We’ll soon see.’

Grünleite was lit by the faint light from a few houses that belonged to the military hospital, Soviet officers and doctors lived in them. One of the windows was open, radio music spilling out of it. Schevola crossed over to the other side of the road that was in the shadow of a high wall. The masonry was badly affected. Meno took out his penknife and stuck it in the mortar to see what it was like. The blade went in right up to the handle without him having to exert much pressure. There was barbed wire running along the top of the wall, but in some places trees stretched out over it. They must be part of the woodland the Kuckuckssteig passed through from Arbogast’s chemical laboratory down to Bautzner Strasse and Mordgrund. Fabian Hoffmann, the son of the toxicologist from Wolfsleite, had explored it together with his gang, to which Ina Rohde and Fabian’s sister, Muriel, belonged, he’d told Meno about weathered statues and an impenetrable wall of overgrown wild roses separating Kuckuckssteig from the wood of the Chemical Institute. Schevola turned to the wall and stifled a cough. The fog was like damp cotton wool pouring out of the laboratory entrance, which, like that to Arbogast’s house, consisted of an elaborately wrought gryphon, here surmounted by a steel arch with black and yellow bands. With that stench Meno wondered how anyone living here could leave their window open, they couldn’t have very sensitive noses or were used to much worse. Schevola peered through the gate. ‘No one to be seen. Best down there,’ she said, pointing to the end of the blind alley where there were a few garages with dustbins beside them, ‘if we roll them up to the wall we ought to be able to manage it.’ The yellowish fog, which now stank of fish soup, came up to her knees; the expression on her face was both alert and eager, and she seemed to see it reflected in Meno’s look: immediately the expression vanished, as if she had let it drop and run a fine, swift eraser over it. ‘Just look at this.’ She held up her forefinger, showing Meno a black blob on the tip. ‘What do you think that is? Tar?’

He rolled the shiny black blob between his thumb and forefinger, it was pliable, like the plasticine from which he’d made models at school: cosmonauts or Young Pioneers, Laika, the dog in the space capsule, the cruiser Aurora after a model in Komsomolskaja Pravda. When Meno wiped the blob off on the wall, it left a black streak. ‘Pitch,’ he said, trying to rub out the streak with his shoe. ‘Be careful, there seems to be more of it.’ He drew Schevola away from the steel arch. The pitch was running over the projecting wrought-iron feathers of the gryphon, dripping in viscous threads down from its beak, which looked like an oozing, upside-down gondola, onto its lion’s claws, filling the gaps in its wings, joining up in braids that in the thinning mist spread out on the ground in puddles that made contact, paused briefly, as if they had to communicate with each other, then merged, seeming to be in constant, searching motion, supplemented from the gate-arch where the black substance was now pouring down in long stretching sheets that tore off with a soft ‘plop’. Schevola regarded her shoes, frowning, gave Meno a disgruntled look.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘We’d better get a move on.’

‘Hmm,’ she replied.

‘You suddenly don’t feel like it any more?’

‘My lovely shoes … from the West, genuine Salamander, they were expensive! Judith, you’re …’ She gave herself a light slap on the face. ‘No more of that. They’re ruined now, so let’s get on with it.’

‘You can manage it?’

‘Now you sound like your boss. All you need is the mirror and comb.’ She gave an amused snort. With the supple swiftness of a cat she was on the garage roof in seconds. Picking up a few pebbles, Meno followed, he too without a sound, which drew a soft whistle of appreciation from her. ‘To be honest, I was going to ask you the same question. I seem to have underestimated you.’ They lay down flat on the roof and stared into the darkness in front of them.

‘Watch out,’ Meno said; they took cover behind a tree beside the roof. A searchlight flared up, scouring the terrain, they squeezed into the shadow of the tree trunk when it went across them.

‘We can use the tree to get back out,’ Schevola whispered.

‘Keep down.’

Once his eyes had adjusted to the darkness again, Meno threw a pebble. ‘If they’ve got dogs out there, they ought to come now,’ he whispered. Nothing happened. He couldn’t hear anything apart from the distant throbbing and the goods wagons carrying ash from the hospital heating plant; the radio had fallen silent.

‘They just chuck their ash down the hill,’ Schevola whispered. There was the hiss of a boiler, the slam of a door shutting, otherwise it was quiet.

The searchlight felt its way back, boring a tunnel of dazzling brightness in the dark, rolled over the garage roofs, abruptly shot up into the treetops, whitewashed the walls like a decorator painting a room systematically, suddenly jerked upwards, came back down in unpredictable swerves; cautiously Meno and Schevola raised their heads once the tunnel of light receded.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Let’s turn back.’

29. Blue vitriol

The record turns like a ship’s screw, the steamer Tannhäuser casts off, taking me into different times (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests), on deck Captain Tenkes and Sinbad, Osceola and Four Men and a Dog — in a Tank, films we’d seen in the Round Cinema, in the Faun Palace, in the Schauburg in Neustadt, where it smelt of alum, where the fumes of Chlorodont toothpaste from the Leo Works mingled with the chocolate aromas from the factories on Königsbrücker Strasse; the curses of the coachmen with the disgruntlement of misunderstood wits (‘Shall I tell you what Dresden is? This emirate of floor polish and rubber plants?’), cinemas with threadbare seats and display cases with film posters and reviews cut out of Eulenspiegel that only I studied while Niklas had just a dismissive wave of the hand for them, and the boys, Christian, Robert, Ezzo, Fabian, had already joined the queue outside the cinema, they knew all these posters, Belmondo’s boxer’s face, attractive, cold depravity in Alain Delon’s handsome features, Lino Ventura’s sly, brawny correctness, which went with inspectors who, earlier on, before they were inspectors but honest criminals in their prime, had been made an offer, people who couldn’t give up smoking because they had seen things that went beyond the parting in their hair, their employee’s overalls, their briefcase; they have no illusions about the fact that the past will catch up with them and make them pay for what they’ve seen; they know that any dream they’ve put down will never be carried through, even if it’s waiting unchanged, even if they can take off their jacket, touch it and look for the point where it was interrupted; cinemas that had a supporting programme and the DEFA Eyewitness flickered across in front of us, a black-and-white sun, in earlier years the UFA Newsreel and different people in the cinemas to whom the wordsmiths spoke, they seemed to be providing the soundtrack to a law, those voices in the Olympia Picture House, in the Capitol on Prager Strasse, in the Stephenson and UT Picture Palaces, the law that the world is eternally divided into friend and foe, that there will for ever be command and betrayal, victory and defeat, and that the light is with the common people, the cruiser Tannhäuser put out to sea, radio location finders and beams of light probed the night-dark waters, villas under the Soviet star where the toxic roses grew, and sleep and brown snow came down on the town and acid rain from the brown-coal heating plants, glue crept into the river from the cellulose factory, and Pittiplatsch waved from the television tower and the Sandman scattered oblivion, the Bols ballerina danced at the apprentices’ celebration in the slaughterhouse to folk songs on a hurdy-gurdy and the tinkling of a dulcimer, and they shouted ‘pisspot’ beside the blood-channel, the bolt still stuck in the head of the wriggling pig, and ‘piddlebowl’ at the steaming dishes on the table where, following ancient custom, the master slaughterman adds meat dumplings to the cauldron of gruel; fiddles and friction-drum on the Titanic-, panic-deck (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests) … benumbed, perhaps that’s what it was, Niklas sat motionless by the record player on evenings when the snow sank down or the light of a summer’s day made the pear tree outside the window glow, I had the feeling that the music sucked him dry and at the same time filled him with the delicious essence of oblivion, the record was a spindle with nettle threads that flew out and clung fast to him with barbed hairs, twined themselves tighter with every revolution and pulled his inner being over: where to? there, there … I asked myself how it was possible for a person to live so much in the past, to be able to wipe away the present with an inner flap of the hand — I didn’t see one outwardly, Niklas didn’t position himself in front of me and raise his arm in a theatrical condemnation of everything that was in the light and shade of our day and that we summed up as ‘now’ — a gesture that was a brusque ‘no’, made with all the unmitigated fury with which a grown-up capitulates in the face of their fear; how could he declare this ‘now’ non-existent — was he a fool who’d made an agreement and would pay for it and could do as he liked until then? — I sometimes thought he’d met the Mistress of the Clocks and that she had granted him a clock face that went differently from those she had allotted us … but what was he doing there, in the past? What was it for him? What was it for the Tower-dwellers? Was he present when I thought of him, visited him, imagined him sitting alone at night in the music room listening to opera voices from long-ago recordings that he preserved and perhaps Trüpel or Däne as well, perhaps this or that person we knew nothing about (but one day they would join Däne’s Friends of Music, it had to happen, and Däne suspected there were these still undiscovered connoisseurs, that was why he liked to put special recordings, rare performances, hidden works on his programme in order to lure them), and when Niklas was going home from Lindwurmring, his worn midwife’s bag in his hand, his beret pulled down sideways over his cheek, the way he approached with dignified steps, gently waving his hand up and down (the echo of music from a performance?), his expression one of strict absorption, still not having noticed me, then I thought: Yes, that’s him, one from up here, one of the Tower-dwellers: who spoke of the past as of a Promised Land, surrounded themselves with its insignia, heraldic badges, its postcards and photographs, what was that past to them? A constellation of names, a Milky Way of memories, a planetary system of Sacred Writings and the holiest, the Sun, was called OLD DRESDEN, written by Fritz Löffler (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests) … and I remember evenings in Guenon House: you went in through the scratched swing door, walked down the wall-to-wall carpeting, time-bleached to the colour of ailing rosewood and fraying at the edges, that daily roused Herr Adeling’s displeasure, past potted plants at the stair corners that reminded me of nicotine-yellow octopuses sulking away for years in the formalin jars of zoological collections, felt crumbling plaster decorated with scenes from the Mastersingers, had accustomed yourself to the panes of glass in the corridor doors held together with Ankerplast adhesive tape — and ended up facing an index finger, pale as a fish and knotted with arthritis, over which a conspiratorial smile appeared: ‘Come in, Herr Rohde, we’re just looking at it.’ There it lay, on a damask-covered table, on a carved lectern, polished to a shine with walnut oil and meticulously rubbed dry, spreading its paper pinions like angel’s wings: the book; come all ye that are heavy laden and refresh yourselves and find rest in the unalterability of my dwelling, come and restore your souls. Open at: the Zwinger, photograph of the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments. ‘It was built between 1711 and 1714 as the first of M. D. Pöppelmann’s pavilions during August the Strong’s period as Imperial Regent, as is proved by the use of the imperial eagle in the decoration of the pediment frieze.’ Voices, at first husky but then lubricated by coffee with cream, cherry brandy and Dresden custard pie, reading out, forefinger sliding along the lines, fingernails boring into individual letters, reading glasses telescoping up and down over the paper: ‘Proved, Herr Rohde, did you hear: proved. You will recall the little discussion we had in our circle here on that very topic. Herr Tietze and Herr Malthakus were both here then and agreed with me while you, Herr Pospischil, were a little wide of the mark, as we can see.’ Herr Sandhaus ran his tongue between his teeth, a soft slurping noise could be heard, executed a slight turn of his upper body to the left where Ladislaus Pospischil, born in Vienna, stranded in the chaos of a chaotic century in Dresden, hotelier, wine waiter, dealer in second-hand goods, briquettes, agent for concert artists, presently manager of the Schlemm Hotel on Bautzner Strasse, scrutinized one of Frau Fiebig’s exceedingly brightly polished silver spoons: ‘Proved, Herr Pospischil. It’s in Löffler, I’ve also taken it out of one of my older copies for you. We also talked about it with Herr Knabe.’ Herr Sandhaus handed the hotelier some sooty typewritten carbon copies, with precise references to place of origin, page and line number added and, as far as the appearance of the imperial eagle in the pediment frieze of the Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments was concerned, an enlarged photograph. ‘There you are. Herr Löffler has also personally confirmed everything to me. I always say: in the next edition he must improve the appearance of the imperial eagle. Just a little. But there it is. It does indeed appear in the pediment frieze, does our much-lauded bird. A drop of liqueur, perhaps? That custard pie’s delicious as usual, Frau Fiebig, tell me, where d’you get it?’

‘What d’you think, from Wachendorf’s, of course, and all through personal connections, y’know. What’d we do without ’em, as my late husband used to say.’

‘You’re absolutely right there, my dear Frau Fiebig, ab-so-lutely right. You get out of your car, which doesn’t exist, go across to the shop and buy till your bags are bursting from the shelves creaking under the load of goods on offer, that’s life, isn’t it? I think we can regard that topic as closed, your very good health, Herr Pospischil, and no hard feelings, I hope.’

‘A company of ghosts,’ Hanna called the inhabitants of Guenon House, ‘I hope you’re not going to be part of it.’ The yellow fog drifted through their rooms, leached the substance out of the houses, made the Dresden sandstone porous, left a crust on the roofs, ate away at the chimneys, made the putty round the windows crumble, but the Tower-dwellers listened to Tannhäuser in seven different recordings and compared them to each other in order to argue about which was the best, the greatest, the most beautiful, the standard recording; they went over the measurements of the destroyed Courland Palace, in thought and on paper, while their apartments were decaying, the wood of the roof beams rotting, and that was something I knew from the whole city, this bullet-riddled baroque boat in the bathtub of the Elbe valley, this shimmering foetus trapped in the womb of its own, parallel time; everywhere I went it was the same: coffee morning, custard pie, OLD DRESDEN

Tannhäuser’s ship sailed away and Frau Fiebig made roses bloom just as others light candles, they were made of fabric, these roses, clouded in aromas of eau de Cologne, dust, furniture polish, the delicate pink had only survived in the shadow of the innermost petals, it was the colour of dancing shoes you find in the loft beside bundles of letters, pastel-coloured paper in lined envelopes held together with dried-up silk ribbons; the gesture of invitation with which Frau Fiebig showed her guests into the apartment made the flowers in the room burst open, made the crocheted antimacassars less distant, brought out the sweetness of the little porcelain chimney sweep, the flirtatious looks of the fake tomes in the bookcase beside the little cupboard in which Frau Fiebig kept her late husband’s war medals and chocolate sweets, they twined round the scores on the piano, their covers decorated with roguish little cherubs and arbours where kneeling huntsmen were singing their hearts out, they budded round the canaries’ cage, these fabric roses from the fancy-goods department of Renner’s store, where Cläre Fiebig had worked as a sales assistant; the guests were shown into the parlour, Herr Sandhaus, who worked on Coal Island for the council of the East District and perhaps therefore felt obliged to provide the Party newspaper, put a whole week’s copies of Neues Deutschland, neatly folded and smoothed out, tied across and down with string, on the part of the table intended for them, straightened up after a moment’s pause for thought, looked to see whether the chocolate girl in the reproduction over the cupboard was rousing herself from her motionless repose, stepped aside to allow Herr Adeling to place a week’s worth of Sächsische Zeitung on Neues Deutschland, the edges and folds perfectly lined up, then came Niklas with the slimmer Sächsisches Tageblatt, Lukas the tailor and his wife with the Sächsische Neueste Nachrichten, Herr Richter-Meinhold with the even slimmer redtop Junge Welt; one kilogram of newspapers; ’s that everything? Frau Fiebig asked, concentrating as she checked them on her fingers while Herr Adeling put on his waiter’s gloves, straightened the stack of paper, tied it up, lifted the pile between thumb and forefinger and went over to the window, which Frau Fiebig opened, Herr Adeling’s outstretched arm, his left hand with the white glove, the package could be seen in the gathering dusk over the Lindwurmring, with hands joined at the fingertips and heads inclined, the company waited for Frau Fiebig’s grandfather clock to strike, ding dong, six o’clock, at the last stroke Herr Adeling’s fingers snapped open, the pile of newspapers thudded into the open dustbin outside the house, Frau Fiebig took off the tablecloth, Herr Adeling sketched a bow to the neighbours, patted his gloves to clean them before picking them off by the fingertips and putting them away, followed Frau Fiebig and the others as they went to wash their hands, filled glasses with liqueur and turned his attention to the geometry of the pieces of cake on the Meissen plate shimmering under the glass cover on the little cupboard, assessing their respective weight with a silver cake-slice; Herr Sandhaus brought the lectern (‘genuine Biedermeier!’), waited for Frau Fiebig, who put a lace cloth over it; she opened the Löffler and said, with the syllable-sculpting emphasis with which the Dresden bourgeoisie distinguish contempt from esteem, low from high, garbage from roses: Right. And no-w. We COME. To cul-chure.

The Tannhäuser caravel, Tannhäuser radio, echo-sounding the depths of time, black-and-yellow the record spindle.

Winter 1978/79: the central heating fails in Johannstadt and threatens to burst in the severe frost, people mock the confidence shining out of the black-and-white faces in the newspapers, curse the subbotnik, the work for the benefit of the community on Saturdays. Teams of the Free German Youth go out to open-cast mines in the Lausitz and help units of the National People’s Army bring in coal for Dresden.

‘They’re supposed to have three wagonloads. They say they’re supposed to come first. Specially to heat the Palace of Culture. Have you heard anything, Herr Tietze, after all you are involved?’ Herr Sandhaus rubs his hands. ‘I’ve actually managed to get two tickets.’

Niklas leans over the table, lifts his spoon over Black Forest cake and whispers, ‘Böhm’s going to conduct, his first public appearance with the State Orchestra here since forty-three. How humiliating if they can’t manage to heat the Palace of Culture.’

Frost patterns spread all over the stairs. Sleep. Sleep in winter, the cold sleep at the revolving records on which the hoar frost crackles. The lamps grate, they’re old, from before the war, the wires are worn and oxidized, in some houses in Neustadt they leave the bulbs on because they might not go on again if they’re switched off, a faint, flickering light in winter, and the whirr of the fan heaters, cubes swathed in cast-iron in which a wire twisted into a snake heats up until it’s red-hot, later there are the orange heaters from Hungary in the city’s bathrooms, kitchens, book-rooms smelling of ash.

Tannhäuser’s ship sailed away,

and Herr Richter-Meinhold, a gaunt man in his seventies, formerly a producer of maps, walkers’ maps among others (yellow-and-red covers, the paper mounted on linen, geographies you never heard about at school: the Hultschin country, the Iser mountains), that people guarded like treasures and that never stayed long in second-hand bookshops, especially when they showed the territory of the GDR (‘the only ones that aren’t falsified, you know!’); Herr Richter-Meinhold raised his hand (that Dresden gesture, that ‘that’s the way it is, I’m afraid, everything passes, we can’t do anything about it’) and said, ‘It’s really cold, like all those years ago, during the bombardment. By the way, Herr Tietze, Hauptmann’s later writings are full of hidden emeralds. Not necessarily diamonds. But certainly emeralds. I knew his secretary, Ehrhart Kästner. He was a librarian in the Japanese Palace and he lived up here. No one remembers.’

‘No.’

‘I actually met Hauptmann. It so happened that my aunt was in the Weidner Sanatorium, from where he observed the air raid. I visited her and saw him. Unforgettable, that Goethe noddle he had.’

‘Anyone who has forgotten how to cry will remember at the destruction of Dresden.’ Sandor, on a visit from Ecuador, ten years old at the time of the bombing, turns away in silence. They remember. ‘Everything used to be quite different up here. Nothing’s what it used to be. No comparison. No, no. Today it’s Dresdengrad. A province of the UGSSR: the Union of the German-Speaking Soviet Republics.’ Ruins are still standing after years and years. Electrification along with bombsites, ugly dual carriageways, draughty tenement blocks, fifteen-storey blocks rammed into the famous, now gap-ridden Canaletto skyline. And in the old days: ‘We used to be a capital. A royal capital! Yes, well … in the old days …’ They sigh. Photos are taken out. The view of the Frauenkirche from the Brühlsche Terrasse. A lamp with needles of light in Münzgasse. The conjurations began, the Dresdeners’ longing for Utopia, a fairy-tale city. The city of alcoves, of quotations from Goethe, of music-making in the home, looks back in mourning to the world of yesterday; their tiresome, eroded everyday life is supplemented with dreams: shadow Dresden, the illusion behind reality flows through its pores creating hybrid beings à la E. T. A. Hoffmann. Double exposures. Tannhäuser sang, sang of the Army Museum, where needle-guns were aimed at Napoleon, Saxony’s days of splendour and soldiers marching to ‘Preussens Gloria’, uhlans’ lances and cuirassiers’ helmets of the Belle Époque (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests), wraiths groping their way in the gas war of the trenches, the blue-cross gas of Ypres, the sappers danced, Verdun, Doctor Gottfried Benn, a poet going round the morgue, Otto Dix painting animals in human form and the shattered glass of the photo of the old Frauenkirche, Dresden … ‘I will give this pearl the setting it deserves’ … The Synagogue burnt.

How does one drink wine in Dresden, the city with the guilty smile? Tannhäuser’s ship sailed away, to Canaletto’s archipelago … Bells sound on 13 February. From all parts of the city people pour to the centre, place candles by the devastated Frauenkirche, two great ruined walls stretching up into the sky like arms begging for help. The boys’ choir of the Church of the Holy Cross sings Mauersberger’s Requiem. Driving home at night, in the Hoffmanns’ Lada or the Tietzes’ Shiguli: in this perspective the ‘Woda’ indicator flashing across the dashboard is as big as the birch tree on the gloomy bulk of the ruined castle and looks like a phosphorous needle restlessly scanning the sooty remains of the stepped walls where by day suites of rooms and the lines of paintings burnt into them can still be made out.

‘The Great Hall in the castle, what splendid concerts there were there. And kings ate from the swan dinner service, at a table with a thousand pieces of finest Meissen china,’ Frau von Stern, a former lady-in-waiting, would tell them. ‘Chandeliers hanging down like coral reefs of light! They tumbled down, lumps of glass on the floor, melted and fused over people, the faces, the faces.’

‘Florence on the Elbe, such an Italian softness, a smiling city!’

‘And the social situation? How did people really live back then? A beautiful façade for a lot of misery? Weren’t there 100,000 out of work in 1933? Weren’t the murderers among us?’

‘Oh, that’s enough. If they hadn’t elected the Nazis, it would still be smiling.’

‘You can’t be a proper Dresdener if you can say things like that, you don’t love your city.’

‘For you love’s glossing over things, is it? Come off it! Sometimes I think you need a bit of that. Basically you wouldn’t even be happy if the old Dresden were suddenly to reappear!’

‘I’m not going to say one more word to you!’

Who is talking? The Tower-dwellers, they talk at the soirées and Frau Fiebig’s roses bloomed, had the fragrance of dust, eau de Cologne and furniture polish, shining clean silver spoons dipped into the Dresden custard pie from Wachendorf’s bakery, outside the frost patterns grew, creeping over the river and the stairs and the clocks; in the evening the Tower-dwellers would sit in their apartments telling each other stories, they told each other about chandeliers found in the loft or in forgotten chests (‘somewhere out on the prairie’), covered in soot and unsightly — for the layman, but in their eyes immediately valuable for the engraved detail that careful, expectant rubbing had brought to light; the Tower-dwellers were familiar with every screw of these chandeliers and if they weren’t, they became uneasy, for they had to know where every screw came from, had to know every hand that had worked on the chandelier and I sometimes asked myself: What’s the point? as I watched them. What did it give them, what adventurous form of satisfaction, to know the name of the master craftsman who had cut that tiny screw? Was it despair at the incompleteness of the world, despair at a missed detail that might cause everything to collapse?

Target coordinates N51°03´/E13°36´. At 9.55 p.m. a radio announcer in the Albertinum cellars reports the approach of large formations of Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force … ‘I will give this pearl the setting it deserves!’ The first marker bomb falls on Ostragehege, the grounds of a slaughterhouse in a bend of the Elbe between Friedrichstadt, Übigau and Pieschen. At 10.13 p.m. the first bombs explode in the centre of Dresden

to collapse, to destruction, to loss, was it despair at the passage of time?

and hear the voice of a Dresdener whose right hand, as if suffering from compulsive checking, keeps running up and down the fastened buttons of his coat: ‘I loved my city but … I survived because it was destroyed,’ said Herr Rosenbaum after a long silence.

The Tower-dwellers … Do they want a hermetically sealed world? Was their god the god of the sphere, of clock faces, of ships?

Star of the Sea Evening Star sank, the needle went into an idle loop, the fishes and Amphoridea on the wallpaper froze, doors closed, the photographs on the walls clouded over, Max Lorenz lowered his sword, the roar of the waves of time died away, the good ship Tannhäuser ran aground

Niklas remained in his frozen posture, I stood up to turn the record over (and I heard the musical clock: Dresden … in the muses’ nests / the sweet sickness of yesteryear rests)

Meno wrote

30. Young woman on a windless evening

Calm: the day seemed to be drifting like a boat after one last stroke of the oars, no longer straining, not yet at its goal, the sky, in which only a few light-as-a-feather cloud-eyebrows were raised in astonishment, expanded to balloon-blue, into which the roofs of the old Academy stuck up like sail-fins; in the park beneath it watercolours of green, the white and purple rhododendrons, were already submerging into twilight. For one moment, when a shimmering burst of swallows had dispersed in the saffron-yellow above the treetops in front of the Dermatology Clinic, there seemed to be an equilibrium of all the balances in which the sense impressions of the late afternoon had risen and fallen: the clitter-clatter-clump, clitter-clatter-clump of a nurse’s hurried steps; the metallic pink and white of coats and caps; patients in bathrobes strolling round the park with X-ray photos under their arms; doctors with their hands buried in their coat pockets, in which they moved them impatiently as soon as a nurse came within greeting distance; the scent of apple flowers drowsing down from the gardens on Händelallee; the whine of the electric carts; cars puttering past on Akademiestrasse.

Then it returned in waves and orders, only for moments, his weary body, the piercing brightness of a lamp aimed at him, demands, a student who nodded to him and, as if he wanted something from him, stopped as if uncertain what to do; it lopped off the threads back to childhood that had fluttered out for a long second, Josta’s letter, that Richard felt for. He had stood up and left without having given the student an encouraging look; he hadn’t been in the mood for discussions about lectures, for proposing a topic for a thesis or whatever else the young man might be concerned about. They were always coming with requests, these young people, and they were always similar, and if they wanted to be surgeons then they had to be neurosurgeons or, even better, heart surgeons; and if they had questions, they were almost always complicated and almost never simple; they didn’t seem to be interested in why a violin bow was able to produce a certain note, why all rivers flowed when the Earth was round and consequently there ought to be some rivers that were faced with an uphill course. Or why you could carry a letter from a woman round with you and not know whether you should be pleased or afraid, and why a letter, nothing but a piece of paper, could weigh so heavy.

He didn’t read through the letter again, he knew it almost off by heart. Why don’t you come, why do you stay away from me, why do you avoid me when I’d like to see you and our paths cross in the Academy, Lucie’s asking after you, we have a right to you as well, I don’t know how long I can stand this, you’ll have to make up your mind some time or other, or have you had enough of us already, of me, is this your ‘just going out to get some cigarettes’?

Richard went back to the clinic. He’d arranged for an operation and had some appointments in the Outpatients’ department for hands. After the operation he went to the ward to have a coffee and something to eat. His secretary was still there. ‘You go home,’ Richard said, ‘you can just as well do the operation reports tomorrow.’

‘Frau Fischer from Administration rang. She’ll call again.’

‘I’m not in.’

‘She said it was important. It’s about Doctor Wernstein.’

‘I’ll be in hand Outpatients in five minutes. She can call me there if she likes.’ Outpatients was full and he let the telephone ring. He would have ignored it but the nurse assisting him picked up the phone. ‘For you.’

‘Can we meet, Richard? Have you read my letter?’

‘Good afternoon, Frau Fischer, what is it?’

‘Can I wait for you, outside Administration today? It’s less noticeable than in the park, if anyone should see us,’ Josta said quickly, perhaps expecting him to object in the hackneyed phrases concealing the secret language they’d worked out for telephone conversations when others were present; ‘It’s a bit awkward at the moment’ meant ‘8 p.m. at the place you suggest.’

‘It’s a bit awkward at the moment.’

‘Or you can come to my place. You can always say things took longer than expected in the clinic.’

‘Could you ring me again tomorrow? Thank you.’ That meant: no. He hung up.

It was still light when Richard left the clinic. He had taken his time changing, even though it was getting on for eight when he finished with the last outpatient; he had even wondered whether to have a shave, but had put his razor back in the cupboard when it occurred to him that there was a discrepancy between a long day at work and a smooth chin smelling of aftershave that might arouse doubts and further suspicion. He recognized Josta from a distance, she was standing on one of the forsythia-framed paths by the Eye Clinic talking to a few younger doctors who were pulling in their stomachs. He was furious that she hadn’t stuck to their agreement, at the same time he felt a sudden spurt of jealousy when he saw her coquettishly playing with her ponytail, throwing back her head, sniffing, as if casually, at the forsythia twig she had in her hand when one of the doctors went up and down on his toes as he spoke. Of course, she saw me ages ago, Richard thought, and now she’s making it clear to me that she only needs to snap her fingers. Josta left the doctors and headed, about fifty metres in front of him, for the Administration building. She was wearing a light dress and had her coat over her arm. He knew that the picture would stay in his memory for ever: a young woman on a windless May evening, the folds of her dress swaying to and fro, a slow-motion image amid the blurred brightness of the other passers-by.

‘Why are you so late? Why did you make me wait? Have you any idea when we last saw each other?’

‘You shouldn’t phone me at the clinic.’

‘Is it asking too much that I’d like to see you?’

‘Josta … they know about our relationship. I’m having my arm twisted. They’ll make it known, if —’

‘Who is “they”?’

‘— if I don’t collaborate with them.’ He swallowed, exhaled audibly. ‘Write reports, gather information.’

She frowned, looking past him. He observed her out of the corner of his eye and was astonished at how differently from Anne she reacted; the expression on her face swung between arrogance and coolness, as if she had not so much feared as hoped for something like that, as if, he thought with alarm, she had wished for it.

‘One day you’ll have to make a decision.’ Her voice broke. ‘If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.’

‘Really?’ That was the cynic speaking that every surgeon recognized inside himself, the sceptical, brutal detachment to which no one was immune after a few years in the profession. He regretted it immediately. ‘What’s this about Wernstein?’ he said, incapable at the moment of finding any way of apologizing.

‘He’s going to have problems,’ Josta replied icily, ‘perhaps because of you? How did you put it? Reports, information —’

‘Josta —’ He felt for her hand, she pulled it away. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. Please. I’m sorry.’

‘Kohler and your Clinic Party Committee have submitted a complaint. Disparagement of socialist achievements,’ Josta said after a while.

Kohler. Müller’s favourite from the General Department. Very efficient as far as clinic management, as it was now called, was concerned. Apart from Müller and Administration, no one seemed to like him.

‘What nonsense is that now?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s on the Rector’s desk.’

‘What is he proposing to do? Call a meeting, the Arbitration Commission? Dismiss Wernstein?’

‘I just wanted to warn you in advance. It could be that this time he’s going to have recourse to drastic measures, recently there’ve been a lot of people from the District Committee here and even from Berlin. There were nasty arguments and one of those characters, you could smell where he came from at ten metres, threatened him openly. Suggesting he was perhaps out of his depth as principal.’

‘Come, let’s walk on a bit. I don’t want people to see us here together. They might think you were letting out secrets. What is it this Kohler actually wants? Have you seen his complaint?’

‘Only the reference and a couple of lines of the letter, they were clear enough. — He wants to get on. Next month he’s being transferred to your section and Wernstein’s in his way there. They’re suggesting he be taken out of the rotation system and transferred.’

‘They want to get him out of the clinic?’

‘Müller’s already talked to the head of Orthopaedics in Friedrichstadt.’

‘And I know nothing about it. Damned schemers. — Will you wait for me outside? I’ll fetch the car.’

He parked in a side street not far from her flat.

‘Won’t you come up? At least for a few minutes?’

‘You know I can’t’

She said nothing and stared at the street. Some girls were playing Chinese twist, a three-wheel lorry loaded with barrels lurched past. ‘Do you love your wife more than me.’

‘Leave it.’

‘Why can’t we be together … Always having to hide, always “You know I can’t” and “Leave it” and “Goodbye” … Recently Lucie was talking about you in the kindergarten, that you always go away in the evening when you’ve been to see us. “You’ve got a funny dad,” the other children told her.’

‘But I told you she was to keep her mouth shut!’

‘I can’t forbid her to talk, I can’t control her all the time.’

No, she couldn’t. After all, it was quite natural for a child to talk about her father; what would he have said if Josta had told him that Lucie never spoke about him. ‘Give her my best wishes.’

Without looking at him she squeezed his hand and got out. He wound the window down. ‘Josta!’

She stopped but didn’t turn round. ‘Please forgive me.’ She nodded. The girls playing Chinese twist raised the elastic. A window was opened above them, a man in braces over his vest put a cushion on the window seat and scrutinized the girls.

‘Another thing I wanted to say —’ He fixed his eyes on the man’s unshaven face; she didn’t react. ‘A lovely dress you’ve got on.’ She stayed there for another second, then slowly put on her coat and walked off. The man stared after her. On his way home to Anne, Richard stole a branch of forsythia from a garden.

Next day was the consultant’s round, a white-coated gaggle swept through the North wards. The duty assistants held X-rays for Müller and his senior doctors to see, the ward-doctors murmured explanations, nurses took the bandages off the cuts with sterile tweezers and gave gloves to the doctors inspecting them. Müller kept looking at his watch, snatching the X-rays out of the assistants’ hands, stabbing at them with his forefinger and throwing them down on the beds. Even the patients could feel the tense atmosphere, lay there rigid, arms along their sides, looking back- and forward between Müller and the doctor reporting to him. By one of the patients’ beds there was a glass bedpan with a splash of urine left in. ‘Is it beyond the bounds of possibility for the nurses with responsibility for this room to empty the piss out of the brandy snifter when the consultant is doing his rounds. What kind of slovenliness is that, Nurse Lieselotte?’ The nurse in charge of North I turned pale. ‘But there’s that proverb about master and man,’ Müller went on. ‘Herr Wernstein can’t find the charts for two patients, lab results are missing, the abscess in Two is merrily gathering pus … What a casual approach to medical treatment in my clinic!’ Richard raised his hands in protest. ‘The man in Two has been put back by the anaesthetist, we are aware of the problem, but he’s on Falithrom —’

‘Since when,’ said Müller, cutting him off, ‘since when, Herr Hoffmann, does an anticoagulant stop us performing our duty as surgeons and lancing an abscess?’

‘Herr Professor’ — Trautson nodded to Richard — ‘I had arranged for the operation, but the anaesthetist flatly refused —’

‘Then we’ll administer the anaesthetic ourselves, goddammit! An abscess on the thigh doesn’t require a general anaesthetic and you’re surely not going to tell me the man risks bleeding to death from having an abscess lanced!’

‘He’s at risk of sepsis if we don’t operate,’ Kohler pointed out.

‘Well, then you do it!’ Richard burst out. ‘The coagulation is poor and so far the antibiotics have kept his temperature under control —’

‘So far,’ said Müller. ‘I’m not happy, Herr Hoffmann, I want to see you this afternoon.’

No one had ever heard such criticism, in front of all the doctors and nurses, of the senior surgeon. Richard felt like a schoolboy who had been given a dressing down. The gaggle went on to the next ward. Trautson drew Richard aside. ‘What on earth can have got into the old man? He knows perfectly well that the anaesthetists are right. And all that fuss just because two patients’ charts are missing and, anyway, they’re already being operated on …’ Trautson shook his head. ‘Oh, great, we’ve got something coming. In your place I wouldn’t take it to heart, Richard. Who knows what’s really behind it?’

‘Can I have a word, Herr Wernstein?’ Richard asked. They went to the ward day-room. ‘Now will you for God’s sake tell me what you’ve been up to. If I’m going to get hauled over the coals because of you, I need to know why. It’s Herr Kohler’s complaint I’m talking about.’

Wernstein told him. As so often, it was about reality and what one made of it — and the barbed-wire fence between the two.

‘And then I told him to mind his own business.’

‘Told him?’

‘In so many words. That smart-arse — we know what sepsis is as well.’

‘And he said?’

‘That he’d been observing me for a long time, I was a troublemaker.’

‘And you said?’

‘That the troublemaker was of the opinion that political bunkum never cured a patient.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Well, something to that effect.’

‘Instead of bunkum you —’

‘… said something else, yes.’

‘My God, Wernstein, have you gone mad?’ Richard got up and started to walk up and down the room. ‘You know the old man’s relationship to Kohler. And anyway.’

‘I know,’ Wernstein growled. ‘Them and their fucking Karl Marx Year.’

‘The question is, what do we do now? I’ve been told that the complaint against you is being considered. Kohler’s being transferred to North I next month and Müller’s spoken to the head of Orthopaedics in Friedrichstadt.’

‘In other words … they want to get rid of me.’

‘Perhaps not only you, Herr Wernstein. I’m afraid I won’t be able to protect you. I suggest that for the time being we wait to see what happens at the meeting this afternoon. Perhaps I can get the Rector to do something.’

‘I’m sorry, Herr Hoffmann. And thank you.’

‘Off you go now — and keep up your good work on the operating table.’

Richard called Josta. ‘Hoffmann from the Surgical Clinic, Frau Fischer, could I have an appointment with Professor Scheffler? It’s urgent.’

‘What is it about, Herr Hoffmann?’ Josta’s voice was cool, she sounded businesslike and uninvolved; it cut him to the quick.

‘It’s about a colleague in the clinic, Herr Wernstein.’

‘Are you in the ward? I’ll call you back.’ For a few moments he could hear her breathing before she hung up.

The afternoon meeting with Müller was cancelled. Richard went to Administration, where he’d been given an appointment for five o’clock. He had to wait and went out because he was afraid Josta would watch him and try to catch his eye, despite the other secretary working in the office. But he was even more afraid that she wouldn’t try to catch his eye. He attempted to concentrate on the discussion facing him, to imagine what direction it might take. He didn’t know Scheffler particularly well, the last time he’d spoken with him was about the Christmas lecture. Richard seldom attended the meetings of senior surgeons that were held in Administration and that Scheffler chaired; Trauma Surgery was formally part of General Surgery but almost had the status of a separate department. ‘Almost’; it was undetermined, sometimes Richard was sent an invitation to a meeting, sometimes not, and when he was invited Richard found himself with conflicting attitudes to Müller: on the one hand he didn’t want to go over his head, on the other, that made him feel like a little boy who had to ask permission for everything. Moreover it annoyed him that, when reading these invitations, Müller would turn away from him and give him irritated responses such as: he couldn’t see the point of Administration keeping two senior surgeons in the Surgical Clinic away from their work.

Scheffler was a pathologist and, like all pathologists Richard knew, interested in the arts. He had quite often seen him with his young, attractive wife in the theatre, cautiously applauding so-called problem plays or closing his eyes at arias from Mozart operas. Scheffler smoked, which was unusual for a doctor, especially for a pathologist, who saw the smokers’ lungs; he smoked Cuban cigarettes, which, despite the fraternal socialist economic relations, could hardly be bought in local shops. The Rector must, therefore, have his own special sources and he seemed, like many pathologists, to be a hedonist. Dermatologists, psychiatrists, clinicians liked beautiful women, could distinguish good from poor wines, read the latest literary works, quoted Goethe and Gottfried Benn, and loved classical music, especially the piano, which they could often play themselves. Moreover they grew to be old. Surgeons loved beautiful women and beautiful cars, and died at sixty-five when their retirement started. Scheffler, Richard hoped, would be open to discussion.

‘I’ve come to see you about a colleague, Rector.’

‘I know. It’s about Herr Wernstein, Frau Fischer told me. Yes. Shall we sit down?’

Richard saw that the portrait of Brezhnev with the black ribbon had disappeared and been replaced by one of Yuri Andropov. Scheffler noticed his glance. ‘Can I offer you a coffee? Some mineral water?’

‘No, thank you. I wouldn’t want to take up more of your time than necessary, Herr Professor. Herr Wernstein is —’

Scheffler gave a weary wave of the hand, asked for coffee and mineral water over the intercom. Then he got up and stood, with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at the photos. The telephone rang, but he ignored it. His shoes were of fine, perforated leather and certainly hadn’t been made in a state-owned company, his suit was of an elegant cut, Richard wondered if he had things made by Lukas, the tailor on Lindwurmring; Scheffler too lived in one of the villas up there.

‘Are you interested in politics?’ he asked abruptly, half turning to face Richard. Only now did Richard see that Scheffler wore the Party badge in the buttonhole of his elegant suit. Why not, he thought, Ulrich’s in the Party too and Scheffler, as Rector, has no choice. Does he always wear it? I certainly didn’t notice it at Christmas.

‘I believe one ought to be, Comrade Rector.’ Scheffler had turned back to Andropov’s smile and gently raised his hand, like a conductor for a piano entry. ‘Oh, let’s stick to academic titles, Herr Doktor Hoffmann, I believe that is what you prefer. — Do you know that they say Yuri Vladimirovich’ — he pointed to the picture of Andropov — ‘loves jazz? He’s also said to enjoy watching films from the West and to read a lot. I haven’t asked him myself and you can’t believe everything you read in the press.’

Richard wondered where in the press it could have said the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was supposed to love jazz and liked films from the West. Certainly not in Neues Deutschland. Josta brought the coffee — although he had declined there were two cups — and mineral water. Richard drank the coffee after all.

‘Thank you, Frau Fischer. Tell the gentlemen from the Ministry I’ll call back immediately. — We talked in German, by the way, he speaks it quite well. I believe he can’t stand medals, in the past the jingling in the sacred halls was considerably louder.’

‘I agree with you, Rector, that the younger doctors as well ought to show more interest in politics, it’s just the fact that —’

‘— Herr Kohler is the chairman of the Party organization in the Surgical Clinics,’ Scheffler broke in mildly, going back to his desk, ‘one of the idealistic hotheads among our young comrades, who are always on the attack. But we must win over the doubters, as Yuri Vladimirovich indicated in his last communiqué.’ Scheffler scribbled something on a piece of paper, showed it to Richard but didn’t give it to him. It said, ‘I can’t promise anything. But I would like to point out that I’m not a careerist member of the Party.’

‘I thank you.’ Richard stood up, Scheffler tore the piece of paper up into tiny bits and let them trickle down into the wastepaper bin.

Now Josta wrote lots of letters without worrying that Richard only collected them from the hiding place they’d agreed on — behind a loose brick in the labyrinthine subterranean passages of the Academy — at very irregular intervals; he once found four letters there that had been written in one week. She avoided complaining and making demands, concentrated on everyday matters and little expressions of affection, but Richard sensed that this cheerfulness was forced and felt worried. He wrote that he wanted to see her, on one Thursday before he went swimming, she replied that it wasn’t necessary, that he had been right when he’d said she lacked self-control and was taking things too far. She was, she said, too impatient and demanded too much of him, she had let her fears run away with her and through that was endangering their relationship, her excessive fear of her fears was making them come true, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. He didn’t believe that reasonable tone. Josta was many things, but reasonable wasn’t one of them except on rare occasions. The language of the letters seemed to be a protective sheet, supposedly fireproof, but beneath it there were fires waiting for the whiff of oxygen that would be enough to fan the crazy smouldering white between the lines into a blaze. Once, on a Wednesday, he went to her apartment and rang the bell but she didn’t open the door, even though he was sure he heard a noise inside. He wrote a few lines and pushed them under the door. In her next letter Josta reproached him for his lack of caution, on that very day, she said, she’d given her key to an acquaintance who was to look after Lucie because she was being sent home early from the kindergarten; by chance Daniel had found the piece of paper and pocketed it, he’d just happened to go up to get a lemonade out of the fridge, Lucie had come along only a few minutes later with the acquaintance, who would surely have read it. But then I would probably have seen them, Richard thought, I waited by the door for a while and it would have been Daniel who’d made the noise I heard. There was something not quite right about it. He found all this disturbing, and on top of it came the trouble with Müller, who rearranged their meeting, first of all asked him, all innocent, about the Querner painting and then rebuked Richard again, though not for the postponed operation this time — the anaesthetists were unmoved and had supported the trauma surgeons — but because he didn’t set a proper example for the political attitudes of his junior doctors. Wernstein had to apologize to Kohler in front of all his colleagues and the nurses but was not transferred to Orthopaedics in Friedrichstadt.

Suddenly the tone of Josta’s letters changed, despair, reproaches and fear returned. Richard was up to his eyes in work, there was a doctors’ conference coming where he had to give a paper on techniques for operating on the hand; Robert was having difficulties at school, he was now in the ninth grade, the results of which were used to apply for one of the much-sought-after places at the senior high school, and Anne said something wasn’t right with Christian; but when Richard tried to discuss it with him, Christian became evasive. Richard put it down to puberty when his son didn’t come home at some weekends. At least his marks were all right, Richard had checked with his class teacher. Josta was once more demanding he leave Anne, she had started calling him ‘Count Danilo’ again, which he didn’t like precisely because he was aware that there was something true about the nickname; he didn’t believe Josta had the psychological insight and judgement of character to give him the name of the character from The Merry Widow; he assumed Josta had only given him it because of some vague similarity to a singer from the State Operetta in Leuben, that she had hit the bull’s eye by mere chance and he held that against her. The singer could just as well have played the hero of any other operetta and Josta would probably have chosen the name of that character. He believed she wasn’t very observant but secretly he knew he was wrong. Towards the end of May a letter came in which she threatened to turn up at his door some time in the near future and force him into a decision, she wrote about his cowardice, about holidays together, about Lucie and Daniel, then about gas and sleeping pills. Richard didn’t take that seriously, the letter had too obviously been written in the heat of the moment, people who actually committed suicide didn’t threaten to do so but acted; he’d seen too many such cases in his years in hospitals. And still saw them — at this particular time of the year, in May, the loneliness, the despair, the pain seemed to become unbearable for many people. Josta asked for a meeting, he agreed, but something intervened, he was late and when he reached the place of their rendezvous, she’d already gone. She had no telephone at home; for such eventualities they’d agreed that she would leave a sign indicating where she’d gone: a ball of paper that had apparently rolled under a park bench said — gone home; two crossed twigs — waiting for you at Holy Trinity Church; in the winter they arranged snowballs in various patterns. This time he couldn’t find anything. He waited, perhaps she’d gone away for a moment. She didn’t come.

‘Oh, Herr Hoffmann, are you waiting for someone?’ That was Heinsloe, the senior manager.

‘Me — N-no. Just getting a breath of fresh air.’

‘And quite right too, Herr Hoffmann. Now is the month of Maying … You feel a new man, don’t you?’ Heinsloe rubbed his hands. ‘I had a letter from Herr Arbogast a few days ago. Do you know him? He wrote to say that he’d like to work together with the Surgical Clinic, more specifically with your department. I’m sure he’ll write to you as well. — As far as your application for funding is concerned, I’m afraid no decision has been reached yet. Have you a moment?’ Heinsloe took Richard’s arm and drew him along with him in the direction of the Clinic for Internal Medicine. Richard was not at all in the mood for discussions about budgets, equipment or funding for a special room for operations on the hand that he had requested a long time ago and that was presumably what Heinsloe was talking about.

‘I really haven’t got time, Herr Heinsloe, you must excuse me —’

‘You have to go back to the clinic?’ He was so unprepared for the question that Richard could do nothing but nod. ‘That suits me very well, I was going to come and see you anyway, I can deal with it now. Let’s walk along together, it’ll save you having an appointment with me.’ As he went to the clinic, with Heinsloe’s chatter filling his ear, he was silently cursing the chance meeting there, of all places, with the senior manager, of all people. He only got rid of him in Outpatients.

‘Oh, and congratulations on the award of “Medical Councillor”.’ Heinsloe gave him a conspiratorial wink. Richard had no time to reflect on the broad hint, Nurse Wolfgang was waving to him. ‘Herr Hoffmann, they’ve been looking for you. Phone call for you.’

Richard went to his ward. ‘A Daniel Fischer, sounded pretty young,’ said the nurse who had taken the call.

‘What did he want?’

‘He just said that his mother had been taken into hospital.’

‘Aha. And to which one? Richard asked, leafing through patients’ charts.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Thank you. Have a nice shift.’ It was only with difficulty that Richard managed to control himself and not to dash off. He called Rapid Medical Assistance from his office and was told that Josta had been taken to Friedrichstadt.

‘Why?’

‘One moment.’ Richard could hear the man wheezing as he got up and rummaged through some papers. ‘Suspected of having taken pills with the intention of suicide. I shouldn’t actually be telling you this, but since it’s you, Dr Hoffmann.’

‘How long ago?’

‘A good hour.’

Richard held down the cradle, closed his eyes. He stood like that for a few seconds, then he could think clearly again.

‘Hello, Anne, I’ll be late today. — No, a meeting in Administration. I met Heinsloe, it’s about the hand operating theatre. — I hope you do too.’ He was surprised he’d managed to sound calm. He went to the washbasin, washed his face, looked at his dripping reflection and spat at it. As he was wiping away the spit with a towel, he noticed a single hair on his cheek that he’d missed when shaving. He went to the cupboard where he kept a full toilet bag for when he was on duty at night, took out his razor and shaved off the hair.

Josta was in Ward 4, the intensive-care unit, of Friedrichstadt Hospital. Richard knew it, he’d often enough had to take patients there in the doctors’ emergency car when he’d been the duty doctor. Moreover he had done his clinical practice there when he’d been a student. ‘Four’, as it was called, was on the top floor of one of the Friedrichstadt clinics that had survived the war. As in all hospitals the strong smell of Wofasept disinfectant, and doctors running upstairs and downstairs. He knew the pale, freckled Nurse Markus with the red beard from the days when he’d been a student nurse on this ward, now he was the nurse in charge of the ward. Because of his beard, which had been impressive even in those days, they’d called him the ‘Evangelist’. Richard had admired him, for when it was a matter of taking a blood sample and everyone failed, they called Nurse Markus … All that went through his mind as he tried to look past Markus and get a glimpse of the resuscitation room. ‘I’d like to see Frau Fischer. We had a call in Outpatients.’

Markus pointed to one of the rooms at the back. ‘She was lucky. In a stable condition now. Her stomach was pumped out, twenty Obsidan tablets. Is she from your clinic?’

‘No. Rector’s senior secretary.’

‘Good grief!’

‘Can I see her?’

‘Five minutes. She’s still under observation.’

‘Nurse Markus —’

‘Hmm?’

‘If our big shots should turn up —’

‘Yes?’

‘Please don’t mention that I was here.’

Markus gave him a swift glance.

‘Can I rely on you? — I ought to be at a meeting.’

Markus looked past him, nodded. ‘We have a duty of confidentiality as well, Dr Hoffmann.’

‘Thank you. Can I phone you? She is your patient, isn’t she? — And it’s brought us together again, hasn’t it?’ Richard concluded weakly, hoping Markus would accept the gesture. He felt uncomfortable, had the feeling all the nurses hurrying hither and thither at the beck and call of the ringing and buzzing of the drips were giving him questioning and reproachful looks; also he didn’t want to run into any colleagues.

‘I’m on early tomorrow morning,’ Markus said, ‘you can phone me.’

‘I can still remember your number,’ Richard said in a further attempt to revive old acquaintance.

‘Do you know her family? Someone who could bring a few things?’

‘As far as I know she has a son. — Have you put her on a pacemaker?’

‘Temporarily. You can go in all the same.’

‘Perhaps it would put too much of a strain on her.’

‘Is there any message I can give?’ Again Markus gave him a swift glance.

‘Best wishes … from Dr Hoffmann.’

He ran down the stairs. He was so embarrassed he wished the ground would swallow him up. Markus had seen through him, he was pretty sure of that. Best wishes … from Dr Hoffmann! In the crumbling, ash-grey plaster of the wide façade of the R-Building, as the clinic in Friedrichstadt was called, many of the windows were open. Crows were croaking in the trees in the middle of the hospital, which was arranged in a square, patients were walking on the paths in the park. The wail of a siren came from the direction of the Yenidze cigarette factory, Richard broke out in a sweat and looked for a bench, his hands over his ears. When he took them off, the siren died away, the bells of Marcolini Palace, in which the hospital Administration was housed, and of the Old Catholic Cemetery on the other side of Friedrichstrasse rang out. It occurred to him that he ought to check on the children. Perhaps they were at home, waiting, perhaps Daniel was running round the streets and Lucie was alone in Josta’s apartment.

He drove on automatic pilot, streets and rows of houses flickered past, he almost missed the signal of a traffic policeman, starting when he whistled and swung his baton round vigorously. He rang at Josta’s door, no one opened. He waited, tried again. Finally he knocked and shouted for Daniel through the gap in the door. ‘Open up, it’s me.’ The door to the toilet on the half-landing opened to the sound of the lavatory flushing, Josta’s neighbour, Frau Schmücke, a divorced assistant in a fish shop who often seemed drunk, came out. ‘An ambulance came earlier on. Must have been pretty serious from all the noise they made. I think the boy’s there, I heard his voice. He called the ambulance. Are you the uncle? Frau Fischer told me about you.’

‘Yes,’ Richard said after brief hesitation.

‘I haven’t got a key.’ She went to the door and knocked loudly. ‘Daniel, your uncle’s here. Open up.’ She turned back to Richard. She was wearing shabby jeans, a paint-smudged jersey shirt, under which her nipples stood out, and a crocheted stole that had slipped down. Noticing his glance, she drew the stole over her cleavage. Her hands were covered in paint.

‘Bye,’ said Frau Schmücke. He looked at her hips. The door to Josta’s apartment opened a crack.

‘So it’s you,’ Daniel said.

‘I’ve been to see your mother,’ Richard said. ‘Are you going to let me in?’ Reluctantly Daniel let him through.

‘How is she?’ A flicker of fear went across the boy’s face, which was strangely ugly: ears that stuck out, the head with almost no neck in between his shoulders. Like Dwarf Longnose, Richard thought. He had no idea why that occurred to him, why he was in the mood for such observations, why his eyes presented them to him in that pitiless fashion. As shame welled up inside him he stroked Daniel’s hair, but the boy drew back.

‘All right. She’ll be well again soon.’

‘Can I go and see her?’

‘No. — Where’s Lucie?’ Richard peered into the living room.

‘Still in the kindergarten. Josta didn’t collect her.’ Daniel always called his mother by her first name. Richard didn’t like it and had once told him off, but Daniel had replied, ‘I don’t take orders from you, part-time-dad.’ — Was that the love the boy was supposed to feel for him? Josta had calmed things down. ‘Leave him alone. I don’t like it when he calls me Mummy. Or Mum. Why not Josta. After all, that’s what I’m called.’

Suddenly Daniel turned to him.

‘Now, now, son, now, now … It’ll be all right.’

‘The gas was on as well, I turned it off and aired the apartment as it says on the notice downstairs,’ Daniel said calmly.

‘You did well.’

‘I’ve still got your penknife.’

‘Let’s see it.’ They went into the living room, where the television was on without sound. Richard switched it off. Daniel unclasped the knife. ‘All the blades, and there: the scissors. It’s even still got the two pairs of tweezers.’ Richard took the knife, Daniel stood there, arms hanging down.

‘Now, Daniel, I’ll go and collect Lucie. You can stay here — no, you’ll come with me. Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go and collect her together.’

Daniel nodded. ‘I can always wait outside the kindergarten,’ he said, not looking at Richard.

‘No, that won’t work. I’m the one who has to wait outside. I’m only your uncle, I don’t think they’ll give Lucie to me. But they will let you take her, you’re her brother. Do they know you? — Good. Let’s go.’

Lucie had been completely immersed in her play, happy that for once she had all the lovely toys to herself. The teacher was relieved that Daniel had come, fortunately she asked no questions. She hadn’t been able to get in touch with Josta; no one answered at the emergency number she’d been given, that of Josta’s hairdresser. Lucie enjoyed the drive in the car; when they stopped at a crossing, she waved to the passers-by, some of whom waved back, amused. By now Richard couldn’t care if he should be seen by anyone who knew him; he was whistling to himself, broke off when he saw Daniel’s face in the rear-view mirror.

Josta had been shopping, he found cheese, bread, butter, cold sausage in the refrigerator, there were meat and eggs there too. ‘Should I cook something for you?’ Too late it occurred to him that he would smell of cooking fat and his excuse that he’d been in a meeting would sound implausible. Fortunately Daniel shook his head. ‘Not hungry.’

‘But you must eat something, my lad.’

‘Where’s Mummy?’ Lucie asked from the living room. She’d switched the television on, Richard heard the signature tune introducing the news, shortly after there was a burst of gunfire, she’d presumably changed channels and there was a Western or something on.

‘Lucie, what would you like for supper?’

‘In the evening Josta just gives her something light, otherwise she can’t sleep and gets tummy ache.’

‘Something light, aha. And — is that something specific.’ He didn’t even know what his daughter had to eat in the evening. Daniel sighed. ‘Oh, I’ll do it. And she has to be in bed by eight at the latest. Usually after the Sandman programme. And she has to be told a story.’

‘And you, when do you have to go to bed?’

‘Ooh …’

‘Hey, my lad, that’s not on! — I could tell your grandparents.’

‘Do you know where they live?’ Daniel asked suspiciously.

Richard didn’t and he didn’t manage to conceal the fact.

‘Well, you’re going to leave after this anyway. Otherwise your Anne will give you hell. And Josta’s in the hospital, so I can do as I like,’ Daniel replied defiantly and with a malicious grin that alarmed Richard. ‘Listen, Daniel, you have responsibility as well now. So far you’ve been great, like a grown-up. But until Josta comes back, you have to look after Lucie. And the apartment. Do you understand? Perhaps Social Services will send someone.’

‘Are you coming back tomorrow?’

‘Yes, tomorrow’s Thursday, I can come and check up on you. Will you promise you’ll be sensible?’

‘Will you promise me something too?’

Richard hesitated, the look on the boy’s face confused him. It was a mixture of hatred, sorrow, fear. ‘What?’

But Daniel said nothing, suddenly ran out.

Richard wasn’t happy with the idea of leaving the children by themselves. It could be a fortnight before Josta was discharged from hospital. Until then he had to find someone who could check up on them regularly. Daniel’s father? He’d never seen him, knew neither his name nor address; whenever he’d asked, Josta had been evasive. Her hairdresser? She’d only have time in the evening and, anyway, hairdressing salons were hives of gossip. And even if by now his carefully maintained cover had probably been blown, he shouldn’t do anything himself to attract attention. Would Nurse Markus hold his tongue? Whether he did or not, Josta’s attempted suicide would stir up a commotion, people would be wondering what had driven her to it, make enquiries, the Arbitration Commission or some other of the organizations in the Academy that made the welfare of individual employees their concern would take her under its wing. ‘Take her under its wing.’ He said it quietly to himself and as he did so, he realized what that might mean for the children: who would have looked after them if the ambulance had arrived too late; what if Josta should attempt to repeat what she’d done that day, but then –

Had she not thought of the children at all? He couldn’t believe that. No mother would do that. At least he’d never met a mother like that. Had she hoped he would take care of the children? Had she told someone? He searched the apartment for a farewell letter but couldn’t find one. In the drawer of her bedside table there were vast amounts of sleeping pills and tranquillizers, including further packets of Obsidan. Where had she got them? Beta blockers were only available on prescription, someone must have prescribed them for her, or had she acquired them illegally? But these medicines were registered … Had she a heart condition she hadn’t told him about? How thoughtless to keep this stuff here, the children could get at it and Lucie at least was still at an age where she put everything in her mouth. He threw all the pills away, she’d get the Obsidan back if she really needed it. Then he searched through Josta’s clothes and bags in the wardrobe — nothing. So, a knee-jerk reaction. He sat down on the bed, where the crumpled sheet still showed the outline of her body. On the bedside table there was the mark made by the bottom of a bottle, the ambulance men would probably have taken the bottle to the hospital with them, along with the packet of pills. What should he do now? How were things going to work out with Josta, with him, with Anne and the children? For a long time he sat there without moving. The television was on in the next room. Lucie was clearly quite happy, he heard her laugh, clap her hands now and then. Perhaps Daniel was sitting with her, examining his penknife … Or wondering what he would do once his ‘uncle’ had left. That brought Richard back to the unsolved problem of who was to keep an eye on the children.

Frau Schmücke had changed and seemed to be drunk again, she was waving her left hand, but then he realized that she had just been painting her fingernails, clearly she was about to go out. Richard was astonished at her profusion of uncontrollable hair, he hadn’t noticed it before.

‘Can I … I’m sorry, I’ve disturbed you. Could I speak to you for a moment?’

‘Come in,’ she said after a short hesitation.

‘Thank you, but that’s not necessary, I don’t want to —’

‘Look, it may be May already, but I’ve still got the heating on and the warmth all slips out when the door’s left open. I’m sure it’s about next door and we shouldn’t discuss that out here. Moreover’ — she leant forward a little, her voice dropping to a whisper — ‘the people like to have an ear out in the hallway, and not only there, I think.’ She went back into her hall and he followed her hesitantly. This woman aroused him, it was grotesque, but his heart was pounding as he went into the stranger’s apartment and, to his astonishment, that made him curious. She walked smoothly and had no shoes on, a little chain round her left ankle, her toenails were also painted. The sight of her bare feet with the red nails and the chain aroused him even more. In the hall and the living room the walls were covered with paintings hung side by side; there was a smell of paint. He found the paintings disturbing, death masks with sharp contrasts, screaming blue mouths, yellow birds with black and green heads could be seen, painters’ palettes had been nailed to the living-room ceiling and, on an easel, in the corner where most apartments of this type had the television, there crouched a picture in a brutal red that coagulated in streaks, wound into fat whorls, had suffered yawning cuts in the top-left corner, smouldered in the middle round a darker spindle. All the pictures were powerful and gripping, but that one in particular; Richard was impressed but ignored that, he hadn’t come to view paintings. ‘By you?’ he asked hurriedly and more out of politeness.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘You need someone to look after the children.’

‘Forgive me for coming to you with …’

‘No problem.’ She poured out two glasses of brandy. ‘I’ve quite often helped Frau Fischer. I know where everything is, what they eat and what they don’t, I can take the little girl to the kindergarten.’

‘That’s good of you.’

‘You wait and see.’ She came over to him with the two glasses. He was so baffled that he took the glass she handed to him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Do you smoke?’

‘N-no —’ He’d almost said: Of course not — and she’d have responded with: Of course not? Why? and perhaps guessed he was a doctor. Perhaps she knew that anyway. He wondered how much Josta had told her.

‘Have a sip, it calms you down.’

‘Don’t you work in a fish shop?’

‘As a sales assistant, true. It’s not so bad there. Now and then you have to kill a fish. You’ve got something to exchange, to bargain with, as a painter I was worse off in that respect. — You’re not a person who tries out different things?’

‘I’ll go now. Please, you must see that I’m not in the mood for a chat at the moment. I’m sorry. Another time — with pleasure, but not just now.’

‘So what are you in the mood for.’ She gave him a rather challenging look. He avoided her eye, stared at her feet. ‘To be honest, I don’t know.’ He held the glass away from him, as if it were infectious, clutched his forehead nervously. What a stupid answer. I must have gone completely mad.

‘You’d like to sleep with me.’

‘What?’

‘Did you think I didn’t notice you looking? In the hall and in the mirror just now?’ She emptied her glass. ‘You were horny and I am too now.’

‘Are you …’ Richard gave a disbelieving laugh. ‘… are you mad?’

‘No. Just alone.’

He took a mouthful of brandy after all. It was good brandy. He hated himself for noticing that.

‘I’ve sometimes been listening when you and Josta … She seemed to be pretty happy.’

‘Oh come now, that’s —’

‘Enviable. I’d like to be like that again for once.’

‘… completely mad —’

‘And now I have the opportunity. You can take off your “uncle” mask.’

‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’ Richard couldn’t help laughing.

‘Call it what you like. I call it seizing the occasion. I don’t want to die an old maid regretting missed opportunities.’

‘You don’t want to …’ He still had to laugh. ‘Are you drunk?’

‘Not at all. And certainly not from this bit of brandy. I have that effect on people, I know. I’m a bit … what do people say? — woozy. I’ve always been like that. Grew up in the uranium mines. We were called “the sleeping village”.’

‘What would you say if I told you I couldn’t care less about your blackmail threat?’

She took his glass and threw it on the floor. ‘I would say: You don’t know what you’re missing.’ She came over to him, treading in the splinters of glass.

But then they sat there, silent. After a while she lit a cigarette, drew on it, held it out to him, he waved it away. Her feet were bleeding. Splinters of glass in the feet were difficult to find if they weren’t stuck in superficially, you couldn’t see them on X-rays.

He left the apartment. Said goodbye to Daniel, who had put Lucie to bed, where she was sleeping with her mouth open.

31. Vanilla and indigo

The girls trotted along a bit behind them and were less mocking than usual, perhaps because Christian had invited them: they were to spend the night in Meno’s apartment in the House with a Thousand Eyes, Meno was in Berlin. Perhaps it was because of the voices from the gardens, the scent of jasmine that was overpowering in the evening, cutting through the other smells: resin on the plum trees, warm asphalt, all the bubbling ferment coming out of the open windows that subsided with the twilight and the blossom-inflamed slope above the Elbe with its whispering — Niklas said: balsamic — delicacy. Christian and Falk did handstands but only Siegbert managed to keep going to the advertisement pillar at the Mondleite — Lindwurmring crossroads, to the shouts and applause of the Russian officers who had been playing volleyball outside the Villa Clair, where they lived. The piano in the Roeckler School of Dancing repeated ‘The Blue Danube’ with mindless patience. Heike had brought her drawing pad and Christian was amazed at the swift sharpness with which she caught Siegbert’s triumph: his precarious balance as he crossed the road on his hands in front of a honking car, his trousers slipping down to reveal his brown, brambly calves and tennis socks, his jacket that had turned inside out like an umbrella, his face as he tried to look casual and breathe calmly when he stood up and brushed the dirt off his hands, then Heike drew a halo over him and Reina’s and Verena’s faces with expressions between the craving for an autograph and an approaching swoon. The history and geography exams were behind them.

‘Hey, Christian, it’s really great that you’ve arranged this with your uncle,’ Reina said. ‘What did you say for question three? I thought it was pretty beastly and I don’t know —’

‘Hey, no more about school, you’ll just have to wait and see what you get, you can’t do anything about it now.’

‘Was it you I asked for your opinion, Falk Truschler, or Montecristo?’ Reina retorted pertly.

‘Can’t you give up these stupid nicknames?’

‘We mean it in the nicest way,’ said Reina.

‘It looks good, your blue dress,’ Falk said when Christian didn’t reply. They made a detour along Wolfsleite, Christian wanted to pick up Fabian and Muriel; when he rang at Wolfstone, no one came.

‘I think they’ve gone already,’ said Herr Krausewitz. He was weeding and paused a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘We’re going to have a summer like we haven’t had for ages,’ he said, more to himself than to Christian, ‘I bet it’ll be even crazier than last year. — Where are you off to?’

‘To the Langes’, we’re spending the night at Uncle’s.’

‘He’s gone to the Association congress, so I heard. Give him my best wishes.’

There was a fountain in the garden of Dolphin’s Lair, a stone dolphin reared up over the mossy rim, a jet of water came out of its mouth and splashed into the basin, the rippling bluish water of which reflected the five-fingered leaves of a horse chestnut. The girls stopped and listened, Heike drew the scroll ornament over the cornice, the door flanked by sandstone pillars with the bee lily above it, and Christian dug up secrets about Frau von Stern, the former lady-in-waiting who had known Kaiser Wilhelm and the last Russian Tsar, going into raptures about her apartment and her souvenirs when he saw he was making an impression; only Verena remained suspicious and asked how he came to be familiar with her apartment. Christian told them about the evenings, with the invitations to the soirées written by hand or on typewriters, when they would gather together, when ice-patterns spread over the windowpanes and Plisch and Plum in Hauschild’s coal store were only weighing out damp brown lumps that didn’t heat the apartments at all; when they all sat together in Guenon House, in Roeckler’s School of Dancing, in Elephant opposite the House with a Thousand Eyes or at Frau von Stern’s listening to a talk by the music critic, Däne, on Weber’s oboe concerto or by Hoffmann, the toxicologist, on poisons; when they discussed the latest rumours from town and country over sandwiches and mineral water. But only Reina was still listening when he looked up, Verena had gone on ahead to join Falk and Siegbert, and Heike was immersed in the perspectives of a shoe dangling from a rhododendron by the remains of its lace. Ina was standing outside the Italian House with a few of the ‘long-haired individuals’ Barbara complained about, one was holding a stereo recorder to his ear that was emitting the boom of tender, brutal music. Ina waved. ‘Hey, cousin of mine, what are you doing here?’

‘Celebrating the end of exams. We’re going to the Bearpit, sleeping at Meno’s. What’s that you’re listening to?’

‘Yeuch, the Bearpit,’ one of the long-haired group drawled, giving Christian’s summer suit a disparaging scrutiny. ‘’s called Feeling B.’ The one with the stereo recorder turned it up louder. Christian introduced the others.

‘Hi, pretty man,’ Ina said brightly. ‘Siegbert’s something different, most of the ones I know are called Ronny or Mike or Thomas. — Your girlfriend?’ Verena put her hands behind her back.

‘Perhaps we’ll see you later, you never know. You’re going to the Langes’? I like the old geezer with his sailor’s yarns, haven’t seen him for ages. — The Bearpit’s a waste of time today, we’re heading for the Bird of Paradise.’

‘Heading’s good, getting in’s the problem,’ muttered the one with the recorder and he pressed stop.

‘We’ll make it, you can trust me. I know the bouncer, I just have to let him see a bit of leg. — If you make it there, pretty man, I’ll reserve a dance for you.’

Siegbert put on his most unfathomable smile. Falk raised his hand but one of the long-haired lads pushed it back down: ‘She says for him, not for you. Right?’ Falk blew out his cheeks. As they went on, Christian heard laughter and ‘Village clodhoppers’ and ‘Hey, guys, look at him, home-made gear.’ Siegbert, who was a few paces in front of Christian, turned round. ‘Does that bother you?’ He grabbed the youth, who gave a yelp of surprise, by the hair and pulled him towards him, grasping his earlobe with his free hand and twisting it, the other dropped to his knees, Siegbert thumped him. It all happened very quickly; Ina was the first to recover. ‘Hey, we didn’t mean it that way. — I like you even more, pretty man.’

‘Stupid bitch,’ Verena, who had come to stand next to Christian, fumed. ‘Are all your relations that arrogant?’ Ina said nothing, looked her up and down, seconds during which the two groups subjected each other to hostile scrutiny. ‘She’d be the one, cousin dear.’ Ina burst out laughing; it wasn’t malicious, it was like spraying water by holding the end of the garden hose tight on a hot day, the long-haired youths laughed as well, even Reina and Falk. Siegbert shrugged his shoulders. Verena and the one he’d thumped didn’t laugh. He checked his trousers, switched the recorder back on.

‘Sorry,’ Christian apologized when they reached Mondleite, ‘that’s just the way she is.’ He nodded to Siegbert. ‘And what was said about your things isn’t what she really thinks, her mother makes clothes as well herself. I’d be glad if I could do so,’ he added. Siegbert didn’t respond.

‘We have to wait for Heike, our slowcoach.’ Reina was being nasty: Heike hadn’t seen anything of what had happened and was surprised when the others exchanged glances.

‘How’s your application going? When will you hear if they’re taking you?’

Heike squinted at Falk, rolled her shoulders, blew a lock of hair out of her face. ‘No idea.’

‘What was it you had to draw?’ Verena asked.

‘A shoe —’ She leafed through her sketchpad and showed them the shoe she’d discovered in the rhododendron. ‘They wanted it from all possible perspectives. Stupid but int’resting.’ The sketchpad was handed round, they admired the strictly naturalistic drawings of the shoe. Seen from the front, it had blue eyes. Siegbert was now walking a few paces ahead of them. Christian closed his eyes and opened them abruptly, as if they were the shutter of a camera, as if he wanted to retain snapshots of Siegbert in his memory: a slim young man in light-coloured clothes such as a ship’s officer or a member of Louis Alvarez’s entomological expeditions could have worn, had it not been for the bizarre details: Siegbert had sewn a purple button on the left leg, at the calf, triangles of green cloth under the armpits and a zip running diagonally across the back. Eyes open-shut, open-shut, on the inside his eyelids were orange, Christian saw Siegbert kicking away a stone, Siegbert raising his head when a tug’s siren boomed from the Elbe, Siegbert throwing a stick to knock an apple, wrinkled by the winter frost, off the tree and lobbing it to Verena; Siegbert and Verena, who was walking beside him and placed the apple on a fence after one bite and dropped back to Reina and Falk, walked on in front again, looking at the street through a monocle of green glass she carried on a string round her neck. The windows in Elephant were open, Frau Teerwagen was putting a bowl of punch on the balcony table. Doctor Kühnast was washing his Škoda. Heike was looking at the rose hedges, covered all over in blossom, of the House with a Thousand Eyes and shaking her head.

‘What is it?’ Christian asked, ringing the Langes’ bell; Meno had left the key with them.

‘No, no, I won’t paint that, that’s kitsch,’ Heike declared.

‘But it is there,’ Falk said teasingly.

‘That there is there.’ Heike pointed to the copper beech that was breathing like a rust lung.

The Langes had laid the table out in the garden, had set up the round iron table, which hibernated in the garden shed with flower pots, the chopping block and sawing horse, in the overgrown lower part as they did every summer; the round iron table at which the ship’s doctor and Meno, sometimes Libussa and Niklas Tietze, would tell stories.

In Meno’s apartment it smelt of books, tobacco and plants. He’d left the door with the pointed arch open for Chakamankabudibaba. Reina went out onto the balcony, leant into the climbing roses growing in profusion on the trellis from the conservatory up to the windows of the Kaminski twins. There was a sheet of paper stuck in the typewriter: ‘Greetings, make yourselves at home. If anyone happens to have forgotten their toothbrush, there are two new ones on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. Light bulbs (should one go, it’s been happening quite often recently) are in the hall cupboard. I’ve put out towels and soap. If there aren’t enough, ask Libussa Lange. Two can sleep in my bed; there are loungers in the shed, also a pump for your air beds. Please don’t forget Chakamankabudibaba, there’s ground beef and mackerel in the fridge, in the newspaper with the smiling Secretary General. Have a good time. Meno Rohde.’

The ten-minute clock chimed. Siegbert examined the engravings on the signs of the zodiac, Verena perused the titles in the bookshelves, Falk peeped down the microscope.

‘Pity we’re not going to meet your uncle,’ Verena said. ‘Great books.’

‘Just have a look at those floorboards.’ Heike was drawing again: the grain of the larchwood, knots, patches of sunshine.

‘I think they’re waiting for us,’ Reina shouted. When Christian went out he saw Libussa by the garden shed, waving. He held up both hands: ten minutes. Libussa nodded. Reina leant over the balustrade, Christian was amazed at all the freckles on her arms.

‘Do you go there often?’ She wasn’t looking at him; shading her eyes with her hand, she pointed at a pale blue mountain in the hazy distance.

‘The Wilisch,’ Christian said. ‘Not often any more.’

‘Sorry about what happened at Kaltwasser reservoir.’ She looked away, there was a scar on her neck.

‘Where did you get that?’

Reina brushed her hair over it. ‘Accident.’

‘Just a minute —’ He picked a dog rose and put it in her hair. It didn’t stay there, he tried again. Then he felt alarmed, looked down at the city, the curve of the Elbe by Blasewitz, a glider was slowly circling in a thermal. Reina didn’t say anything; he went back into the room.

‘Is that your uncle?’ Verena and Falk were standing looking at the photos and pointed at the one with Kurt Rohde and Meno on a botanical expedition.

‘My grandfather. The boy’s my uncle.’ He picked up the photo of Hanna. ‘His divorced wife, my Aunt Hanna. And on this one here there’s my mother, Meno and my other uncle, Ulrich. The father of Ina we met just now. — If you like I can show you round the house.’

But he told them nothing about the djinn, as they walked round the corridors, nothing about the secrets of the runner in the hall and the leaden shadows that appeared in the mirror in the evening when Meno’s living-room door was open. Heike described the toucan as ‘wicked’. The ten-minute clock struck.

‘We ought to go down.’ Christian saw that the key to the door in the salamander wallpaper wasn’t in the lock. Verena avoided his eye, he decided to say nothing about the spiral staircase and the conservatory, nothing about the photos; though Falk and Siegbert seemed to have discovered them, for they were calling out to the others from the stairs that they really ought to see this. Reina had stayed in the living room.

Fabian and Muriel were sitting between a lantern and a paper moon in front of the dog roses that completely obliterated the other garden smells in that part; they had presumably sat there deliberately, opposite Libussa and Alois Lange, whom they knew: for as long as he had known them there had been something formal, an element of studied affection, in their behaviour towards each other that they didn’t want to expose to the hurried looks of strangers for a casual judgement. Whenever he saw Fabian, his long hair and the unusual shirts he affected — with frills and much-too-long cuffs that he turned back — Christian thought: All he needs is a wig, a sword at his side and a three-cornered hat to go with them and he’d be a vicomte from one of those epistolary novels full of perfume and poison from the second half of the eighteenth century; Barbara had grown thoughtful at one of their Sunday lunches, because Ina’s expression had darkened at Fabian’s name, had said ‘enoeff’ and that in her opinion Fabian was ‘on the other side’, of which his shirts — theatre props, fancy dress — were more than just a cautious indication, and she thought that his parents ought to talk to him about it even though in their place she wouldn’t have been overly worried, after all, that kind of thing did happen and Fabian was only fourteen or fifteen, nothing was finally settled yet. At that Ina had bent her head over the bowl of stewed fruit and snorted. Moreover, she went on, in his own way he had taste, as did his sister. Then Fabian raised one hand to rest his chin on it elegantly while with the other he gave his sister a caterpillar and closed her hand over it. They wanted to be artists; ‘Yes,’ Meno had said without smiling in response to Barbara’s look of exasperation, ‘that’s the result of a youth spent among aromas, poems and conversations about Chopin’s nocturnes, that’s what one dreams of after reading a passage in which Hermann Hesse meditates on evening clouds in the Ticino. Perhaps Hans talks about poisonous plants too much as well.’ — ‘But Iris Hoffmann’s an engineering draughtswoman with Pentacon.’ — ‘True,’ Ulrich had said in response to Barbara’s interjection, ‘but you have to admit that there is something about those theatrical evenings in their house, and Cuddles only forgot her lines twice in the role of the almost-mute; they were great, those evenings, and the beer was good!’ Muriel was sitting with her legs crossed, she was wearing button boots from the days of Lucie Krausewitz’s youth, saved from the wardrobe of the Albert-Theater, which had been destroyed during the bombardment of Dresden, together with a peach-yellow double-breasted suit with black stripes that could have been worn in The Importance of being Earnest or by Maurice Chevalier in one of his roles, a beret right on the back of her head. They went to school dressed like that and were the strangest pair in Robert’s class; but since they were twins and Muriel held the school record for the sixty-metre sprint and Fabian saved penalties spectacularly as goalkeeper for the Fürnberg High School handball team, they were left in peace. And Robert told them that some pupils secretly envied them their things: it was the period of Wisent and Boxer jeans, status-symbol clothes from ‘the other side’ or from Exquisit, compared with which there was a certain odd dignity about the things Fabian and Muriel wore. Siegbert scrutinized the pair of them and they scrutinized him; Fabian’s eye kept coming back to the purple button, Siegbert’s to Muriel’s hair, gleaming black like a wire coil. Lange pulled a yarn out of his sailor’s kitbag, it was about conserved hydrangeas and their use as an antidote to seasickness, at which Siegbert remarked that that was new to him.

‘Christian,’ Alois Lange said, ‘be a good lad and get my logbook from the conservatory. — I’ll prove it to you.’ Lange had spent a quarter of an hour talking about classes of cruisers and types of submarines with Siegbert, to the annoyance of the girls, who had helped Libussa with the punch she had started with strawberries from Hortex; the glass bowl cast an elliptical shadow on the table, the fermenting sweetness attracted wasps and moths; Reina was afraid of the hornets from the nest in the garden shed.

The Kaminski brothers were sitting in the conservatory by the light of a miner’s lamp, they were chatting quietly, windows open, smoking, gave Christian a friendly grin to which he didn’t respond. ‘Hello, how’s your application for university? Are you looking for something particular?’ He saw that they were leafing through Lange’s logbook, went over, without looking at them, stretched out his hand wordlessly.

‘Later, young man, it’s our turn now. The stories are massively exaggerated, but not bad otherwise, he should discuss them with your uncle.’

Christian went to the window: ‘Herr Lange?’

‘Oh, no sense of humour.’ They gave him the book. ‘It’s OK,’ they shouted into the garden.

There was a ring at Meno’s door. ‘Oh, he’s got visitors,’ Judith Schevola said when Christian opened the door. ‘You are —’

‘His nephew.’

‘Herr Rohde and I — we’re working together. He’s my editor.’

‘Do come in.’

‘I don’t want to disturb …’

‘Aren’t you Judith Schevola?’ Verena came from the house and, when Judith Schevola nodded in surprise, said, ‘I’ve read everything of yours, pity I haven’t got a book with me or I’d have asked you to sign it.’

‘There’s punch in the garden,’ Christian said.

‘What are you celebrating?’ Schevola asked, following the two others. ‘Is it someone’s birthday?’

Verena kept talking to her, full of enthusiasm, Lange had no chance with his sailor’s yarns and made a gesture of cheerful resignation. Siegbert and he withdrew with the logbook and lantern, and soon the smoke eddies of Copenhagen vanilla tobacco were feeling their way to the iron table where the others were sitting bombarding Schevola with questions.

‘How does a conference like that go?’

‘Do you really want to know?’ Schevola smiled. ‘Rhubarbrhubarb …’

‘I think I’ve heard that before.’

‘And: whisperwhisperjeerjeer. — What do you like reading best?’

‘At school? The Adventures of Werner Holt,’ Siegbert shouted. ‘At last a book that’s fun to read.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me. And Hermann Kant: Die Aula?’

‘Dishonest shit!’

She laughed. ‘That was clear.’

‘And you’re a real writer?’ Reina wanted to know.

‘I write books, yes. But whether I’m a real writer … Sometimes I think I’ll never be one.’

‘Well I enjoyed your books,’ Verena said. ‘You can really get into them, and the people you describe … it’s as if they’re alive. — I think you like them a lot, even the awkward ones,’ she added quietly. Schevola rummaged round in her handbag, fished out a packet of cigarettes. ‘May I?’ she asked Libussa.

‘Of course, child. Meno thinks a lot of you and, believe me, he has his opinions about authors.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Do you often suffer,’ Verena hesitated, ‘I mean … You’re so successful, my sister works in a library and your books are frequently asked for and everyone I know likes you —’

‘Self-doubt? — Yes, I do. It’s an affliction, success and praise make no difference. You know, in the evening you’re alone in your room and the great authors, the masters, are watching you from the walls, their books are silent on the shelves and you’re sitting over a sheet of paper, scribbling away —’

Verena’s face lit up. ‘I like you, may I say that to you? And I thought I was the only one who always had such thoughts.’

Schevola glanced at her, blew smoke at the paper moon. ‘Nice here.’

‘Sometimes I think of this as Eichendorff’s garden,’ Christian said. ‘The one in his story about the good-for-nothing, near Vienna, the Countess’s castle and it all ends happily ever after?’

Ina arrived, they could see from afar that she was frustrated. ‘Damn, damn, damn! We didn’t get in. It was a different bouncer. And d’you know who’s on? Neustadt!’

‘That’s why it’s so full today.’

‘Is it the Bird of Paradise Bar you’re talking about?’ Schevola asked. And when Libussa nodded: ‘Could I use your telephone?’ Schevola stubbed out her cigarette and went up with Christian. Five minutes later she came back down. ‘How is it then? Who’s coming?’

‘Wow, how did you manage that?’ Falk said in astonishment.

‘Vitamin C. Right then?’

Ladislaus Pospischil’s Bird of Paradise Bar was living off its earlier reputation. In the sixties the notoriety of disrepute had shone over its parquet dance floor that bands with acceptable names, gawky youths in crocodile-yellow shoes and suits from VEB Herrenmode, authenticated by string ties, had filled with Bill Haley’s and Elvis Presley’s incendiary music, after two or three numbers the mirror wall was showing nothing but smears of colour and the outlines of bodies, was sweating condensation among the smoke from Karo cigarettes and the exudations of 500 squealing, wildly jigging bodies and warm champagne stirred with the finger. Cheap beer went flat as excited conversations were held on table telephones with pulsating red lights. In the men’s toilet there were glasses of sugar water for dishevelled duck’s-arse haircuts, between the mirrors was a warning about sexually transmitted diseases and couples that spent two hours over the same cocktail wanted mostly to listen. Representatives of order and rebels had subjected each other to hostile scrutiny across Sprelacart laminate tables, many a Dresden marriage had been arranged by the cigarette spirit in the private booths that could be closed off with bird-patterned curtains made by Tashkent weavers. Since it had been nationalized, it had gone downhill, Pospischil was no longer its owner but senior employee; the smugglers’ cave in the Schlemm Hotel ran out of smugglers.

Christian had never been there before. The deafening noise that suddenly enveloped him like a rubber wall, the screaming, laughing stream of people, drifts of smoke and beer fumes in the air that lay on his skin like a warm, damp nappy, the cramped, claustrophobic room with the throng heaving like heavy, dark water in a tank with a few lantern buoys drifting on it; the jerky movements of the dancers on the small floor in front of the band that seemed to him like the desperate flounderings of non-swimmers: all that repelled him and he was glad to find a seat in the corner of the bench Schevola had reserved. Beside them were soldiers in their uniforms, squinting longingly at the girls, glasses of cheap champagne in their hands. ‘Poor sods,’ said Muriel pityingly, after a glance at their epaulettes, and asked the ugliest one to dance; a flush immediately twitched across his face, spreading a few fractions of a second later to the others, as if there were a connection between them, the hope of a similar piece of good fortune; but Verena and Siegbert were already on the dance floor, Ina had dragged Fabian up and Reina, after a glance at Christian, Falk; Heike simply shook her head when one of the soldiers attempted an awkward bow, and Schevola was at the bar, flanked by a man with a ponytail and a big bushy beard and a woman in a sari-like dress.

The music was booming out of the loudspeakers; when the drummer sent his sticks flashing over his skins the impact of the sound was physically painful, Christian would really have liked to put his hands over his ears. He wondered whether the others felt the same, no, they were dancing and laughing in high spirits, expressions of liberation on their faces, and enjoyment. Libussa and Alois Lange stepped onto the floor, the bandleader smiled, leant over the mike and announced, ‘Grandad and Grandma Lange’ — a real cheek, Christian thought, and how did the guy know them — as ‘twist legends from the lejjen-derry days of the old Bird of Paradise’, then the rhythms of ‘Let’s Twist Again’ ripped out and, urged on by cheers and raised arms, Libussa and Alois put on a brilliant twist that no other couple on the floor could match; we can’t dance any more, Christian thought, and: This just can’t be true. He’d never seen the pair of them like that before and yet he imagined he knew them well. Instinctively he dismissed what he was seeing, two white-haired people who, at a click of the fingers and a few bars of rousing music, had cast off their age like a straitjacket that had nothing to do with them and into which an abusive, imperious power had forced them. Christian was shocked to observe them and began to sense that we only knew as much of other people as they were prepared to reveal. This observation hurt him, made him jealous — after all, it was ‘his’ people who were showing Verena, Siegbert and the others something they’d never shown him; they were seeing them for the first time, and in a light they had no idea was new. New for him — suddenly he couldn’t help laughing: You’re behaving like one of those artists Meno sometimes talks about; they imagine people belong to them and feel insulted when they behave differently from the way they’d assumed in their plans.

Christian emptied his glass. It was some cocktail for young people, tasting vanilla-ish and excited at its own alcohol content; it made his tongue sticky. Verena and Siegbert were jumping about, waving their arms as if they had a fit of the shivers. Silly! Christian thought. What was the point of looking like that? Verena’s feverish eyes; a flush creeping over Reina’s usually pale face, like red wine spilt on a tablecloth. It fascinated him. It disgusted him. The hooch tasted revolting, but what could he do except drink it. Heike was observing him, he could see her out of the corner of his eye, he couldn’t bear being observed, gave her a glinting stare but she wasn’t bothered by it, compared him with her drawing, stared back, unmoved, dissecting. He thought the music was terrible, but it was just loud, not bad, it was good. That was the stupid thing about it: it was good. Not a twist now, a take on the state-approved Lipsi dance, the cellar was filled with roars of laughter. Guitar riffs with eyes closed and rapt open mouths. That was as filthy as a dustbin, not the music they taught you at school. Music that bared its teeth, a thermometer bursts in your arse. Yes, right there, in your arse, in your arse! Christian greedily repeated the word. The lads on their instruments knew what they were doing, even if they weren’t playing the cello or piano. Five lads, at a guess just a few years older than he was. At a guess, Christian thought, perhaps I should simply take the drawing pad away from Heike? ‘You OK, Heike? You’re drawing the whole time,’ he said boorishly, grabbing her cocktail. She didn’t object, simply nodded. So he just downed it. His skin was burning. The cigarette smoke was like a smouldering shroud hanging from the ceiling. Christian imagined the drummer, with his violent up-and-down gesticulations, as a wind machine that would suddenly blow away the smoke, the voices and the laughter bubbling up over the tables, above all the laughter, it sounded like paper tearing. He checked whether anyone could see him. Heike had found other subjects. The soldiers were interested in skirts and female bottoms in jeans, he moved deeper into his shady corner, under the foggy light of a circular neon lamp from the sixties, nothing had changed, he couldn’t loosen up. He imagined playing his cello in a cathedral, the congregation frozen in devotion, Bach forcing them to their knees, these very people here, with a nervously trembling hand Libussa would change the hymn numbers on the board, the ship’s doctor, head bowed in contrition, would do penance on a hard bench, the laughter on Siegbert and Verena’s lips would die away. Silence, church-cool eternity, Bach’s harmonies, not this home-slaughtered howling with its cheap texts … Falk threw his head back joyfully and gasped for air like a carp. In his mind’s eye Christian could see him walking away after his interview with Fahner, comb in his back pocket, the dripping quiet on the stairwell, and he’d felt no pity as he watched Falk leave, his angular shoulder blades and his arms that, as Reina had said, were really too skinny for a boy. Now he was dancing like crazy and a week after the interview in the hostel room he’d still had difficulty concealing his fear: ‘He ranted and raved a bit, not actually very loudly, but … You know him. Nothing’s happened … so far. Perhaps the worst is still to come, you never know with them, and he’ll chuck me out of the school.’ That was what Falk had said, his words merged with the voices in the bar, the music. Rock ballads now. Good, good, good. Yes. He ought to get out. Perhaps go to the toilet. No, better stay here, otherwise his place might get taken. Christian observed Judith Schevola, who appeared to be having an agitated discussion with the woman but during the pauses in the conversation peered over at the tables. Make sure you don’t get under her magnifying glass, he thought. The band leader had an Armenian cap on his cropped head, a leather coat with shoulder straps and belt, and a ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ badge sewn on. Theatrical, honest gestures, so allergically sweeping that those playing guitar kept at arm’s length from him. The drummer in a Russian shirt streaked with sweat; hovering like a misty halo above his wildly jerking head was the tail of a bird of paradise made from pieces of coloured glass and illuminated from behind.

‘So, what d’you say?’ Ina flopped down beside Christian.

‘What’s the guy waving his arms around called?’

‘The front man? André Pschorke. Hey, wouldn’t you like a dance?’

‘Pschorke,’ Christian said meditatively. ‘International careers start with names like that.’

‘You can be pretty arrogant at times, has anyone ever told you that?’

‘Her over there,’ Christian said with a weary nod in Verena’s direction. ‘I don’t care. Never-ending boom-boom-boom —’

Ina made a dismissive gesture. ‘Oh, you are a wet blanket, Cousin. You really are going to come a cropper one of these days. Your classical music is something for the old fogies. You can stick it up your arse. Uptight aesthetes, huh, to hell with ’em.’ She lit a cigarette.

‘Hey, Cousin, lighten up.’

A guitar chord cut off Ina’s reply, she shook her head and, as those on the dance floor separated, went over to Siegbert. Now Muriel was dancing with Falk, Verena with Fabian, the soldiers were skipping round Reina, who was dancing alone with her eyes closed. Neustadt sang about cobblestones, about mail inspector Alfred going to his night shift along dark dreary stree — heets with his briefcase and sandwiches, about the bit of sky above the back yard as blue as Milka chocolate — the dance floor bawled along — they sang the ‘Ash Song’. ‘No, it’s not what you think,’ André Pschorke shouted to the soldiers, ‘it’s about … Ash lies over the streets / People have it in their hair / Ash that’s the colour of sleep / Ash of the things that were … // Tell me, where has the dream gone / Everyone had at dawn / Did they all get rid of it / Like a baby that never gets born …’ Christian was impressed by the words, he scribbled them on a beer mat, making it obvious so that no one would get the wrong idea about him. They sang ‘Your Eyes’, a slow number with a lot of keyboard.

Schevola came, behind her the woman in the sari. ‘We’ve seen you’ve been drawing away industriously, may I have a look?’ she said to Heike. She opened the drawing pad, examined the drawing with brief glances, like a craftsman checking the contents of a tool chest, turned over the pages. ‘You’re still at school?’

Heike jutted out her chin and twined a lock of hair round a finger, the woman in the sari presumably took it as a yes. ‘What do you want to do, after school?’

‘Paint,’ Heike said. The woman in the sari nodded. ‘If you want, you can come and see me. My name’s Nina Schmücke, during the day I sell fish, on Friday evenings we look at each other’s pictures and discuss them.’

‘You had the red picture in the art exhibition,’ Heike said.

‘For one day.’ Nina Schmücke handed back the pad. ‘Then someone with influence didn’t like it and it was taken down.’

‘It was very powerful,’ Heike said. ‘May I really come and see you?’

‘Have you something to write on?’

Heike turned the block over, Nina Schmücke wrote her address on it. Then the two of them sank into their own universe of painters’ names and pictures and painting techniques.

Schevola sat down beside Christian. ‘Shall we have a chat,’ she said to him in amused tones. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the steps. Neustadt were strumming furious protests.

‘What about?’ was the only thing that occurred to Christian. He said it no louder than normally, Schevola couldn’t have heard.

‘I presume you don’t dance?’

He shook his head, then he picked up another beer mat, wrote, ‘Would you tell the others I’ve left. The door’s open.’

How quiet it suddenly was: as if a space full of noise had been shut off and was no longer in operation here, dispersing and dissipating in the smells Christian once more perceived: from the park where a large bird flew off, startling him, from the garden, from the House with a Thousand Eyes. Bats were flitting between the treetops, visible as angular shadows against the muddy sky. The barometer at home was on ‘set fair’ and Libussa had said there wouldn’t be any rain. Chakamankabudibaba emerged from the sweet briar beside the path, briefly touched his calf with his bottle-brush tail in a kind of condescending greeting noting his arrival, licked a front paw, sniffed at the depths of the garden, disappeared as silently as he had come. The Teerwagens were sitting on their balcony, a trickle of pop music was coming from open windows, perhaps it was Here’s Music with Rainer Süss, a popular show on Channel 1. Half past eleven, no, it wasn’t on at that time. It was unusually warm, he wondered about sleeping outside, then he remembered he still had to get the loungers out of the garden shed and pump up the air beds, he decided to do it right away. Everything was dark at the Kaminskis’ and the Stahls’, but when he went to the balustrade, below which the garden fell away steeply, he saw the Stahls sitting in the light of the coloured bulbs they strung up over the iron table in the summer. He went down, the engineer asked whether Sylvia had been quiet; Christian hadn’t heard anything, Sabine Stahl said she sometimes secretly watched television when they were down in the garden, the glow of the screen couldn’t be seen from down there. Christian said there could be problems with washing in the morning but Stahl replied that there were things young people had to put up with, he’d filled the tin bathtub in the garden. ‘Are you staying longer?’

‘A little.’

‘Meno told us you and your friends will have to go to the pre-military training camp soon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Keep your chin up. — Good night, Christian.’

‘Good night.’

The Stahls got up. Christian noticed the bulge in Sabine Stahl’s stomach. She smiled. ‘Meno will soon have to let us have the bedroom.’

They slowly made their way upstairs. Christian watched them leave, two patches of brightness going up the steps to the house. The slight feeling of intoxication he’d had from the cocktails had gone; he poured himself a glass of punch, it tasted flat, he abandoned his glass. He switched off the lights, put out the lamp, sat down in the chair where the ship’s doctor had been sitting, stared up at the Chinese lantern swaying in the currents of air, a white sphere with a clown’s grin in red drawn on it in which burnt insects were to be found in the mornings. At night the garden was a mysterious realm, the crickets sawing their soporific ‘tsik-tsik’ into the distant noises of the city and the whispering of the trees, everywhere there seemed to be eyes opened, everywhere a hunt was on. A bug crawled onto the table, it had long, backward-curving feelers that seemed to be sieving the air, Christian, startled, stood up: that was something for Meno, not for him, Meno would certainly have had a Latin name ready at once and told him something about the habits of the bug. Christian was afraid of it, for him the creature was one of the night spirits, an eye with which nature looked at humankind.

He went to fetch the pump from the shed. Stahl had placed a lantern beside the tin bathtub, a yellow pinhead in the darkness dappled with the white moth-attracting plants: narcotic vibrations; he suddenly felt the need to dip a hand in the rainwater butt beside the shed; then the other hand: he was amazed how unpleasant it was if you only wet one. The hornets’ nest was empty, he remembered that Meno had told him that hornets lived for just one year and that the queens built new nests after they’d overwintered; also hornets, unlike wasps, didn’t go for human food; he could have told Reina that. When he looked up, the pinhead had gone. He found candles in the shed, matches as well, Meno probably used them when he worked out there. On a shelf were some apples from the previous year, on the windowledge cardboard cylinders of greenfly killer; there was a smell of fertilizer and rubber boots. The tin bathtub was in the lowest part of the garden, on a terraced piece of lawn with tomatoes and raspberries where Libussa toiled to keep them clear of dog roses and the maple shoots that landed in the autumn like invading propeller troops from the mother trees below the end of the garden — beyond a rotten wooden fence there was a drop of several metres, the neighbouring plot was overgrown and didn’t seem to belong to anyone. Glow-worms whirred across the path Christian was slowly going down, twigs kept scratching his face; here were gnarled fruit trees, the Cellini apples Lange used to make cider and puree, Boscs, Russets and Orange Pippins; Lange’s particular pride, the old pear trees: Beurré Hardy, Gute Luise, one tree with Christian’s favourite variety, the red and yellow Comice, Meno preferred the cinnamon-red Madame Verté and the spherical Grüne Jagdbirne; in the cellar there were hundreds of jars of bottled fruit.

He waited. One woman’s and one man’s voice, then splashing and when they burst out laughing he recognized Ina and Siegbert; he squatted down and only stood up again when his legs started to hurt. The splashing again, they were laughing in the drawn-out way drunks laugh, Christian crept nearer and saw their milky bodies in the bathtub, they separated, murmured, came together, touched each other gently, as if they were two doctors sounding each other with the warmed membranes of their stethoscopes.

Yes, he thought, yes. You ought to be somewhere else. But he waited, avid and sad.

Then he went upstairs, fetched the loungers, put them up in Meno’s living room and saw to the air beds. His thoughts wandered hither and thither and the chirping of the crickets coming through the open balcony door was excessively loud. The desk lamp would attract insects, he switched it off, went outside for a breath of fresh air. All at once the garden was alien, the frothy, dark-blue tree shadows threatening, there was still pop music coming from somewhere, suddenly cut through by squealing, as if someone were being thoroughly tickled. How boring, how meaningless! And all these blooms and plants, pushing against each other like forces in a polite and unfair game, existed just as well without him; this insight filled him with such consternation that he could no longer bear it on the balcony. The door opened. Verena switched the light on, started. ‘You gave me a fright. I didn’t know you were here —’

‘Where are the others?’

‘Still at the Bird of Paradise. Siegbert went off with Muriel and Fabian. Have you seen Reina?’

‘No.’

‘She left shortly after you. Christian … may I say something to you?’ She looked past him, he had to swallow. Verena wanted to go into the garden, to the iron table, but he said no, even though, for a moment, he felt a desire for revenge because he was expecting reproaches.

‘OK then, we can just as well stay here,’ she said.

‘No, I … Would you come? I’d like to show you Caravel. Just from outside —’

He hesitated, he turned away. ‘We won’t need to ring, I don’t want to go in … it’s not far,’ he said quietly.

They walked along Mondleite, deserted at night, it was dark now at the Teerwagens’ too. For a long time Verena said nothing and he didn’t urge her, recalled the walk with Meno in the winter, before the birthday party in the Felsenburg, how mysterious and full of stories the district had seemed, now it looked closed. There was something ghost-like about Verena’s dress over the streets that were like grey ribbons, she was wearing soft shoes, he couldn’t hear her steps. ‘I don’t think it was right of you simply to leave like that,’ she said when they’d already reached Heinrichstrasse, where the only lights were at Niklas’s and in number 12, the house with the wisteria, the scent of which mingled with that of the elderberry bush outside Caravel. ‘We’d so looked forward to this evening and then —’

‘This is where I usually live.’ Christian pointed over the arched gateway to number 11.

‘You mustn’t be annoyed with me for telling you this.’

‘No.’

‘I don’t know if you realize yourself, but you have a way … We’re dancing, you sit in the corner. We’re enjoying ourselves, you’re pulling a face.’

‘Of course. My arrogance —’

‘You don’t need to be cynical. Please, you must understand, I don’t have to tell you all this —’

‘Well don’t do it then.’

‘Actually you’re pretty immature,’ Verena retorted softly. ‘Pity.’

‘But Siegbert, he’s mature.’

‘Let’s go back. You’ve gone into a huff just like a peacock. Won’t you listen to me for once! Or can’t you stand being criticized?’

They walked back in silence, not by Wolfsleite, where Muriel and Fabian lived; he didn’t know whether they’d given Verena their address or not.

He couldn’t leave it at that. ‘Out with it, then. What was it you wanted to say to me?’ he said when they reached Mondleite again.

‘Yes, that is arrogance,’ she said reflectively. ‘You call us into question, for to you everything we do’s too stupid … All the fun of a dance, how common; then the look on your face, like, Oh God, how I must suffer, no one loves me, I’m all alone in this world full of cheap rock music and stupid jigging about, no one understands me, I’m so misunderstood, in such a bad way!’

‘It’s certainly not Bach those guys are strumming —’ Christian was shivering with rage.

‘Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. This disparagement. And the arrogant twist of your lips when you express it, I don’t need a lamp to see it. But I like what they do ten times better than your spoilt —’

He broke in. ‘Oh, leave off.’

‘I think you’re a coward,’ Verena called after him.

32. East Rome II. Barsano

‘I’m not interested in what Fräulein Schevola thinks!’ Schiffner stood up and began to walk agitatedly back and forth. ‘I would like — no, I demand that that scene goes. We’re both just back from the congress, you heard the directives just as well as I did and now you present me with this!’ Schiffner threw the pages up in the air, they floated down slowly to the floor.

‘We’ll destroy the book if we insist on cutting that kind of scene,’ Meno replied quietly.

‘So what! Then she’ll just have to rewrite the stuff. Why else did she become a writer? Do you know how many drafts Tolstoy made for his books? Tolstoy! And Fräulein Schevola and you rabbit on about “destroying the book” …’ There was a knock at the door. ‘Come in,’ Schiffner roared. Frau Zäpter appeared in the doorway, small and apprehensive. ‘Barsano’s office have rung to say it starts at seven tonight.’ Schiffner nodded and waved Frau Zäpter out with a rough gesture. ‘What do you have to say about this, Josef?’

Josef Redlich lowered his head and nervously played with a ballpoint pen. ‘But it’s true, Heinz. Such … incidents did actually happen, we all know that, and our friends better than anyone —’ Schiffner cut him short. ‘Truth! As if literature had anything to do with truth! Novels aren’t philosophy seminars. Novels always lie.’

‘I don’t share your view on that,’ Josef Redlich ventured to object. ‘You know my opinion: literature that capitulates in the face of reality is not literature but propaganda. We’re not making propaganda, Heinz. Rohde let me have the manuscript, I agree with him. If we take that passage out we’ll be castrating the book. And it’s not the days of the Eleventh Plenary Session any more.’

‘That’s clearly your opinion too?’ Schiffner leant over to Stefanie Wrobel, who avoided his eye. ‘I only know that passage, not the context —’

‘But I gave you the manuscript,’ said Meno, astonished.

‘I didn’t get round to it. Herr Eschschloraque has priority.’

‘All right, then, let’s try it,’ Schiffner said in conciliatory tones. ‘But on your head be it, Josef. I will make my objections known if Central Office rings up and there are difficulties. I bow to the will of the majority of my editors. But I can tell you both right now’ — Schiffner leant forward with his hands on the table and fixed his gaze on Josef Redlich and Meno in turn — ‘it’s your necks that are on the block. Of course the event Fräulein Schevola thinks she has to write about did occur. But the question is, to whose advantage is it if she does write about it? Our country has problems enough as it is, our friends as well, and she comes along with this old stuff. My God, who was it who started the war! That’s just the counterclaim, and she’s moaning and wailing just because a few Nazi women —’

‘They weren’t just Nazi women,’ Meno said even more quietly. ‘She portrays quite ordinary people.’

‘Do shut up, Rohde. It was these very people you describe as “quite ordinary” who elected the Nazis in 1933! They sowed the whirlwind and were surprised to reap a hurricane. The scene ought to be cut precisely because your objection is possible, but have it your own way, and don’t say I didn’t warn you. — I want three external reports, then it must go to the Ministry first of all; I want a translation for our friends and that has to go off before anything’s decided. This evening is the report on the congress; you’ll write it again please, Herr Rohde, and show it to me.’ He went over to his desk and handed his paper back to Meno. The pages were covered with corrections in red ink.

Meno looked back from the middle of the bridge to East Rome: a yellowish haze hung over the town, fed by the smoke from the factory chimneys; the outlines of Vogelstrom’s house and the funicular creeping up the rise shimmered in the air; the slope above the Elbe drifted into the falling twilight like an island hedged round with a proliferation of roses. A smell of decay wafted over, perhaps the wind came from Arbogast’s Chemical Institute. Judith Schevola was waiting on the Oberer Plan. She told Meno about the evening in the House with a Thousand Eyes and the Bird of Paradise and he let her talk; his thoughts were already at Barsano’s reception that was being held in Block D, on Karl-Marx-Weg; it was the headquarters of the Party, the Schneckenstein, the former castle of an expropriated prince of the Wettin dynasty. Judith Schevola fell silent and surveyed Meno with furtive glances, Josef Redlich and Schiffner would have made the most of the situation and kept her on tenterhooks a while longer; Meno didn’t like these little games they played with authors, the revenge of those whose hard work in the background went unheeded and drew little thanks; he told her about the editorial discussion.

‘Three external reports,’ Schevola said quietly after a while, ‘and a translation for the Russians … That’ll take for ever. That means the book is dead, it won’t get through.’

‘I promise I’ll do everything I can.’

‘And what can you do?’ Schevola retorted in irritation. ‘You know just as well as I do how things work here. It’ll end up with you paying me an advance of ten thousand but the book won’t be published.’ That was common practice, Meno didn’t dispute the fact: the publishers would pay a so-called difficult author for a bogus edition of, say, ten thousand copies, but in reality only a few hundred were printed, to be locked away in the collections of non-approved books in a few libraries — and the author, although cheated, couldn’t even complain.

‘I’m prepared to go a long way,’ Meno said. ‘You’re very talented and I … I’m grateful that you trust me as your editor. Your writing is unusual. Very French. Elegant, light, roving, not ponderous like that of many German authors, especially those over here.’

‘It’s the first time you’ve said that to me.’ Schevola turned away.

‘I’m not trying to cheer you up. It’s going to be hard work getting your book published. You’ve got enemies.’

‘Why?’

Meno accepted the naive astonishment he saw in her expression as genuine. ‘Why? You’re lively. You’re vivacious and passionate. You understand people, you express yourself in language that is worthy of the name. Put together, all this means that when people read you they have the feeling they’re reading something true. Not intended as propaganda.’

‘Something true, my editor says! That won’t buy me anything. I have the impression that that’s not what the reading public wants at all. They want entertainment, something to take their minds off things, otherwise stuff like Hermann Kant’s Aula wouldn’t have had such a success.’

‘You want to write best-sellers? You won’t. And in my opinion that’s not something for you.’

‘But the others are praised and courted, I’ll have to bow and scrape, suck up to VIPs …’

‘Listen,’ Meno broke in, ‘none of them is capable of writing a scene like the one in which your heroine says farewell to her father. You complain about your lack of success. Lack of success makes one sensitive. Sensitivity, along with background, is a writer’s great asset. Don’t let yourself be corrupted.’

‘Said the man with the steady income. It’s easy for you to talk of lack of success. True, I’ve got talent, as you say, but no one will know.’ He sensed she was tired and didn’t reply. They turned into Karl-Marx-Weg. At the gate to Schneckenstein they were stopped by soldiers who checked their identity cards and Meno’s briefcase. A sergeant phoned the castle, Meno and Schevola waited, there was no point in getting worked up about the process and pointing out that the check and phone call had already been carried out by the sentry posts when they’d gone onto and left the bridge. The gate, a steel wall several metres high on rails, opened like a theatre backdrop and closed again behind them.

The drive was tarmacked, in earlier times carriages would have driven up the serpentine road, lit by spherical lamps, to the castle building. It was in the shadow of tall trees and noticeably cooler; Schevola was shivering and Meno gave her his jacket. ‘Do you know Barsano?’ he asked to prevent her from refusing it.

‘Only from a distance. And you?’

‘I’ve been up here a few times.’

‘You were born in Moscow, weren’t you?’

Meno looked at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’ She winked at him. ‘I like to know about people I have to deal with. — Did you know that Barsano’s father was one of the founders of the Comintern?’

‘And of the German Communist Party, together with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The family emigrated to Moscow in thirty-three, they lived in the Hotel Lux, Barsano attended the Liebknecht School. His father died during the purges.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Schevola.

‘And never mention it. His mother and his brothers and sisters were arrested and he, as the son of an enemy of the people, was expelled from school and banished to Siberia. He slaved away in the mines and lost his left index finger. When we get there, behave as if you haven’t seen it.’

‘How long were you in Moscow?’

‘I don’t know exactly, I only have hazy memories. Sometimes I remember fragments of children’s songs. My brother was born in thirty-eight, he knows more. My sister was still in kindergarten when we came back. — Can you speak Russian?’

‘Only what I learnt at school, Nina, Nina tam kartina … and a little that has stuck in my mind from travels. — Why?’

‘Because up there’ — he pointed to the castle — ‘they sometimes only speak Russian. Almost all of Barsano’s people are ex-Muscovites, and they send their children to school and university in Moscow.’

‘The Red aristocracy,’ said Schevola. ‘The ones in the West go to Paris and London and New York, here they go to Moscow. Paris … That’s the city where all the women wear gloves and white dresses with black spots. Oh well. Mustn’t it be great to be cured of your clichés. I’d still like to go there one day.’

‘You might perhaps be disappointed.’

‘Yes. The grapes will surely be sour. There’s one single reason I’d like to go there. In his novel The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By Simenon has his central character, Kees Popinga, write a letter to the police chief: “… he deliberately used paper with the letterhead of the bar”. So there are bars there that have their own writing paper! I think that’s wonderful. It sounds so matter-of-course … As if it often happened that people wrote letters in bars.’

‘You’re a dreamer and pretty trusting,’ Meno warned her with a smile. ‘You don’t know where I belong.’

‘No, I don’t know that,’ Schevola said after a while.

The castle was a neo-classical fort, the main building flanked by two octagonal towers, the Soviet flag flying on the left-hand tower, on the right-hand one the flag of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Republic. Meno and Judith Schevola crossed the gravel of the square outside the entrance; a head of Lenin in reddish stone was like a meteorite lying on the ground, the Tartar face staring with a faint smile at the trees in the park; Schevola couldn’t resist tapping it with her knuckles. ‘Solid,’ she said in surprise.

‘What did you think?’ Meno said, even more surprised. ‘Just imagine if it sounded hollow.’

They waited in the foyer. The dusty brass hands on the clock clicked onto seven. Max Barsano could be heard laughing from some way away, immediately the group of people waiting relaxed, the faces of the Comrade General Secretaries in the two window-sized portraits on the walls either side of the entrance assumed encouraging expressions. Barsano stopped at the foot of the stairs, surveyed the assembled guests with a swift glance and, with an ‘Excuse me, comrades’, went up to Judith Schevola and clasped her right hand in both of his. ‘You’ve had your feathers ruffled, so I hear,’ he said to her in a sonorous bass voice that didn’t seem to go with his delicate figure, ‘doesn’t matter! That means it’s some good. Keep writing, tall oaks from little acorns grow and you’re someone who’s got what it takes to follow on from our great writers of the older generation.’ With that, he went past Meno to the author Paul Schade, who was proudly wearing his anti-fascist-resistance medal on his chest, and to Eschschloraque, who gave a thin smile and elegantly sketched a bow of the head as they shook hands; Schiffner, whom Barsano greeted next, looked embarrassed after the praise that had echoed round the foyer, Josef Redlich glowed with pleasure. ‘Just don’t get carried away,’ growled Paul Schade, the author of the revolutionary poem ‘Roar, Russia’, lengthy extracts from which were in the school readers of all their fellow socialist nations with the exception of the USSR, ‘we’ll deal with you later.’ Schade, who held an important position in the Writers’ Association, gave first Schevola then Meno a threatening look. Barsano turned to the two Londoners, father and son; Philipp in an elegant cream summer suit, still wearing his hat over his hair done up in a ponytail, something probably only he could get away with there. ‘Well, Herr Professor,’ Barsano cried cheerily, ‘I’ll send my barber round to you tomorrow. In the war those splendid locks would have been full of lice! — That’s young people for you,’ he said to his deputy, Karlheinz Schubert, who, at least a head taller than anyone else there, was doing the honours after Barsano in the cautious, slightly bent posture of people who are too tall. Barsano patted the Old Man of the Mountain on the shoulder, a gesture that would have seemed too hail-fellow-well-met and falsely jovial had it not been for the moment of hesitation that seemed to beg his complicity, to ask whether the restrained pat on the shoulder was acceptable; not everyone saw it as a mark of honour, for some it was crudely chummy familiarity, others perhaps even felt it marked them out. Barsano greeted Meno; he put his left hand in the pocket of his poorly cut jacket — how much more elegantly dressed were the Londoners, Eschschloraque and Schiffner! — then took it out again as if he realized that things one hid attracted interest, tried to smile but broke off immediately when the conversations of the others, conventional as they were, just filling in time, died away. ‘How’s your father? Haven’t seen him for ages. Making preparations for a journey, is he?’

‘He’s giving illustrated talks. Most recently in the Magdeburg House of Culture.’

‘Aha, in the Magdeburg House of Culture. Just needs to go down the Elbe. I wouldn’t put it past him. Kurt Rohde gets in a canoe and paddles to Magdeburg.’

Schubert and Josef Redlich were the first to laugh.

‘You’re the spitting image of your mother,’ Barsano said, subduing the laughter with a wave of the hand. ‘Brave Luise. I’ve lots of memories.’ He turned to Paul Schade. ‘Do you remember her facing Nadezhda and showing her Vladimir Ilyich’s letter?’ Schade’s leathery face brightened. ‘And the hand grenade she threw back into the train, a real partisan!’ As he spoke he gave Meno a disparaging look.

‘Let’s go into the film theatre,’ Barsano said. ‘Communal viewing of TV News at half past seven, the reports at eight.’

Meno and Schevola were the last to go in. Once they’d left, the foyer filled with members of staff from Party headquarters. A secretary attempted to breathe fresh life into three ceiling-high yellow rubber plants with water and peat. Voices could be heard from the offices again, one after the other lights gradually went on in the telephone booths underneath the picture of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

‘Probably government lines,’ Schevola said. Black telephone receivers were painted sloping diagonally across the glass doors, below them was the yellow glow of the letter T engraved on the frosted glass. ‘Do you know the man with the ponytail? And could you introduce me to him?’ Schevola hadn’t turned to Meno but addressed the air between him and Philipp Londoner, who was in front of them; she’d spoken loud enough for Philipp to slow down until he and Schevola were side by side; she tried clearing her throat, which Meno discourteously cut through with a ‘And how is Marisa? Did you leave her in Leipzig?’ and an innocent expression, at which Philipp muttered that she was still tired from a trip to Moscow as a member of the Chilean delegation to celebrate Yuri Vladimirovich’s appointment. The film theatre was a box-shaped, wood-panelled room on the first floor. After impatiently shooing his guests to their seats, Barsano pressed a button; blinds came down over the windows, televisions slid out from the walls, immediately followed by the signature tune of TV News. ‘Lower Jaw’ was reading the news. That was what the newsreader was popularly called; with sparse hair and square spectacles, he sat stiff as a poker on the screen, like a mummy, holding a sheet of paper from which he read the news without making a single mistake and emphasizing each syllable equally — Lower Jaw had never made a slip of the tongue, the whole Republic seemed to be waiting for that unheard-of event to happen; only the lower half of his angular face moved, grinding out news item after news item at the calm, steady speed with which a cable is unrolled from a cable drum … moving purposefully towards the realization. Schevola and Philipp Londoner were sitting in front of Meno, on Schevola’s left was Barsano’s deputy, Schubert, who’d squeezed into the row at the last minute … comprehensive exchange of views … in a constructive atmosphere. On the screens combine harvesters advanced in formation over the wide grain fields of the Uckermark … impressive testimony … all-round strengthening. Barsano pointed to the screen, a jubilant sea of waving hands as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party and Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic, Comrade … shook the hand of the Chairman of the Praesidium of the State Great Hural of the Mongolian People’s Republic, Comrade … matter of prime concern … unshakeable foundation. Now the bottling plant of the state-owned Wine and Preserves Combine was shown, muted clinking of glass as bottling forewoman Comrade … spoke of the overfulfilment of the plan’s targets for gooseberry juice … the assent of millions. The next picture showed tanks in the course of a NATO exercise, Paul Schade roared ‘Imperialist swine!’ … indestructible relationship based on mutual trust. Aeroplanes thundered across the sky, rockets jutted out their noses threateningly. Cut: a major in the ‘army service uniform/summer’ of the land forces of the National People’s Army in a steel helmet, binoculars to his eyes, scanning the horizon: … impressive testimony. Eschschloraque took out his handkerchief and quietly blew his nose. Now the reporters of TV News were visiting the Agricultural Cooperative ‘Forward’ that had harvested the largest pumpkin in the Republic. ‘’s already been on Unique or Freak!’ Paul Schade crowed … worldwide recognition … dynamic growth. Three of the four televisions suddenly went dark. Barsano pressed a button, there was a knock at the door, Herr Ritschel in an Arbogast Institute lab coat came in and inquired, emphasizing each word equally, what Barsano’s wishes were … far-reaching change came from the television, which was still on; the General Secretary flapped his hands at the three sets and told Comrade Ritschel to repair them immediately.

Barsano had chairs taken to his office, a sparsely furnished room at the end of a corridor with a grey PVC floor that swallowed up the sound of their footsteps; the murmur of voices behind the doors with the official signs, the sound of roll-fronted cupboards being opened and closed, the clatter of typewriters seemed to fade away in the puddles of light left by the fluorescent tubes with yellowing protective strips. While Paul Schade arranged his manuscript on the lectern and started to speak when Barsano gave the nod, Meno looked round: wood-panelling, a few veneered cupboards, a wide desk with a pennant on the right and a signed portrait of Lenin, which Barsano was very proud of, on the left corner, photographs of his wife — she was a doctor at the Friedrich Wolf Hospital, one of the few wives of senior functionaries who still went out to work — and of his daughter, about whom, as far as Meno knew, Barsano never spoke. Paul Schade’s voice grew higher, the worker-writer’s cheeks were flushed bright red and what had happened at the congress was about to happen again: one of his feared fits of rage, foaming with coarse venom, that the audience let wash over them with closed eyes and stony expressions and that in Berlin had come to a ghastly and grotesque end: Paul Schade’s false teeth had come loose and, rattling like those of a ghostly skeleton, shot out between his lips, which had brought a horrified expression even to the face of the chairman of the Writers’ Association. Meno shuddered as he recalled the urge to laugh welling up inside him, like a poisonous liquid boiling over in a hot saucepan, at the sight, at the icily embarrassed silence of the gathering: woe to anyone who lost control of themselves; the corners of Judith Schevola’s mouth had twitched, as they did now when Schade raised his left forefinger to castigate ‘parasites, formalists, scribblers out of touch with the people and the real world’, during which, remarkably, he did not look at Meno, the Old Man of the Mountain or Schevola, as he had in Berlin, but at Eschschloraque, who was sitting in the front row beside Barsano, legs crossed, and was giving his fingernails all the more bored and weary looks the more enraged Paul Schade became. Judith Schevola had assumed her insect-researcher look again, the cold, stone-grey interest in a man with medals and decorations bobbing up and down on his chest as he continued his vulgar vituperation. What was she thinking? Was she reflecting on the fact that Paul Schade had been in a concentration camp, had experienced the Gestapo’s torture chambers? Was she thinking of his book in which he described his childhood in a working-class district of Berlin and with which he had made his name until no one read him of their own free will any more since ‘Roar, Russia’ and various novels in which Stalin was portrayed as a father and the Germans — with the exception of those who had emigrated to the Soviet Union or communists working in the underground — as a wolfish race of incorrigible fascists? Josef Redlich was squirming restlessly in his seat in the second row beside Schiffner. Was it just that he couldn’t stand the shouting or was he thinking of Paul Schade’s editor, whom no one envied … Art was a weapon in the war between the classes, Schade bawled, today it was no longer enough to sit quietly in one’s attic room, turning well-crafted sentences, the world was once more threatened by the old enemy, by imperialism and its accomplices, literature had to go on the offensive, novels had to be like MIG fighters and articles like a salvo from a MIG and he demanded that agitators be sent to the schools to practise revolutionary poetry with the children; he had noticed that bourgeois ideas were creeping back into the teaching of literature and music, formalism, defeatism, recently he’d discovered poems by Eichendorff in a school reader, that was pure reactionary ideology. And by other Romantics! In earlier days people like that were strung up from the nearest lamp post. Eschschloraque nodded.

Schiffner, who followed Schade at the lectern, drip-fed his audience with figures and tables, dwelt on Dresdner Edition’s overfulfilment of its Export Plan norms for the non-socialist economic area and on the acquisition of hard currency. After him Josef Redlich reported on the political-ideological training of Dresdner Edition’s authors, especially the younger ones; at this point Judith Schevola stood up, cried that she couldn’t bear any more and left the room, slamming the door behind her. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, we won’t molest you, you’re as white-hot as ice,’ Eschschloraque mocked at her departing figure. ‘Oh, isn’t she sensitive,’ Barsano said, ‘and yet what Comrade Redlich is demanding is correct, only too correct. We’ve slackened the reins too much recently. That always takes its toll. Reactionary elements immediately stir like the nest of vipers they are. Think they can make something of it. We must be vigilant, comrades. The young are always at risk. They must be given a firm grounding in ideology.’ After Josef Redlich had returned to his seat, Meno didn’t dare get up to read his paper; it was about the ‘Role of the Author in a Developed Socialist Society’, of all things, and had already been criticized in Berlin; he looked across at Schiffner, who gave a quick shake of the head, even though he’d cut the most provocative passages, and stood up to leave, to see how Judith Schevola was, which Paul Schade misinterpreted, and said, ‘There’s no point in you dumping your shit again here, Rohde, your mother would have given you a good box round the ears for stuff like that’, which had Barsano, Schubert and Schiffner slapping their thighs in amusement.

Meno went out. Judith Schevola had opened the window at the end of the corridor.

‘There’s a balcony at the front,’ he suggested. She nodded. ‘I need some fresh air. I just have to get away from here.’

Their footsteps echoed in the empty corridors. The sound of voices and the clatter of typewriters could only be heard from a few rooms. In the rotunda the murmur of conversation drifted up from the telephone booths on the ground floor, the service lift for food in the shaft beside the stairs started to move, one of the beige microphones of the intercom crackled, someone cleared their throat, then all was quiet again. Curtains from the sixties, printed with grey flowers, hung over the wide double doors.

‘One for you?’ He offered her his packet of Orient, she mechanically took one, didn’t move when he gave her a light.

‘May I ask you something?’ She turned her face towards him, without looking at him. It looked pale and tired but perhaps that was an illusion created by the faint light that came to them from the searchlights in the park directed at the castle. ‘What are you actually doing here?’

He remained silent, smoked. ‘And you?’

‘Typical. You’re as cautious as … well, as an editor. — There was a time when I believed in all that. The better social order … But with them?’ She pointed vaguely over her shoulder. Meno leant his ear forward, which made her smile. ‘Oh, I don’t care if they do hear! They know anyway, don’t you think? All those clichés … it makes me want to puke! And most of all Schade would like to lock us up, like in Stalin’s days. Or simply whisht.’ She made the gesture of having her throat cut.

‘Do be quiet,’ Meno whispered, ‘just smoke your cigarette but keep your mouth shut.’

‘Shall I tell you something? I can’t be bothered.’ She laughed her ugly, gritty laugh. ‘My grandmother always used to say, “You’re nowhere so safe as under Old Nick’s hams, child.” ’ She waved her hand, drew on her cigarette. ‘And afterwards we’ll be good as gold and play along with them, say nothing and get drunk. That’s it, not a word more.’

‘It’s not just for me,’ Meno said after a long pause. ‘My mother … oh, let’s forget it. Later, perhaps, if you’re really interested. Schade’s just chucked me out with a verbal box round the ears.’

‘You’re a funny person,’ Schevola said reflectively. ‘I never know where I am with you. Despite that, I trust you.’

‘We should go back in,’ said Meno, changing the subject, ‘you can’t simply leave one of Barsano’s receptions as if it were a birthday party where you’ve had an argument.’

‘And what comes after the insults?’

‘Drinks, a film and singing revolutionary hymns. He seems to like “Vetcherniyzvon”.’

‘Then he’s moved to tears?’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘I’ll stay for that.’

They finished their cigarettes. In the distance dogs could be heard barking and for the first time Meno noticed the overpowering smell of henbane that grew rampant on the castle walls; the park must attract lots of nocturnal insects.

‘Calmed down, have we?’ Barsano asked with a cool ironic expression when they came back. ‘You shouldn’t be so touchy, everyone says what they think here, you have to be able to take the odd jab.’

‘A conspiratorial meeting!’ Schubert gave a suggestive smile.

‘The following’s on offer, comrades,’ said Barsano, counting the items off on his fingers. ‘One: watch a film, Chapayev or Vesyolye rebyata —’

‘Have you got the whole series?’ Paul Schade broke in.

‘The lot. Or Sergei Eisenstein’s Oktyabr. Two: we can have some food. Three: go down to the White Pavilion and see how Comrade Vogelstrom’s getting on with the panorama of revolution. Four: something special. I’ll show you some documents from the time of struggle. So, what d’you think? — Right, we’ll have a bite to eat and then communal viewing — of? Oktyabr. Great. A good choice.’ Barsano pressed a button, the doors of a cupboard opened, a control desk with hundreds of buttons and levers came out. There was a knock at the door after he’d pressed a button, a man in forestry uniform came in. ‘No, no,’ Barsano told the man, ‘I want the comrade duty cook’, pressed another button, a man with a grey beard in the uniform of German Railways appeared. ‘Not you either, isn’t it possible —’ He searched, scratched the nape of his neck, pressed the next button, this time it seemed to be the right one, the duty cook from the Ivan V. Michurin restaurant complex pushed in a trolley with dishes and a canister of kasha, a minibar on the shelf beneath them.

‘Buckwheat groats,’ Philipp Londoner groaned to Eschschloraque, whom he’d asked how his play was progressing and the nightwatchman question was developing.

‘You’re all far too spoilt,’ Paul Schade snapped. ‘During the time of struggle we old revolutionaries sometimes roasted rats and in Spain we lived on dry bread for weeks! And in the concentration camp we’d have been glad of a bowl of buckwheat groats, I can tell you. You of the Young Guard should be carrying the revolution forward!’ His reproachful look took in Philipp Londoner and Judith Schevola, who were in front of him in the queue.

‘A very valuable pedagogical hint,’ the Old Man of the Mountain agreed, filling his bowl with a portion indicating either genuine appetite or his openness to memories. Paul Schade turned away contemptuously and fished out a bottle of Z.ubrówka vodka. ‘Don’t think you can butter me up like that, Comrade Altberg. Spare me your comments and honour us with your presence at an Association meeting for once instead. — And you, Herr Eschschloraque, been travelling in the West again?’

‘Comrade Eschschloraque … I’m appauled to be so misunderstood.’ With that Eschschloraque turned away and started to mix a long drink, a ‘Gentle Angel’, for himself and Philipp Londoner: one part curaçao, one part champagne, one part orange juice. Karlheinz Schubert poured himself a glass of vodka, Sto gramm, murmured, ‘Na zdravje’ and downed it in a few appreciative gulps. The Old Man of the Mountain told him he’d regret it on an empty stomach but Barsano’s deputy just pulled a face and poured himself another glass. Barsano gave the control desk a kick, telling those around that Arbogast had installed the thing, it was getting worse and worse, he’d completely forgotten which was the button for the projectionist, but he was already at the door waiting for Barsano to say what he wanted.

The kasha smelt and tasted of wall filler, the Old Man of the Mountain was the only one who hadn’t finished when Barsano went round personally pouring vodka he’d spiced with ginger and nutmeg, a little sugar and cinnamon, the ‘concertina’ mixture, of which Meno had unhappy memories from previous visits. Barsano grinned as he filled Meno’s glass to the brim. ‘Y’spend too much time at y’r desk, comrade. Can’t take a drink. Well, I’ll treat you to a real one. Y’r mother could take her drink, a revolutionary through and through she was. There you are, get that down you and you’ll see splendid … whatsit.’ Meno had little desire to see splendid ‘whatsit’, the last time it had been a porcelain oval in Barsano’s personal toilet; at least that had revealed to Meno that the District Secretary must be a great fan of the ‘Digedags’ and ‘Abrafax’ series of children’s comics, huge piles of which were stacked on a ledge in the middle of the glazed tiles with the panorama of ‘Our World of Tomorrow’: blond children were sitting on the arms of full-bosomed tractor drivers waving to their fathers, who were zooming across the cloudless sky in jet aeroplanes; on the left-hand side was a lab full of microscopes and retorts with well-known scientists in gleaming white coats bending over them; magnetic suspension railways, an underground chicken farm, viaducts on several levels with futuristic cars gliding along them; deserts and steppes were transformed into blooming landscapes by canals; on the right-hand wall star-cities on distant planets were to be seen, orbited by spaceships and glass-roofed island resorts; and on the floor was a Lenin quotation, in the original Russian: ‘So let us dream! But on condition that we seriously believe in our dream, that we observe real life most precisely, that we connect our observations to our dream, that we conscientiously work to realize what we imagine! Dreaming is necessary … VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN.’

‘To the Great Socialist October Revolution,’ Barsano cried, raising his glass. Schubert and Paul Schade uttered a ‘Gorko, gorko’, as was usual in the Soviet Union — ‘Bitter, bitter — and downed with good cheer / as if it were water clear’. Judith Schevola didn’t seem to be bothered by the ‘concertina’ either. After his glass had been filled, Meno had quickly gone over to the cabinet with the presents from delegations of friendly governments; there was a carpet from the Frunze Military Academy on which the heads of Marx, Engels and Lenin had been sewn with tiny glass beads beneath crossed Kalashnikovs; a model of the Moscow television tower in malachite; a Bulgarian wine cask Young Communists had made by sticking halves of clothes pegs together and with folk designs burnt into it, and a ‘Cup of Friendship between the Nations’ in the form of a brass amphora, from Greece; that was what Meno was heading for; he didn’t want to make the acquaintance of Our World of Tomorrow again; pretending to suffer from a coughing fit, he poured his ‘concertina’ into the Friendship between the Nations; it swirled round in it. ‘To the memory of our great Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’, ‘… to the good health of our great Comrade Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov’, ‘… to the Party’, ‘… to world revolution’.

Judith Schevola wasn’t even swaying when all the toasts had been drunk. Paul Schade gave her a tap of appreciation on her shoulder, ‘Great girl! I’ll venture a dance with you’, and Schiffner, a beatific smile on his face, patted her cheek.

By that time Ritschel had finished his work in the film theatre. The projectionist, with several rolls of film over his shoulder, went up some stairs into the projection room; behind a little window the size of an embrasure in a castle wall was an ancient Ernemann projector, as Meno knew from the Londoners, whom Barsano quite often invited to his film evenings. The film theatre was not solely used for Barsano’s personal hobby, films were previewed there, decisions were taken as to whether a film could be shown to the general public or not. The light went out once the District Secretary and those he wanted with him in the front row had dropped into their seats, the machine began to rattle, a shaft of light with motes of dust floating in it cast the opening images onto the screen, which had risen as if by magic; at first a white pane with rounded edges was to be seen with black scratches scurrying over it, figures appeared in cross-hairs, a crackly, quivering countdown, Barsano and Paul Schade shifted expectantly from side to side in their seats.

33. Pre-military training camp

Garden smells, the fragrance of the rhododendrons, of jasmine opening, pale-faced, in the evening, white mouths of the murmuring twilight, and blue, ochre, water-tinted currents, fanned by the breeze; the secrets of the cuckoo-striped grass that deepened to purple at the edges, suddenly the call of a bird from the top of a maple full of trickling green, elderberry, its whispers sounding as if someone were pouring sand,

a leaf, a gleaming paddle, carried up by a thermal, it whirled back down and stopped on the branch from which it had fallen off, so that you looked at the street to make sure the passers-by weren’t walking backwards, as in silent films; the sudden flash of bicycle spokes as a boy turned a bike propped up on the curb; dissonance: a thistle in a meadow with fruit trees,

cats slumbering on stacks of wood behind sheds, first two, then three, then another grey one, a brown one stretching on brown wood and there: a tabby, dozens of cats sitting in the sun, at a stubbornly respectful distance from each other, no cat looked at another, none was lying parallel to another or behind another’s back, they looked past each other at angles that seemed precisely calculated, however minimal they were, and more and more kept appearing, as silently as outlines on a developing photograph, some might be touchable, some not; as if the colony were made up out of different June days and through a disruption of the normal course of time all the cats that had sat on this spot over the last hundred years had become visible,

then summer came.

‘We would prefer not to see you for the time being,’ Josta had written after her discharge from hospital and it was that ‘we’ — which included Daniel and Lucie as well, who didn’t understand what had happened — that disturbed Richard and increased the melancholy that often, after the peaceful enticement of spring, its vulnerable and non-assertive green, befell him in the hot months. The summer was demanding, driving, everything was going full throttle, a hectic, sweat-soaked hustle, the sky seemed to be turning like a millstone, weighing down on treetops and roofs, honing the river to a shining blade; the blossoms didn’t calm down at all, they had no time, or so it seemed, and burst open, pumping aggressive white out onto the streets that, around midday, beneath a pebble-grey sun scratched like old films, was swirled up into streaks of heat then withered and, when the blossoms, crackling, fell onto the paths, billowing up like clouds of plaster dust. Richard went swimming on Thursdays — despite the heat he preferred the indoor to outdoor pools — circled round Josta’s house, found the shop where Frau Schmücke sold fish. ‘The boy’ll be on holiday soon,’ she said in response to his cautious enquiry when the shop was empty and the tench in the glass tank sank lethargically back down to the bottom, ‘it looks as if they intend to go away. The little girl doesn’t laugh any more. By the way, someone came for the children, I didn’t need to look after them. — A woman,’ she added, ‘I don’t know her. From the city’s Family Welfare Office, she said.’

The boys from the eleventh grade went to the training camp. Christian brought home a light-green uniform and a gas mask he’d been given and had a pair of black boots over his shoulder. ‘It’s only two weeks,’ he said to Anne, who was concerned. The uniform came from a depot, stank of mothballs; Robert, who was unhappy that his brother was back in Caravel for the holidays, threw the windows wide open: ‘That stuff’s stinking out the whole pad! And by the way, bro, some tart keeps calling, is she the one from Waldbrunn? Reina, she says she’s called, Reina Kossmann.’

‘You mind your own business,’ Christian said. He went to Wiener’s to have his hair cut short. ‘Might as well go the whole hog’ — he went in his uniform and boots, his cap under one of the epaulettes. Wiener said nothing as he worked and the customers fell silent, avoided his eye. Only when Colonel Hentter, formerly an officer on the general staff of Rommel’s Afrika Corps, stood up and put his hand on Christian’s shoulder did Wiener and his assistants look up. ‘We thought we’d paid,’ Hentter said, ‘I saw lads like you die like flies at El Alamein. And then you turn up here in that outfit. Go home and only put it on when you have to.’

Christian was disappointed that the colonel hadn’t understood. He wasn’t wearing the uniform out of pride but because he wanted to be pitied, perhaps out of defiance too, a masochistic ‘look-at-me’ feeling, the public exhibition of suffering. The Russians were still in Afghanistan. Poland was still under martial law. He couldn’t bear the idea of running around free with the uniform lying as a reminder in the room. The moment he’d been given his kit, a shadow had fallen across his freedom, the days until he was to leave had been poisoned — and he felt a need for dignity: outwardly he conformed, inside himself he said, ‘I’m wearing these clothes, I even have short hair, I’m doing more than is required and despite that you have no power over me.’ He covered up the real reason: he put on the uniform earlier in order to make the moment of departure more bearable.

Richard saw Christian when he came back from the barber’s, could that lanky beanpole with the bright red scalp, blond hair shorn to shoe-brush length, really be his son? Anne, who’d been working in the garden and had just put the watering can down by the rose beds next to the gate, cried out, lifted up her hands, the doors of Tietze’s Shiguli slammed shut, Richard saw Niklas in a white coat, waving, the watering can fell over, running slowly in flowery patches over the paved path. Christian waved back, stopped in front of Anne, spoke to her shaking his head, she didn’t react, he picked up the can and watered the roses, which rustled in the heat like crêpe paper.

The carriages were crammed full, the Railway had only put a few special compartments at their disposal, in which schoolboys in light green from Dresden and the surrounding area were sitting squeezed up together, supervised by their teachers. The embracing, the shedding of tears and the surreptitious passing of love letters was over, doors slammed, a conductor blew a piercing whistle and raised his baton for departure, slowly, like a steamroller inching its way between the ash-grey platforms, the train began to move, leaving behind the people — waving, running alongside, blowing kisses, reaching for the flailing arms of particularly delicate boys still tied to their mother’s apron strings — who so clearly fell into the categories of ‘parents’ and ‘girlfriend’ that Christian couldn’t accept this concentration of sentimentality and angrily refused an apple Falk offered him; he didn’t like these farewells, they didn’t make it any easier, tear-stained faces didn’t make the inescapable any less inescapable. For the first time in his life he’d forbidden his mother something: to drive him to the station; he’d done it so curtly that he was now suffering pangs of conscience. Anne had slapped him, the first time for many years, he’d seen her horrified expression but had still gone out slamming the door behind him. Pigeons flew up, Christian squeezed into his corner and looked at the glass arch at the end of the beer-brown station concourse, there were reefs of bird droppings hanging from the steel girders. After Siegbert and Jens had gone on enough about Christian’s haircut, they invited him to play cards, they played for eighths of a pfennig and Christian lost a few ten-pfennig pieces. Sitting opposite were boys from the School of the Cross, whispering to each other, watching them sleepily. Their school had an elitist reputation, the choir, under their choirmaster, Rudolf Mauersberger, had become famous all over the world, its classical curriculum made exceptionally high demands on the pupils; recently the school had been decried as ‘Red’ and, so it was said, its singing had also suffered. Still: to be a Crossian was special, it counted for something in Dresden; the ladies at their coffee mornings raised their eyebrows, grandmothers clasped their hands and exclaimed, ‘Oh no, oh no!’ with happiness if their grandchild had made it through those august portals. Meno was an Old Crossian, as was Christian’s Uncle Hans, and both Muriel and Fabian were down to go to the senior high school there. The Crossians frequented the Café Toscana, where they displayed the bored-blasé expression that had been characteristic of them for generations and that, as reliably and incestuously as a transfusion with your own blood, as Meno said, established them in the bourgeoisie of Dresden Island. Christian envied them their self-assurance. Siegbert ignored the boys in the other compartments, he’d brought a stack of ‘Compass’ adventure stories and started to read one as soon as they got bored with cards. Falk took his guitar out of its case. Now the Crossians perked up. ‘Hey, that’s great, shall we play something together?’ With an elegantly casual gesture a sun-tanned boy with shoulder-length hair indicated an accordion on the luggage rack. ‘And you can get your horn out, Fatso.’

‘D’you think I’m a queer, or what?’ The one addressed as ‘Fatso’, fair-haired and thin as a rake, grinned and shook his fist at him.

‘That’s not the one I mean, blockhead!’ The sun-tanned boy took his accordion down. ‘Crossians — viva la musica!’ Raising an eyebrow, he turned to Falk. ‘Can you play?’

‘Can you read music?’

‘Can you do irony?’ the sun-tanned Crossian replied to Christian.

The Crossians wanted to sing the Latin ‘Carmina Burana’, but had to do it by themselves since no one else knew them. Falk accompanied them on his guitar, the fair-haired Fatso blew his trumpet with feeling. The only ones they all knew were the hymn of the Italian labour movement, ‘Bandiera rossa’, and the German equivalent, ‘Side by Side We March’, and as no one wanted to sing those, the Crossians once more started on part-songs. The sun-tanned boy played his accordion and conducted with nods of the head.

The train meandered through Lusatia, a landscape of stone houses with half-timbered upper storeys, the palatal ‘r’, sleepy villages and gently rolling fields stretching away to the horizon; here potatoes were called ‘apern’ and many of the place names on the signs were in two languages, German and Sorb. When the train travelled slowly you could hear the skylarks singing over the pale yellow of the wheat; there was a smell of sweat and dust and sweetened rose-hip tea. From the front compartment came the clack of the conductor’s revolving ticket punch, Christian leant forward, Stabenow’s youthful voice could be heard, he was giving an enthusiastic lecture on something or other and sitting round him were Hagen Schlemmer and a few more of those keen on physics whose eyes still lit up at names like Niels Bohr and Kapitza. Stabenow too was wearing the training-camp uniform. Dr Frank supervised the civil-defence course for girls at the senior high.

The camp, two and a half acres with huts, flagpoles and parade ground, was on the edge of the little town of Schirgiswalde, surrounded by green hills high up on which were detached houses with closed roller-shutters and single miniature spruce trees; they looked artificial, like the scenery for a model railway. The Waldbrunners were greeted by a corporal who showed them the hut they’d been allocated: two communal rooms, each for ten boys, double bunk beds, reveille at six, exercises, at the double to wash in the central washroom, bed-making and cleaning of rooms, breakfast at seven, then training.

‘Any free time?’

‘Name?’ The corporal drew himself up to his full height in front of Jens Ansorge, who was standing in the doorway chewing gum. ‘And take that chewing gum out when you’re talking to me.’ — ‘Ansorge.’ The corporal wrote it down. ‘You’re not on holiday here, just you remember that. You’re on toilet duty first, Ansorge. Report to me afterwards. Understood?’

Jens said nothing.

‘Have you understood, knucklehead?’

‘Uhuh.’

‘Heels together, hand at your cap and: Yes, Comrade Corporal. — We’ll be practising that.’

The days began with an ear-piercing whistle followed by Corporal Hantsch’s bellowed, ‘Platoon Nine — Up! Prepare for morning exercises.’ Then one or two morose, tousled heads would appear, yawns, sighs, grins of disbelief at not being woken at home, in their own cosy bed, by a loving mother to the smells of tea and breakfast but by him, the corporal who’d been seconded from a motorized infantry unit to Schirgiswalde and thought this was the direct extension of a National People’s Army barrack square where he could drill the arrogant, pampered senior-high puppies with their affected airs to his heart’s content. During morning exercises, which consisted of running at the double interspersed with bunny hops, press-ups and knee bends on the parade ground, Christian observed Hantsch: for the first time in his life he had encountered a person who took obvious pleasure in ordering others about, demonstrating his power by trying to find their weaknesses and, when he’d found them (Hantsch seemed to possess an unerring instinct for that), by exposing them for his own satisfaction and his victim’s torment. It was brazen and it disturbed Christian that Hantsch didn’t seem to know (or didn’t want to know) the limit beyond which humiliation began. Naturally Hantsch realized that Christian, after morning exercises, when they had to run, bare-chested, to the washroom, tried to drape his towel round him like a toga in order to hide his acne — which didn’t work because the towel was much too short — that he always tried to find a place at the back of the row so that the others wouldn’t see his bad skin. Hantsch made the platoon halt, came up to Christian, looked him up and down with an expression of surprise and disgust and said, ‘Christ, no woman’s going to want to fuck you. Platoon about turn!’ All the boys turned round, Christian closed his eyes, but he could feel the eyes of the others burning into his body. ‘Hey, now he’s so red the pimples are almost invisible. It’s really revolting, man, don’t you wash yourself properly, can’t you do anything about it?’ Putting on a concerned expression, Hantsch ordered them to turn back and move on. In the washroom he stood behind Christian, watching how he washed. ‘And your willy?’

‘In the evening, Comrade Corporal,’ Christian said through clenched jaws, giddy with rage.

‘You leave the thing stinking all day, you dirty dog.’

‘Leave him in peace,’ Falk muttered. Hantsch slowly turned his face towards him, everything went quiet in the washroom. Hantsch shrugged his shoulders. ‘What do I care? Senior-grade students, huh!’ He blew down his nose in contempt.

The heat made the drill, the mind-numbing marking time in highly polished boots that, after two or three about-turns on the dry paths, were covered in dust, the ‘Left turn!’ — ‘Right turn!’ — ‘Right, left wheel — marrch!’, the field exercises, in which only Stabenow let his platoon rest in the shade of the brambles and the fringes of the woods, and the assault run, a combination of press-ups, squats and flying jumps in the camp’s Werner Seelenbinder Stadium, into sweat-soaked torture. Only Siegbert seemed at ease, at least his only response to the daily programme was a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ he said with a touch of contempt to Falk, who kept getting out of step when they were marching and was therefore characterized as an ‘uncoordinated idiot’ by Hantsch. Siegbert grew impatient. ‘Just pull yourself together and concentrate. I don’t want you to spoil our points score, we have to get one over those idiots from the School of the Cross.’ On the way to the canteen there was a board showing the daily points score of the various platoons; Siegbert was determined to finish first.

‘This isn’t a war — and you’re not Gilbert Wolzow either,’ Falk objected.

‘Oh what the hell. Reina was right, you’re just too sissy.’

Christian stood in front of Falk. ‘You must be out of your mind, Siggi.’

The camp was commanded by a former major of the National People’s Army, a stocky man with a wrinkled face and sunburnt complexion, his fat belly made his uniform stick out over his belt. In the evening he would stride up and down the tarmacked camp road, swollen with pride and affable, examining the things the boys bought from the camp shop (vanilla ice cream for twenty pfennigs, pink strawberry ice that tasted of water and strawberries that were on the way towards strawberry flavour); clicked his heels as he welcomed ‘his’ (as he put it) platoon leaders back, and Christian sometimes watched him as he stood, hands clasped behind his back, looking over to the houses with the shutters down. ‘His’ platoon leaders, ‘his’ property (the training camp), ‘his’ soldiers as Major Volick called the boys at morning roll-call and talks in the canteen; his favourite word was ‘immaculate’. A jovial, affable man who seemed to be at one with himself and the world — and one who could have run a corresponding camp with the same joviality and affability fifty years ago, or so it seemed to Christian. He didn’t discuss his impressions with anyone, didn’t write either. Siegbert replied to Verena’s letters, which came almost daily; Christian recognized them from her characteristic spiky handwriting; he himself had a letter from Meno, who told him there was little worth telling: the heat in Dresden, the stones on the bottom of the Elbe were visible, dead fish were floating in the branches of the river; two girls by the names of Verena Winkler and Reina Kossmann had sent him a thank-you letter for ‘your hospitality and the wonderful time we had in your house’. Then he mentioned the Kaminski twins, who were becoming more and more free and easy in their behaviour, then that he had managed to find a precise adjective for the colour of one of the saturniid moths on the stairs at Caravel. Typical Meno, Christian thought.

Now Richard had said it; he turned away from the table around which Barbara and Ulrich, Niklas and Gudrun, Iris and Hans Hoffmann were sitting, turned his shoulder towards Anne, who kept her head bowed while the ticking of the grandfather clock grew louder and louder in the living room of Caravel, and Meno, who was sitting next to Regine, felt a profound sense of shame, he couldn’t say why, and sympathy for his brother-in-law, who had always seemed so strong and uncomplicated to him; the usual clouds life brought, certainly, but basically a sunny character, a practical person little given to introspection whose nature seemed to say, What d’you expect? You can live life in a different way, be more cheerful, more open to the simple things that are amazed at you worriers anyway — what you make out of them, how you manage to festoon a breath of fresh forest air with complexes.

‘You have to tell your colleagues.’ Barbara let out a long breath.

‘But the children’ — Anne raised her tear-stained face — ‘the children … What do we do if they carry out their threat?’

‘Things are never as bad as they seem,’ said Gudrun, trying to look on the bright side.

‘You think so?’ Richard stood up, walked to and fro. ‘They’re not your children. Would you risk it?’

‘My God, it’d just mean they don’t go to university … Do you have a problem with that? I love my child just as much whether she goes to university or not … But with you lot it absolutely has to be something special. I think it would be much more important for them to be able to go through life with their heads held high, if you make a clean breast of it; then you’d have a clear conscience too.’

‘What high-sounding words!’ Richard said, mocking Barbara’s contribution. Ulrich tried to calm things down, took Barbara’s hand, which was flapping indignantly. ‘Don’t get worked up, Bubbles. You may well be right but I can understand Anne and Richard. It’s their children’s future that’s at stake and even if it makes no difference to you whether Ina goes to university or not — it makes a difference to her.’

‘The lads want to go to university,’ said Meno, who so far had taken no part in the discussion, ‘at least as far as I’m aware. Anne and Richard want the best for them and that, I think, involves studying at university —’

‘At the price of Richard spying on his colleagues?’ Hans Hoffmann leant forward; he’d gone pale. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that of you, Meno. You’re an opportunist.’

‘Now listen here …’

‘You mustn’t provoke them,’ said Gudrun.

‘We have problems with Muriel, but do you think we’d be prepared to spy on people? Not provoke them! What nonsense! They’re the ones who provoke us!’

Niklas raised his hands. ‘I can remember a similar case in the State Orchestra. Then it was a question of whether the daughter could go to university. After a while he admitted it. He’d only told them unimportant stuff. By that time his daughter was at university and was still allowed to stay on.’

‘How do you know he only told them unimportant stuff?’

‘What are you suggesting, Iris?’

‘There’s no need to shout.’

‘Stop it! We been through all these pros and cons already. What if they take a different approach with me?’ Richard was walking up and down again.

‘And if they don’t?’ Barbara asked challengingly.

‘It’s all right for you to talk, it’s not you who’re taking the risk. It’s not Ina’s future that’s at stake,’ Anne interjected.

‘They say that Security only approach certain people …’ Gudrun gave Richard a suspicious look.

‘You take my breath away. Do you think this can’t happen to you? A word from you in the ear of the high-ups … Well, just you wait and see,’ Richard shouted with malice and desperation.

‘How about asking Christian and Robert what their opinion is? We’re going over their heads and yet they’re the ones most immediately concerned —’

‘You’re being naive,’ Richard snorted. ‘Can you imagine the pressure we’ll put them under if we invite them to join us and ask them what they think of the matter! Eh? Take pity on your parents, that’s what they’ll feel’s being demanded here, so then they’ll yield and give up the idea of going to university, to their own disadvantage. Is that your idea of responsibility? If we did that we’d be delegating it, to boys still going through puberty who can hardly assess the consequences of decisions. Moreover that would be cowardly. No, Meno, I’m sorry, but that question’s outside your competence.’

‘That’s enough!’ Ulrich thumped the table. ‘We have to do something.’ Now they all started talking at once. Regine sat, mute and dejected, beside Meno, who also remained silent.

‘Give it here.’ Siegbert stretched out his hand. Jens threw him the frog he’d taken off one of the cherry trees, large numbers of which grew round the camp. During the first rest the boys had stuffed themselves with the yellow cherries, Hantsch had waited patiently, then ordered gas-mask training; Falk had torn the mask off his face and, even though Hantsch threatened to make him do extra training, dashed off into the bushes — afterwards Hantsch had silently offered him a water bottle.

‘A nice frog,’ Siegbert said. He thought for a moment. Hagen Schlemmer was lying, arms outstretched, on the forest floor, Christian was watching Falk, who, red in the face, was gasping for breath. Siegbert felt in his pocket, took out his penknife, placed the frog on a piece of bark in front of him and cut off its legs.

‘They really do keep thrashing,’ he observed. Falk opened his mouth; Hagen Schlemmer said, ‘Yeuch’, Jens looked round — Hantsch had gone off to the side somewhere, they’d been wondering how to pay him back for this or that (stinging nettles? a push so that he landed in a fresh heap of cow dung? but he’d have seen them); it was too soon, it wasn’t the right occasion, they’d agreed that something like that had to mature. Christian saw the frog’s body slowly separate from the blade and therefore from its detached legs, that were still mechanically opening and closing, the animal was croaking softly and its arms were still going to and fro like windscreen wipers; Christian couldn’t understand it, looked up to where the branches were shimmering, then back down again to the alert, interested expression on Siegbert’s face; then he stood up, took the knife, which was sticking in the piece of bark between the frog’s body and legs, and stuck it in Siegbert’s thigh; it didn’t go in very far. Siegbert said nothing.

Christian twisted the knife to the left and the right. Only now did Siegbert seem to understand and protested in surprise. Christian pulled the knife out and threw it into the bushes. Then he looked at the frog; Falk also tried to do something for the animal; they exchanged glances and Christian looked for a largish stone. Now Siegbert really did protest. Hantsch came. ‘What’s going on here?’ He looked from one to the other, his eye finally coming to rest on Christian. ‘What have you done, Hoffmann?’ He went over to Siegbert, saw the blood. ‘Are you crazy? You’ve —’ he shook his head, then he seemed to understand something and couldn’t help smiling — ‘you’ve had it, man. You’re finished. I quite clearly saw you throw something away, that will be the weapon, vital evidence.’ He seems to read detective stories, Christian thought.

‘That’s not true,’ Siegbert said, groaning. ‘That’s not true Comrade Corporal. Christian didn’t … have anything to do with it. He was trying to help me. I fell over … right on something sharp. Too stupid.’

‘And what was that?’ Hantsch bent down over the ground, eagerly scouring it. ‘Can you stand up? You two carry him out of the way.’ He pointed to Jens and Hagen. ‘Nothing to be seen. What was it you say you fell on?’

‘That was before, I crawled a short way.’ Now Siegbert’s face was waxen. ‘The others are witnesses.’

Hantsch straightened up, stared from one to the other. ‘If you give false evidence here there’ll be consequences. We’ll get to the bottom of this. Form two groups, look for the knife.’

‘I don’t have a knife,’ Siegbert said.

‘But I saw it in your hand myself, you were slicing an apple, yesterday. What’s this nonsense you’re telling me, Füger? Hoffmann stabbed you and out of misconceived comradeship —’

‘That’s what you say,’ Siegbert replied wearily. ‘I borrowed the knife from someone.’

‘From whom? His name!’

‘I don’t know, I can’t remember … A damn nuisance to fall like that. I can’t walk.’

Hantsch ordered them to make a stretcher and had Siegbert carried to the medical station. Falk found the knife. He buried it and they had to keep searching until the evening. Since Siegbert stuck to his version and no one gave any evidence to the contrary, Hantsch could only report an accident to Major Volick. The injury wasn’t serious, but from now on Siegbert was on indoor duty.

What irritated Meno and made him think rather than amusing him — amusement at certain aspects of life, the Old Man of the Mountain had told him, also presupposed a certain kind of inhumanity: a taking-things-lightly that drifts like a balloon, beguiling, rootless and weightless, above the days and so having nothing to do with them at a deeper level — what seemed so strange to him that he didn’t simply find it entertaining was the fact that scenes he had been through could be repeated, at the same hour on a different day, at the same position of the sun (again it was in Caravel), with the same smells and the same seating arrangement; even Regine had come after her work in St Joseph’s Hospital, again she had chosen to sit next to Meno on the black leather couch, opposite Querner’s Landscape during a Thaw, next to the Hoffmanns’ Junost television and the grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes; again the same arguments about Richard’s revelation and again Richard had paced up and down like a big cat. Irregularities in the picture didn’t abolish the correspondence with the evening two days previously; indeed, they seemed to emphasize it, as if the scene were just being mirrored and the mirror admitted: I could be precise, if I wanted, but I don’t feel like it, for in that case everyone might notice me and that’s no fun; my efforts are to remain something for the better observers. Now Richard and Meno were standing on the veranda, drinking beer and looking out of the open window at the garden.

‘I see you like Wernesgrüner,’ Richard said.

‘I find it lighter, more hoppy and leafy than Radeberger,’ Meno said. — Why did he tell us? Was he afraid one of us might find out before he admitted it; does he think one of us might know something?

‘Particular kinds of men always go for particular kinds of beer, I’ve noticed that,’ said Richard. — Keeps out of everything, does my brother-in-law. Unfathomable. Do I like him? Yes, I do, somehow or other. He’s not a windbag, he knows how to keep his mouth shut. Why hasn’t he got a wife? Could he be …? Anne ought to know. But what do brothers and sisters know about each other? What do I know about Hans? And he about me? Perhaps Meno’s a ladies’ man? But still waters sometimes just run still.

‘Top-fermented or bottom-fermented guys? Those that prefer dark beer and those that drink light beer for preference?’ — Perhaps he’s trying something out? Perhaps he’s trying to see how far he can go? He said they wanted information about things inside the hospital from him. He didn’t say they wanted information about his relations and if he’s kept quiet about that, his revelation to us is meaningless. Or is it? Does he suspect one of us is an informer? Have his doubts about me? Ulrich as well. Party member, director of an industrial combine and both of us born in Moscow, the sons of communists. He wants to be able to tell himself that he’s done everything possible without bringing himself into danger. He wants us to be in the situation of sharing his knowledge.

‘Wernesgrüner’s drunk by artists and people who don’t really care for things that are centralized, accepted, popular, but have retained their scepticism: can something that is generally recognized and the centre of attention for the general public, as Radeberger is among beers, really be the best of all? Your Wernesgrüner men look for what is hidden, they look for the éminence grise. They’re often éminences grises themselves — or think they are. In musical terms Wernesgrüner men are those who’re sceptical about the Berlin Philharmonic and put the Vienna Phil. at the top. Niklas is a Wernesgrüner. They also believe in conspiracies. And Wernesgrüners will always prefer an Erzgebirge landscape to any far-away country, however exotic it is.’ Richard raised his glass to Meno. ‘The country of quiet colours. That’s what they love. It’s just the same with me, I only need to look at the Querners. Even though I’m a Radeberger guy.’

‘Well I prefer the State Orchestra.’ Meno emptied his glass. The beer tasted fresh as a mountain spring and was cold as an old key.

‘The amethyst looks good in front of the Insel volumes. — So in mineral terms the Radebergers would stick to diamonds, the Wernesgrüners to emeralds?’

‘Yes, because deep down inside they believe emeralds are the real thing,’ Richard said. — Basically, Ulrich and Meno are Reds. The only thing that surprises me is that Anne is completely free of that. Or seems to be. What do brothers and sisters know of each other? What do husbands and wives know of each other? He is a bit unworldly, my brother-in-law, with his insect research and his writing he doesn’t show anyone. Can’t be any good, otherwise he’d be reading some of it to us from time to time, they’re all supposed to be vain, are authors. Spends his days at the publisher’s poring over paper with writing or printing on, what difference does it make whether they use commas in this way or that? But everyone’s made the way they are. ‘Tell me, Meno, there’s something I’ve wanted to ask you for ages, you know the Faun Palace, there’s a plant in the foyer I call a snake plant because it has striped leaves. Do you know what it’s really called?’

‘Have you any idea whether Christian’s all right? I wrote to him but he’s not answered yet … They could still conscript me, you know. My last spell with the reserves was only three years ago.’ — Richard with his calculations: practice prevails, theorists are cripples who know nothing of life and the world. And yet we all have our feet firmly immersed in our dreams. What he’s saying is that Wernesgrüners don’t really count. What nonsense. And just because doctors are important. Demigods in white, huh! They make people healthy again, so what? If a patient’s stupid, he’s just as stupid when he’s well again. And if I were to suddenly start drinking Radeberger beer, so what? ‘Do you happen to have a bottle of Felsenkeller?’

‘He has to see the training camp through, we told him that. We can’t get him out of it and if he wants to go to university, he can put up with the two weeks,’ Richard said.

‘It could be a Vriesea splendens, a bromeliad,’ Meno said.

One evening in the pre-military training camp Christian was reading a book, an autobiographical account with the cover wrapped in the newspaper of the Party’s youth organization. Gothic print on foxed wood-pulp paper; someone shouted: ‘Attention!’ Stools were shifted and before Christian could react the book was snatched out of his hand. Christian stared at Hantsch’s triumphant expression. He wanted to jump down from his bed and take the book back but he couldn’t move. The book was called My Way to Scapa Flow, written by the U-boat commander Günther Prien. Naturally Hantsch opened it at the last picture: Hitler awarding Prien the Knight’s Cross; Hantsch closed the book again, lifted it up. ‘Who did you get this from?’

Christian said nothing even though fear clutched at his throat. It had been a serious mistake to read that book, especially there, and he wished he could turn the clock back to the moment when Siegbert had given it to him and say ‘No’, to refuse it on the grounds of the uneasy feeling he’d had and that he’d ignored.

‘I’m asking you who you got this book from.’ Hantsch went out into the hall and called in the boys who were outside cleaning their boots.

Christian said nothing. Siegbert, standing by the door, pale, said nothing, avoided looking at anyone. Hantsch said, so quietly that Christian thought he might be dreaming and his classmates would dissolve into thin air like an apparition, ‘So it’s yours, as I assume from your silence. You will pay dearly for this, Hoffmann. You read Nazi books, you who are studying to qualify for university. At a socialist senior high school. That’s something I’ve never encountered before. — All of you here’ — he gestured right round the room — ‘are witnesses to this. There will be an investigation. This time you’re not going to get away with it, Hoffmann. You two’ — he designated Siegbert and Jens — ‘are to make sure Hoffmann doesn’t run off or do something stupid. I will report this to the Commandant.’

‘Herr Hoffmann? — Frank, Christian’s class teacher here. Can I have a word with you? — A private word. It’s about your boy, something’s happened.’

Frank had called him at the clinic, in the ward. Richard sat down.

‘On the telephone there was talk of him having read a Hitler book. I’ve tried to speak to my colleague who’s in Schirgiswalde but they’re still all with the Commandant. They’ve set up an investigation.’

Richard listened as Frank made a suggestion but it was only after some seconds that he realized he was being asked to go and pick up Frank and drive with him to Schirgiswalde.

He called Anne at work but couldn’t get through to her. He called home, but when Robert answered he immediately put the phone down again, he hadn’t worked out whether it would be wise to tell the boy something to pass on to Anne; he’d picked up the phone without thinking and now he had doubts whether it would be right to inform Anne, she might perhaps crack up; then he saw her in his mind’s eye and thought he could hear another voice inside himself telling him that he just had to get through to her, it would be better if she came with him; he looked up and saw the nurses eyeing him and thought, Where’s your decisiveness, surgeon? Then he rang home again. ‘Listen carefully to what I’m saying, Robert’, and he told him that he was going to Schirgiswalde with Christian’s class teacher; ‘Tell Anne. I’ll call back as soon as I know what it’s about.’

Frank was already waiting for him in Waldbrunn; he told him that in the meantime Stabenow had called and given him the details; not a Hitler book but one from the Hitler period; he felt it was a serious matter. Richard drove like a madman; the inhabitants of Schirgiswalde didn’t respond to questions about the training camp; only when he stopped two policemen in a patrol car by waving and honking was he told the way, not without first being asked to show his driving licence and to take an alcohol test. Now Richard would have liked to have had Anne with him, for he felt capable of killing the policemen; Frank tried to calm things down, showed them an identity card that, however, didn’t impress the two policemen.

Christian saw his father come out of Major Volick’s office with Dr Frank, his short, sandy hair still showing the mark of the scrub cap; the dark-blue eyes didn’t look at him.

‘Come with me,’ was all Richard said. They went outside. The flags on the parade ground were fluttering in the wind. A platoon of boys from the School of the Cross were practising the goose step. Christian observed his father, suddenly the fear returned that he hadn’t felt during the interrogation by Volick and Hantsch. ‘You’ve really got yourself into a mess,’ Richard said wearily, turning to look at the gate, where two guards were letting a few pupils in on the camp road; laughing and babbling tipsily, they strolled off towards the huts.

‘Been allowed out,’ Richard said, with a nod in their direction.

‘They were in Wilthen, where the brandy comes from.’ If Anne and Richard had come to visit him on a normal day, Christian would have felt ashamed for the drunken schoolboys, now he felt nothing but indifference.

‘Didn’t we tell you not to do anything stupid?’

Christian hunched up, made himself as small as possible; he was determined not to say anything. Richard raised his arms, mentioned Erik Orré, saying his efforts must have been pointless, a pure waste of time; he dropped his arms. ‘How could you, my lad … you know very well what kind of place this is.’

‘Yes.’

‘So? Why did you do it? My God, there’s a swastika in the book! I sometimes wonder —’ Richard clasped his forehead. ‘I’ve never seen you with a book like that, but what does that mean? Where did you get it from?’ This seemed to represent a hope and he clutched at it, suddenly grasped Christian’s shoulders, shook him. ‘Where from? From Lange, that old fool? Did someone lend it to you? You can’t be that stupid. I just can’t imagine that.’

Christian remained silent, hunched up even more.

‘And we’re left to get you out of it. I’ve got into this mess, now you get me out of it. You’re not just stupid, you’re selfish too. What d’you think Anne’ll say? She doesn’t know yet, or perhaps Robert’s telling her at this very moment. Did you think of that? — Of course not. My son doesn’t think, he just acts without thinking. Have you any idea what all this means?’ Richard shook Christian again. ‘No, you haven’t. They were talking about the military prosecutor, about a juvenile court. They believe we haven’t brought you up properly and you’d be better off in a reformatory. Your class teacher has persuaded them to agree to let your case be dealt with by the school. They’ll call a staff meeting.’

‘Yes,’ Christian said tonelessly, he had to keep hold of himself.

‘Now you just listen to me, my lad. We have to work out a strategy. You’ll say you read the book because you wanted to find out about the fascists’ way of thinking. Because you wanted to understand how it was possible for Hitler to seize power. You hoped you would get some information about that out of it. Have you understood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you say something different before?’

‘No.’

‘Did they want to know why you read it?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That’s the version you’ll tell them. And you’ll stick to it whatever bait they put out for you. They’ll definitely want to try and pin something on you. You’ll use the Red Front argument. Have you understood? — I’m asking if you’ve understood!’

34. The Ascanian Island

For expulsion: Schnürchel, Kosinke, Schanzler, the two principals: Engelmann and Fahner. Against expulsion: Frank, Uhl, Kolb, Stabenow, Baumann. Five — five. Christian’s case was to be brought before the District Schools Officer.

‘Did you manage to find anything out about him?’ Ulrich asked when Barbara, Anne, Meno and Richard met before leaving for Waldbrunn. It was a Saturday. Christian’s grandfather was going to come by bus from Glashütte; he knew the Schools Officer, who also came from Glashütte.

‘He’s building a house,’ Richard replied.

‘Good. That means that in the first place he’ll have trouble getting supplies and, in the second place, problems with the tradesmen. Anything else?’ Ulrich had turned up in his Sunday best and with the ‘sweet’, the Party badge, in his buttonhole; Barbara had been to Wiener’s and was wearing a flamboyant white dress with large black flowers on it. After the meeting with the District Schools Officer they wanted to make the most of their outing together and go for a meal.

‘He drives a Saporoshez.’

‘Then he’ll need dates with a garage — and any amount of spare parts. Anything else?’

‘He’s sixty-four.’

‘So he’ll be retiring next year at the latest. Firstly that means he won’t want to saddle himself with another difficult case. He’ll want to make it short and to cover himself. He’ll probably pass Christian’s case on up the line. Minus point. Secondly that means that he’ll be all the more interested in help with building his house. What use is a retired Schools Officer to anyone? That’s what the tradesmen will be telling themselves. Plus point.’

‘And if the house is finished before next year?’ Barbara objected. Ulrich gave a knowing smile. ‘What are you thinking of, Bubbles. We’re living in a planned economy.’

DIARY

Sunflower wallpaper, hardboard table, beige telephone, on the wall the Comrade Chairman of the State Council, the grim-faced likeness of the lady Minister of Education, opposite a portrait of Makarenko. We were sitting in a semicircle facing the desk and the fact that the Schools Officer stood up to lower the blind over the only window could be an escape mechanism on the part of the short, tubby man, perhaps also an attempt to gain time: six pairs of eyes staring at him expectantly, narrowly, anxiously, restlessly, disparagingly, six times bodily odours on this hot day, which had not yet reached its zenith; Barbara’s heavy and Ulrich’s light perfume (eau de Cologne, he’d soaked the handkerchief in his breast pocket with it and kept taking it out to wipe his bald head, a damp patch on his jacket pocket slowly grew larger) in competition from either side, and when the Schools Officer, who had fished a sign with the name Röbach out of a drawer, sat down again, Richard said, ‘My son’, Ulrich said, ‘My nephew’, Arthur Hoffmann said, ‘My grandson’; then for a while no one said anything and Anne started. — I sat and waited to see how she would proceed. I was interested in that. The researcher into spiders, Barbara would have said, if at that point she’d felt like a diversion: observing me instead of the Schools Officer. They were being a little mean and Anne alone wasn’t aware of it (I’m not entirely sure of that but my sister’s never been devious); that’s why they let her speak — also, of course, because they knew it would make a greater impression if it was the mother who spoke: she who was generally reserved, at least when faced with all these men present, sitting on the edge of their chairs, just managing to control their inner urge to speak; even Arthur Hoffmann, sitting upright like a retired officer who has to balance the weight of the medals on his chest, seemed to be waiting impatiently for Anne to finish, as if the mother were not the best person to speak up for her child; as if he, the experienced officer, were watching the young folk using playground tactics against a hard-boiled enemy interpreting gifts brought by Greeks. Richard and Arthur Hoffmann had greeted each other briefly: cheek-to-cheek embrace, short discussion of the table reservation in the restaurant, no ‘How’s things?’ or ‘Not seen you for ages’ (a Christmas card, that was all, as I knew from Anne, pre-printed with angels and gold lettering, Arthur’s signature neat and precise, the dent made by the pencil still visible under the letters); no ‘Hi, my son’, or ‘Hello, Father’, just the terse assurance that there was no problem with the table reservation; then Arthur shook Barbara’s hand, ignoring for the moment Ulrich’s proffered hand, gave Barbara a charming, ceremonious, friendly nod, and yet with a touch more emphasis than his greeting for Anne, hat and umbrella in his left hand. I hadn’t seen him for two years, he didn’t seem to have changed at all: the thick, cropped, snow-white hair with the whorl Richard and Christian also had, the gold-rimmed spectacles, big blue eyes behind the ground glass, a coolly friendly cornflower gaze; the deliberate, measured gestures, the slender hands that Richard had inherited and that dealt with clocks without sentimentality yet appropriately: without kid gloves such as people wore for whom clocks, especially valuable ones, were just highly prized ornaments; without the thoughtless roughness of those who saw clocks as mere objects of practical use and who couldn’t care less what kind of ticking thing they wore on their wrist as long as it performed its function of measuring time as precisely as possible and as reliably as possible. Röbach didn’t interrupt Anne, even though he must have been familiar with the case. He’d put a file with Christian’s name on the table, nodded at Anne’s halting explanations that, with many repetitions and tear-choked assurances, begged him to regard Christian’s deed as a silly, childish escapade. — He was sorry, Röbach said, but that was precisely what he was still in doubt about. Principal Fahner had sent him Christian’s file and in it there was this and that element that indicated that … Röbach was sweating and gave Ulrich’s handkerchief ploy a long look. ‘You’re welcome to open the window, if you want,’ Barbara said. Röbach declined; no, no, he said, that would just mean the hot air from outside would come in and it was the same with the fans, they just swirled the warm air round the room, did nothing to cool it down. — ‘Yes, at this time of the year it ought to be cool in a room, in an apartment!’ Ulrich exclaimed. The people in the Dresden apartment blocks were really sweating, that was the way it was with concrete slabs and asphalt joints and tin roofs and you couldn’t remedy it just with eau de Cologne … ‘Although,’ he went on brightly, that was worth thinking about, he’d have to have a chat about it with his colleague, the Technical Director of the Karl Marx Combine, man-to-man, one director to another: eau-de-Cologne atomizers in every newly built apartment. It wouldn’t do much good though, might even just encourage allergies, joking aside: anyone who had a house could consider himself fortunate, with the new methods of insulation it was on the one hand pleasantly warm in winter and on the other refreshingly cool in summer, even our forefathers with their clay-brick buildings had known that and in the Combine they’d partly relearnt it, partly developed something new, just have a look at this. Ulrich took a piece of paper and with a This-is-the-house-that-Jack-built, he’d drawn a house that looked like a lantern in a single line: ‘Very simple when you know the principle.’ — Yes, of course, you had to know that: Röbach seemed to be sweating even more, ‘that you can do it just like that, off the cuff, so to speak, I presume you have experience of this?’ He was familiar with the game, he said, there were several methods of drawing a house in one line; he was building a house, a real house, and in that case it wasn’t, unfortunately, just a matter of a pencil and paper. Ulrich nodded: ‘If you could draw the workmen’ — he picked up the pencil and doodled a few, one was even pushing a wheelbarrow — ‘who simply just do what they’re supposed to’ — ‘If only!’ Röbach’s face was shining. ‘But where on earth can you find them? And modern insulating materials as well?’ Yes, if everything was as easy as on the sheet of paper where you could draw a line from the matchstick man to the house-that-Jack-built with a pencil! — ‘Yes,’ Ulrich said with a laugh, ‘like that’, and drew an arrow. — But insulating materials weren’t the only thing, Barbara said, when Röbach slid the file back and forward a bit, then left his hands above it without touching it. True, they were important, but there were other kinds of insulation, and not purely theoretical, she just happened, as a furrier who was also a qualified dressmaker, to have a few samples of lovely insulating material with her, ‘Just feel’, and she handed Röbach a swatch card of materials across the table. — ‘But I’m sure we’ve taken up too much of your time already,’ Arthur Hoffmann said; the effect was like a blade cutting the air between Röbach’s hand (still close to the file) and Barbara’s swatch card; it was Saturday, the Schools Officer reassured them, glancing at his watch, he’d no other appointments until twelve; now, as he turned his wrist to look at his watch to see the time, he picked up the swatch, felt the materials between his fingers; above all now, in summer, Barbara went on, they said it was going to be a hot summer, you could sense it already and her customers sensed it too, and the ventilation that was possible in suits made from that quality of cloth; according to his watch there were still twenty-two minutes left, the Schools Officer said, nodding; Arthur Hoffmann pulled back the left sleeve of his jacket, two watches could be seen, pieces from his collection that was known in other countries as well; he took one off, handed it to the Schools Officer, ‘Nineteen minutes precisely, if you would like to check it for yourself … forgive me for speaking frankly, yours is by Poljot, not too bad, designed for everyday use in Russia, but … that cosmonaut on the face.’

They waited.

‘Right then.’ The District Schools Officer gave a deep sigh, pushed the drawing, the cloth samples and the watch away from him. ‘I’ll have to pass it on to the Regional Schools Officer.’

Downriver, enclosed by arms of the Elbe, was the Ascanian Island. That was where Richard and Meno were heading after a fruitless meeting with the Regional Schools Officer. He had turned out to be a timid, indecisive man who dropped Christian’s file like a hot potato. ‘Oh God, oh God, what’s this that’s being loaded on me again, always these difficult cases, Herr Doktor Hoffmann. You’ve no idea of the stuff that arrives here every day. Only yesterday we had a similar case … What’s the matter with our young people? What’s going on? I can’t do anything, anything at all. It has to go to someone higher up. I’m sorry but I can’t make a decision on this.’

That left the lawyer, Sperber.

‘Thanks for arranging this,’ Richard said to Meno. They were standing at the entrance to Grauleite, part of Arbogast’s Institute behind them. ‘Did it take a great effort to persuade him — I mean, was he annoyed? After all, I’m not part of the family and you aren’t married to Hanna any more.’

‘He picked up the telephone right away.’ Meno lit his pipe with the spherical bowl and glanced through the papers again. ‘Can we trust Sperber, what d’you think?’ Richard seemed nervous, they were already within sight of the guards in Grauleite, one could see them both from Sibyllenleite and from Buchensteig, which met the road there. The streets were empty, apart from a few children playing football in the square outside Rapallo Castle and the Sibyllenhof restaurant, but the funicular would soon be bringing up people who were coming home from work in the town. But it was already starting to get dark, the implacable July sun was sinking; by day it was like a disc of boiling milk in the stone-white sky, recognizable only by pressure marks, circles of waves pulsing out; as if the air were a body that had been gashed by the low-lying rays, it had been covered with lines of reddish metallic discoloration, light rubbed raw: haemoglobin that was dispersed and deposited in layers on the fences, the shiny surfaces of dark car roofs hot enough to fry an egg on, the cracked asphalt of the streets, that surrendered its living red first and the iron molecules, glittering rust that remained.

‘Of course, he has contact with them.’ Meno nodded in the direction of the grey concrete block on Grauleite. With all its aerials it looked like a larded roast that had gone wrong, left mouldering in the deep terrine of the ring of walls. The clatter of a typewriter could be heard from one of the windows. ‘Londoner says if anyone can help us, it’s him. He called Joffe as well, but he declined: no accused, no defender. Such affairs had no business in a lawyers’ chambers.’

‘They’re all hand in glove with each other. There’s no lawyer in the country who isn’t in cahoots with them. We simply have no choice.’

The guard at the entrance patiently checked all their papers, made a few telephone calls and let the two men through with an imperious nod. At the end of the road was a black-and-yellow-striped sentry box with a barrier, the soldier on duty glanced briefly at their identity cards and gave them two one-quarter permits. If it was Sperber who had arranged for that, they had a long discussion to look forward to. They set out across the bridge.

‘Have you been here before?’ Richard asked; he was walking in front of Meno, there was scarcely room for two people side by side on the bridge. It was made of iron and its railings were closed off with wire netting; a weathered sign said ‘Grauleite’ with ‘Min njet’ beneath it in Cyrillic characters that the soldiers of the Red Army had put on buildings after the war.

‘Once with my senior editor and an author, once with Hanna,’ Meno replied, ‘but each time we went to see Joffe, not Sperber.’ Joffe, the bald lawyer with horn-rimmed glasses whom many people knew from television: with heavy rings on his fingers, that he spread out to emphasize his measured speech, he presented the fortnightly programme Paragraph, during which he discussed difficult and spectacular cases and answered viewers’ questions. Joffe also wrote in his free time and had published two love stories with Dresdner Edition, brilliant pleas, the response to which had in many cases been a deafening silence. Eschschloraque and Joffe hated each other, the relationship between Sperber and Joffe was said to be difficult as well.

‘You know Joffe?’ Richard looked at Meno with an expression of surprise and suspicion.

‘I was just thinking about him. There aren’t many lawyers in the country. He sometimes comes to the office.’

‘A professed communist with a predilection for capitalist sports cars,’ Richard said.

Meno looked at his watch. ‘We’d better hurry up, we’ve still quite a way to go.’

They were above the Rose Gorge; beside it a few turrets and battlements of Arbogast House peeked out of the web of trees, some flat ground with a swing hammock and Arbogast’s observatory not far away. There was no one to be seen, the bridge empty as far as it stretched; the windows of Arbogast House caught the late rays of the sun and threw them back in warm copper tones. There was hardly any wind at all, the Old Man of the Mountain would have said the air was rummaging round in its pockets a bit; there were currents, the warm evening air rising, a strong marshy smell from the Rose Gorge with its thousands of flowers looking inflamed in the darkness.

The inflamed body of a giantess lying on her side, legs drawn up half modestly, half lasciviously, Meno wrote, she seemed to be leaning on one arm, snuggling up against the curve of the bridge; white and red islands that had burst open on her body, and this could be heard: an unceasing, deep humming, like the drone of a transformer but without the crackle as it switches on and off; thousands of bees were scouring the roses, stopping them from congealing, as would have been right and proper for them in the falling twilight, the red, the white liquid, the extract of flower heads woven from hundreds of petals: delicate material, membranes that seemed to consist of old fragrances expressing themselves in fragments: spikenard, battlefield sweetness, forming thin braids, as it were, in the marshy smell and attaching themselves to the brown decay of the pillars, climbing up like vetch — an advance guard of roses was already on the way, exposing tendrils as thick as bell clappers — strengthened by clusters of blossom deepening their red into crimson in their centres, covered with a transparent, glutinous substance, like the sticky traps of pitcher plants, that they released in the no-longer-hot, not-yet-cool phase of evening, in the expectantly trembling stage shortly before being touched, all a-quiver under the tiny engravings of insect legs of which the humming faun of the bees consisted; and suddenly, when the flowers — replete with red, resembling wounds dripping red, magnets sucking in swarms of insects — showed patches of white, white roses a wind we could not yet feel had touched and opened, I was made to think of one of my old teachers, a chemist showing the prospective zoologists the shelves of his laboratory: stuffed vixens; regina purple ‘is a term for three coal tar dyes known since 1860’; rose-chafer paint: which tipped over the blossoms rustling in the wind from the country and set windows of fire a-glitter; rokzellin, an ‘azo dye close to true red’, with which the oscillating rays, like brushes dipped in it, painted the pulsating hedges; again, when the wind turned, splashes of white among the tumour-like clumps of red roses; picrotoxin, a ‘poison obtained from the berry of Anamirta cocculus, it forms a fine, white, crystalline, extremely bitter-tasting powder or crystal needles arranged in a star-form’; or was it the up-and-down of the bees, dusted all over with pollen, that created the impression of a swirling flow, repeatedly discharging white –

‘Look, over there.’ Richard pointed to the bank of the Schwarze Schwester, which, now visible, was winding its way along the Rose Gorge like a snake gleaming purple and tar-black.

‘The statues?’

‘Yes. I’d like to know who this wilderness belongs to.’ Richard took his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder.

‘Arbogast, I assume. At least, it’s below his Institute. As far as I know it was supposed to have been a rose nursery.’

‘As far as I know, it still is. — I once had a patient who worked here. An accident at work with interesting consequences for the insurance. Got a thorn in his forefinger and it festered, eventually we had to amputate. — It stinks of petroleum here. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arbogast’s chemical laboratory didn’t discharge into the stream. Everything’s dead down there.’

‘Who knows?’ Meno replied. The marble statues, green with age and neglect, were on the bank of the Schwarze Schwester, up to their waists in nettles and asphodel; here and there the face of a stone warrior could be seen entwined by roses; Amazons with bows and arrows that on his last visit Meno had seen with their breasts clear of foliage had been almost completely swallowed up by the hedges.

‘Anne told me you were doing a book with Arbogast?’

‘His autobiography, I’m helping him, sifting through material, listening to him. He’s very much in favour of oral expression.’

‘What does he say about the time he spent in Sochi? There’s all kinds of rumours.’

‘Not Sochi. Sinop.’

Richard nodded. ‘Yes, you know more about that, having been born over there.’

Meno seemed not to notice the jibe. ‘So far we haven’t talked about it and you know how it is — that phase might be left out. It doesn’t depend on us.’

‘He wrote me a letter, he wants to work together with the clinic. Medical projects on combating tumours.’ Richard had let the little dig slip out without giving it much thought and now he wanted say something friendly to Meno, who seemed taciturn and subdued; it couldn’t be him or Christian’s problem that was bothering him, perhaps it was just the heat. ‘By the way, those string quartets you gave me — top class. The Amadeus Quartet play outstandingly well. Those guys at Eterna must know what they’re getting for their limited resources of hard currency.’

‘Nothing but the best.’ Meno smiled. ‘What has Niklas to say about them?’

‘Benchmark recording. He’s got it, of course, though not the Eterna but the Deutsche Grammophon original. He hinted that I should note the difference.’

‘Oh’ — now Meno made an effort to speak in a serious tone — ‘so you’ve already checked which recording had the better sound mixer?’

‘Impossible to say, our man as well as the one from over there are both masters of their art but Grammophon have the better microphones and speakers, that’s just the way things are, we can’t do anything about it. And the better vinyl, of course.’

‘But you have the better record player?’

‘The very idea! Not even the better needle. Niklas is fair, I have to give him that. It would be no problem for him to decide the matter once and for all by bringing stuff back with him. But that would be like the high jump on the moon — only the Americans can get there, so they’d only be defeating themselves, in the long run it’s no fun.’

‘It’s self-irony, is it? I thought music was sacrosanct, especially German music.’

‘Well, we’re not exactly the norm, I can see that.’ Richard laughed. The last time Meno had seen him laugh was at the birthday party, when he’d been given Landscape during a Thaw. Meno remembered Christian and fell silent. He looked across to the ruinous pseudo-baroque town house that used to belong to a manufacturer of photographic paper but now housed the rules committee for the game of skat; four flags were hanging limply from the flagpoles outside the building: the ace of clubs, the queen of spades, the king of hearts and the ten of diamonds; there were lights on, they seemed to be pondering over enquiries.

The DEFA film studios were beyond the Rose Gorge, in the valley of the Schwarze Schwester, the sheds and the rails, on which scenery was moved backwards and forwards, could be seen. The studio grounds were fenced in, there were watchtowers, tall street lamps curved like cobras mingled their dull light with that of the searchlights from the towers. A gigantic Sandman waved, his helicopter was slowly coming towards him from the far end of the valley, the sleepy-time sand was in a third car, Richard and Meno observed it squashed in a corner that the roses from the gorge had already taken over. The bulbs hanging from a chain over the bridge went on but only about half lit up, some were making rasping noises, would soon go out.

‘Odd that you can’t see anyone,’ Richard said, ‘the scenery cars seem to go of their own accord.’

‘Remotely controlled, perhaps?’ Meno raised his hand, music came from one of the studios: ‘First we-he wa-a-tch our bedtime sho-how, then ev’ry chi-i-ld to slee-eep must go-ho …’; the familiar ditty of the Sandman programme, which started at ten to seven. They continued on their way. Settings for Westerns could be seen, on a poster a larger-than-life-size DEFA Indian was brandishing his tomahawk. Beside it were rows of garden gnomes, next to them an arbour, probably for the popular programme You and Your Garden. A searchlight caught the Weather Fairy at the entrance to the site, a cardboard eagle perched on an aerial, the emblem of the Monday-evening programme of carefully selected clips from Western TV, The Black Channel, by and with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, known as ‘Sully Eddy’. That’s where Frau Zwirnevaden works, Meno thought.

The closer they came to the Ascanian Island, the more nervous Richard grew, imagining scenarios of what would happen to Christian if Sperber couldn’t find a way out or, contrary to Londoner’s assurance, refused to take on the case. ‘What else could we do then?’ He went through lists of names. Could Londoner himself not do something, after all he was a close friend of the Chairman of the State Council; would Meno ask for an appointment with Barsano or perhaps with Arbogast? He was an influential man, valued by the high-ups, an important earner of hard currency.

Meno tried to calm him down. ‘First of all let’s see what Sperber says.’ But he too was wondering what they could do if Sperber held back. ‘And Christian? Has he written that essay?’ ‘That essay’ had been Anne’s idea, Christian was to present his view of the affair, explain why he’d read the memoirs of a U-boat commander in Hitler’s navy.

‘Yes. It’s been sent to the Regional Schools Officer and to the Schools Committee.’ Again Richard started thinking, found new names, examined and accepted or rejected them.

‘Has he recovered a bit by now?’

‘He is, let’s say, reasonably approachable once more. By now he seems to have come to understand what he’s done. Anne and I have discussed the matter: if all goes well, it would be best if he didn’t come on holiday with us this year but has the chance to think things through, get over it by himself. He’ll stay with Kurt. You can go and see him, of course, that will certainly do him good. He should be free for a few weeks and have time to reflect on what’s happened. Perhaps he has a girlfriend? The boy never tells me anything.’ Richard looked at Meno, Meno shrugged and raised his hands.

The bridge ended with a sign warning, in four languages, that unauthorized persons were not allowed onto the island. There was dense woodland either side of the well-trodden path, only sparse light came through the tops of the trees, Meno and Richard started when a guard suddenly asked to see their papers.

‘Pass,’ the man said in an expressionless voice, waving the two men on in the direction of the ferry. There was a smell of decay, yellow-and-black flowers were slumbering in the twilight, fields of henbane in delicate, fimbriate movement, as if sucking, even though there wasn’t a breath of air. The forest floor was covered in pine needles, the atmosphere was like a hothouse, stifling, deadening all sound. Meno coughed, a brief sound without echo, immediately smoothed out by the syrupy air. He was surprised that no birds were to be heard, nor any other woodland noises: the creak of branches, the warning cry of a jay, the leaves quietly foaming in the listless evening breezes that made thousands of branches, moving up and down at leisurely pace, shade in the darkness with the soft, silent strokes of pencils on paper.

Richard put two ten-pfennig pieces in the coin box by the jetty, Meno pulled the lever, the two coins clicked out of the slots in the revolving disc; a grey-bearded conductor came out of the shed with geraniums on the window ledges that was the ferry waiting room, gestured the two men wordlessly to the ferry, a rusted flat-bottomed boat with bulwarks and wheelhouse. The man started the engine, the ferry pushed out into the pitch-black arm of the river by the banks of which, a radiance of metallic white in the sluggish current, masses of water lilies proliferated. Neither Meno nor Richard spoke during the crossing, each looking round with rapt attention.

One of Sperber’s assistants was waiting for them on the island. He led them along a lighted path; soon, between clumps of milky green, the baroque castle came into view; it had been built on the island by one of the successors of the Ascanian dynasty.

‘He wants to speak to you by yourself,’ the assistant said to Richard.

‘What should I do in the meantime?’

‘You can wait in the secretary’s office with a cup of tea, you can have a walk anywhere in the park, just as you please, Herr Rohde.’

‘Then I’ll take a walk. — All the best, Richard.’

Richard followed the assistant. Sperber’s chambers were in one of the pavilion-like outbuildings flanking the Ascanian castle, the seat of the regional high court. The corridor floors were covered with grey PVC that muffled the sound of their footsteps, fluorescent tubes cast the unhealthy-seeming pus-yellow light typical of official buildings. The assistant rang the bell at a door with the plain sign ‘Dr Sperber Lawyer’, after a brief pause there was a buzz, the door opened. It was padded. They passed the secretary’s office, where there were a telex machine and several black typewriters, and went into Sperber’s office. The assistant, aiming his words at the ceiling, said, ‘Herr Doktor Hoffmann’, and withdrew. Sperber, sitting at his desk writing, did not look up. He pointed to the chair opposite him. Richard smoothed his jacket and sat down.

‘You must excuse me, this is urgent, it won’t take a minute.’ The lawyer still didn’t look up. Behind his desk, on the wall and on a shelf, a collection of clocks were ticking, all good pieces as Richard, with the practised eye of a clockmaker’s son, could tell. A few framed prints by the painter Bourg, spidery drawings with heavy cross-hatching; Richard recalled the Black Plants in the corridor of his brother’s house. Above a washbasin a little mirror at tie-knot level. A comfortable-looking sofa with a table and chairs, probably reserved for important visitors, or for Sperber himself when he was reading the newspapers: there were stacks of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Die Zeit and the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the table; clearly Sperber belonged to the restricted group who were permitted to subscribe to Western newspapers — and who could afford to. A Querner was hung over the sofa. Sperber seemed to collect Russian nesting dolls as well, one of the wall shelves, otherwise packed with files, was kept free for them. A tiled stove, the tiles with blue windmills in the Delft style. Framed diplomas and letters of thanks in free spaces on the wall beside the clocks; a certificate for the Patriotic Order of Merit in gold.

Sperber waved what he’d been writing dry, put it in the outbox, took two loose-leaf files out of a drawer. ‘I don’t want to waste either your time or my time, Herr Hoffmann, so let’s get down to business right away. I have two cases here. I can do something for one of them. Our system of justice is remarkable. It is rare for two similar cases — such as that of your son and this one here — to be judged in the same way. If I win one, I will lose the other. That has often happened to me. So I will pass on the case I don’t accept, that is only sensible. A different lawyer — another chance. Unfortunately not all my colleagues have my experience; which is why — there’s no point in beating about the bush — so many clients turn to me. So which case do you think I should pass on?’ He put his splayed fingers on each of the files and looked at Richard expectantly.

‘Not my son’s,’ Richard replied after a while.

‘You see, the other father gave me the same answer. Put yourself in my position … What should I do? That father wants your child to lose, this father wants the other’s child to lose …’

‘If it’s a question of your fee —’

‘It’s not a question of my fee, Herr Hoffmann. It’s a question of time.’

‘But couldn’t, I mean … your time, isn’t that a question of your fee … you love clocks.’

Sperber smiled. ‘We’re not even going to start talking about that kind of thing. I became a lawyer because I love justice. Where would we be if the dispensation of justice went with those who are able to pay more. No. I decide this in my own way.’ He took out a coin. ‘Heads or tails for your boy?’

‘Are you being serious?’

‘Certainly,’ Sperber replied. ‘And before you condemn me, I would ask you to put yourself in my place. I have time for one case — given that, how do we choose in a way that is reasonably fair? So, heads or tails?’

‘May I … go out for a moment?’

‘No, stay here. In the first place I haven’t unlimited time for you and in the second all the thoughts and fundamental considerations you will go through outside won’t make it any easier. Heads or tails?’

‘Heads,’ Richard murmured. Sperber tossed the coin and it was as if through a veil of mist that Richard saw it fall back down onto the table, onto the rubber pad, bounce up, come to rest balanced on its edge, slowly roll down the table, tip over and disappear.

‘Shit,’ Sperber said. ‘That doesn’t count, of course. We have to find it, though, I always use that one for tossing a coin.’

Richard remained seated, unable to move, while Sperber crawled round the desk looking for the mark coin. ‘So there you are!’ he cried, after a certain amount of crashing and banging, and appeared, red and panting, from under the desk, triumphantly holding up the coin. ‘Right then. That’s not going to happen again.’ The coin spun, this time Sperber caught it and slapped it onto the back of his other hand. ‘Heads,’ he said, ‘so you have got me for your boy. — Would you like to know the name in the other case? — I can understand that. Though it would have been more honest if you had wanted to know.’ Sperber seemed to be wondering whether he should tell him the name anyway but changed his mind, put the other file back in the drawer. ‘I think Christian has a good chance of coming out of this unscathed and I don’t imagine it will have much effect on his prospects of going to university either.’

While this was going on, Meno was exploring the island. Beyond the park, which was well tended — agaves and orange trees in tubs, fountains, gravel footpaths — a wilderness began: spruce and beech trees were wreathed in creepers, lepidodendrons grew closer and closer together the farther Meno went, masses of leaves tumbling on top of each other, tangled lianas round moss-encrusted giants, tree ferns, leguminous species: it was the vegetation of past geological periods; he was in a brown-coal forest. How quiet it was; it was so quiet that it struck him that there were still no birds calling, no mosquitos buzzing, that he could hear his watch ticking. The ferry terminus was on the other side, to the north the arm of the river widened out into a lake. When Meno went to the shore he saw pipes under the surface, on the opposite bank, amid a wall of swamp cypresses with their high aerial roots, they curved upwards, supported on pylons, they’d been coated with camouflage paint. Meno put his hand in the water — bathtub temperature — before listening again and watching the almost imperceptible tug of the river, the silent forest of swamp cypresses. Rays of the sun slanted down on the surface, like lancets of light operating carefully and filling the water with metallic fire; the edge of the woods merged with the sky to create an active osmotic layer with an iridescent greenish tinge — smoky flowers, steaming waters — ferns, bloated horsetails seemed to sit up, like sleepers awakening, on the ground of more distant alluvial islands. On a tree stump jutting out into the water not half a metre away from him Meno saw a cocoon, a horned butterfly larva the size of his hand, shaped like a sea snail and, to go by the movements that could be seen, the occupant must be close to emerging. Meno stood there, fascinated and confused. The cocoon burst open, feelers groped, twitched in the currents of air, the olfactory stimuli, the scents of danger, then the body pushed its way out, the eyes appeared over the edge of the pupa, little baskets gleaming like tar, then the front legs, still uncertain, the wings, still tied up and folded like umbrellas half out of their covers. The lines of the tracheae could be distinguished, one wing broke out. Veronese green, moonspots, motes of rusty red on the body: a uraniid, a day-flying moth from the tropics. Cheered up, Meno walked back.

Outside the court building he met Joffe. The fat lawyer recognized him, looked in the direction from which Meno had come and waved him over. ‘You mustn’t talk about that, Herr Rohde,’ he said in his guttural voice, oiled by elegant addresses to the jury and countless The Law and You programmes, ‘there’s an explanation for everything. You’ll have seen the pipes. Well, they’re for district heating. They leak a little, the heat gets out, that’s all. In winter the snow doesn’t lie here — and we have some rare birds among the winter visitors. — You’ve come with Herr Hoffmann?’

‘I’ve just had a little walk. Herr Hoffmann has an appointment with Sperber —’

‘I know,’ Joffe broke in. ‘By the way, since I’ve happened to run into you — before long Herr Tietze will be going to Salzburg with the State Orchestra as their accompanying doctor. He shouldn’t take on any errands for Frau Neubert, make that clear to him.’ Surprised, Meno said nothing. The lawyer seemed irritated by his incomprehension. ‘Herr Neubert intends to meet Herr Tietze in Salzburg and to give him money for his wife, with whom your brother-in-law is on friendly terms, as I know. Herr Tietze should leave the money where it is if he wants to avoid getting into trouble.’ Joffe gave Meno a searching look, seeming to enjoy the effect of what he’d said. His expression became friendly again. ‘About that little business with Herr Eschschloraque, has he’ — Joffe waved his hand as if to ward off annoying insects — ‘that nonsense with the comma he wanted to foist on you, you know what I mean?’

‘He hasn’t said any more about it to me.’

‘Oh, good, very good. I heard about the matter and thought that one should do something to prevent Herr Eschschloraque from doing anything rash. Vindictiveness is ugly, I think, and unworthy of a communist.’

‘Thank you.’

Joffe laughed, making his shoulders shake. ‘Ah well, my dear Rohde, one does what one can. A very good evening to you.’

35. Dresdner Edition

When Meno got up for his lauds he felt tired, washed out. At night the temperature only fell by a few degrees. Sultry air was hanging over the garden, virtually no cooling breeze came from the river. A marshy smell was loitering on the slopes above the Elbe. Sometimes Meno could hear the Kaminski twins laughing, the heat didn’t seem to bother them, in the evenings they would walk up and down by the parapet with the eagle, spick and span in their white cotton slacks and white shirts, murmuring, perhaps they were revising for an exam. When the sultry heat became unbearable, Meno would sleep in the summerhouse, wash in the rainwater butt and run naked, with rubber slippers on his feet, round the garden to get dry. Water was starting to be rationed; the city council had posted notices that curled up on the trees like the locks of a wig: no washing with running taps, cars to be washed with a bucket only, gardens only to be watered with a watering can.

He took the 11 to work. In the morning, when the passengers were squashed together, the tram stank of sweat (nylon shirts, the fabric of the future) and over-applications of perfume, all the sliding windows and vents in the roof were wide open, the airstream was cooling; on the stretch between Mordgrundbrücke and the Pioneers’ Palace, where the road was lined by the outliers of Dresden Heath, you could breathe fragrant air. Meno got out on Dr-Kulz-Ring and walked to the Old Market; the Dresdner Edition offices were in the block beside Holy Cross Church — gambrel roofs, historicizing architecture from socialist town planning; you went in by a hall lit by 1950s lamps with cone-shaped shades and smelling of Frau Zäpter’s coffee, Josef Redlich’s tobacco and the used air from the office refrigerator. Josef Redlich suffered during those dog days. With a morose expression he would stick manuscripts in the editors’ pigeonholes, close the window in his little room, which looked out onto the Old Market — too much noise, too much pitiless light on typescripts, he wanted nothing to do with dissecting rooms, microscopes, halogen lamps, shook his head at Meno’s activities. ‘Aren’t you going to put your stethoscope on as well, Herr Rohde?’ And he would point to stacks of paper, chalky white under the lampshades, which seemed to be projecting X-rays. At that time of the year the Old Market shimmered like a layer of salt with dead car-fish strung out along it; the oddly skiddy noise of the trams in Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse interrupted the rumble of traffic between the post office and Pirnaischer Platz in an unpleasantly irregular rhythm. Josef Redlich wanted the blinds shading his room before he sat down to his literature — and before the telephone, a black toad squatting on a tray on an extending shelf, started to disturb him. On some mornings the temperature had already risen to over thirty degrees, then even Oskar Klemm, the proofreader, would loosen his tie, the consumption of ice cream, of which there was always a supply in the refrigerator, could lead to shortages and Josef Redlich would cover the floor of his room with colourful plastic tubs that he filled with cold water and walk up and down with bare feet — clasping his hands behind his back and puffing away at his cheap cigars (Meno could never find out what brand they were, Redlich took them out of a leather case; Madame Eglantine said: railway-embankment harvest), sometimes contemplating a corn on his left middle toe, thinking, ‘The things it’s seen, all the countries its walked round with me’, and musing in the dreamily abstracted Josef Redlich manner with its Lichtenberg quotations. Sometimes he would lean back in his chair, his waistcoat stretching over his potbelly, though without a single button flying off, his pocket watch, still on its chain, lying open on the table in front of him, the cuffs of his white starched shirt with the impeccably smooth sleeves (he had them ironed, he had been a widower for a long time and had two wedding rings on his right ring finger) turned back, the veins stuck out on his hands dangling down, over his spherical head he’d draped a wet handkerchief, the corners of which protruded like a flying squirrel. At moments like that he looked as if he’d had a stroke, but when Meno came over, a look of concern on his face, he would wave him away wearily, ‘Oh, Herr Rohde, I still have some prose to order around, but just look at me … rarely can a mind have come to a standstill more majestically.’

Josef Redlich would never have given his personal taste the status of objective authority. That was what the West German tsars of the arts pages with ambitions to educate the nation did — for example, the great panjandrum of critics, Wiktor Hart, whose articles Josef Redlich read with fixed cigar, on which the ash grew to a structurally ominous length; then he would put the pages (numbered copies) aside, tap the ash off his cigar and declare, ‘We ought to take him seriously’, or ‘His argumentation is ringfenced, if you’ll forgive the expression; a fence is made by its fundamental component, the slat, being repeated time and time again; it is unclear whether the desire for variety is out of place here’, or ‘He doesn’t understand poetry at all, he confuses it with the exclamation marks in the margins of our biographies’, look across at Meno, happily expecting contradiction, which wasn’t long in coming, for Meno enjoyed reading the reviews, which were written with fervour, and were knowledgeable and positively obsessed with the desire to champion literature; Hart made no concessions as he delivered judgement, an advocate of common sense (that did not, of course, always produce the desired results in literature, that vague art of feelings, contradictions and dreams: half-mad authors had created half-mad immortal works; this or that representative of the most socially committed realism nothing but crystal-clear whimsies); he was a weather god who could cut up rough at a neglected nuance and stood guard before his holy place — though he himself never used that expression, nor a word such as soul, he would mock it, reject it, put it in inverted commas, scenting waffle. He understood a lot, it seemed to Meno, and he possessed the chief virtue of the born critic: he didn’t enjoy panning a book (though such reviews were enjoyable to read) and he disposed of the whole palette of praise. Hart was vain, but he was vain for literature and he was capable of putting his vanity on one side and leaving some matters unmentioned out of tact or discretion; and Meno always felt that, basically, he didn’t want to make a fuss about himself, there was an unspoken ‘That’s not done’ and much quiet knowledge of human nature. Everyone who was able to get his reviews read them immediately, but not everyone in publishing enjoyed that privilege, copies went to Schiffner, the senior editors and Party secretaries, at Dresdner Edition to Kurz alone among the editors; Meno owed the fact that he could read them to the sympathy Josef Redlich clearly felt for him (that, moreover, was mutual). Everyone who read Hart either nodded vigorously or vented their feelings with gestures of outrage, no one remained indifferent to him, especially not the authors he dealt with. Eschschloraque wished for Moscow conditions ‘in which I could have had this individual taken care of’. The Old Man of the Mountain thought Hart was ‘magnificent, he panned one of my books, you know, but I can see that he was right’, and Schiffner said, ‘An important man, unfortunately. He helps our work, when he praises us, he helps our work, when he pans us; we are dismayed he doesn’t come to our aid, when he ignores us.’

The typographer, Udo Männchen, suffered from the heat more actively than Josef Redlich; he would emerge from his graphic studio at the end of the corridor more frequently than usual, tear at his shock of fuzzy hair, hold up his glasses to the light, then dangle them resignedly. Fanning himself with one of his outer garments (Indian-Hawaiian-Buddhist — shirts they were not) that had the look of the theatre about them, he would shout down the corridor, ‘Dante! I’ll use the Dante Antiqua, since it’s sizzling.’

‘Quiet!’ the proofreader, Oskar Klemm, cried from the office diagonally opposite.

‘Or perhaps not the Dante after all.’ Udo Männchen put his glasses back on, let his arms hang down.

‘Eschschloraque, king of the ornamental fish, is a classicist; but the decline began with Dante. — What do you think, Herr Rohde, should we, as men of profound feeling, not use Dante, of all fonts, for him?’

‘He’d notice,’ Meno said with a smile.

‘Notice, oh yes, he would that. And he’d grab me and rumple me, he’d curse me — Männchen, he’d say menacingly, you did that on the wings of wrong! Intellectually speaking, the solecism you managed to perpetrate there is elementary, my dear Männchen. As far as I’m concerned, your reputation — O editor! Now something bad is coming. A dirty word, a non-literary word. Impossible to represent graphically — is shit.’

‘He wouldn’t use it, Herr Männchen.’

‘No, I have to agree with Meno there.’ When she heard Männchen, Stefanie Wrobel liked to go and fetch a cup of coffee or an ice cream. ‘We have it on good authority that a single so-called four-letter word can take him two to three hours.’

‘Vulgar expression,’ Josef Redlich corrected. ‘If you must quote Lichtenberg, then please stick to his terminology. Notebook F, note 1155.’

‘How can it be so hot? Or should I use the Walbaum … a fine font, a beautiful font, Goethe’s collected works in the Insel India paper edition are set in Walbaum. He’d notice that …’

‘Herr Männchen, there are still people in this office who are trying to work,’ Oskar Klemm growled, ‘and, anyway, what do you know about Goethe?’

‘Or should I rely on the delicate timelessness of Garamond? But Eschschloraque avoids italics and Garamond is the king of italics. We ought to print nothing but books in italics, don’t you agree, Herr Rohde? Italics were derived from the monks’ handwriting, eternity begins with the monks. More eternity in literature! Or a Bodoni? A Bembo, that Antiqua typeface, matured like an old cheese? It bears the name of a cardinal … Perhaps we ought to be truly radical?’ Männchen rolled his eyes and did some shadow karate chops. ‘A sans serif font, bare and clear and unadorned, like a meat axe … Courier, that’s the typewriter font. A serif again, true. Remind him of a golden age …? The typeface for a summons and no one will laugh, no one dare to say a thing … Anyway, Herr Klemm, you know nothing about the Beatles.’ Udo Männchen started to whistle the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’.

Meno and Madame Eglantine exchanged horrified glances. Oskar Klemm remained silent for a while. He was seventy-five and should have retired years ago, but the pension he would get, after almost sixty years working, would be ridiculously small. Schiffner wasn’t pushing him out. Oskar Klemm was a legend; there was no one waiting for him at home, his wife had died in the Dresden air raid, his children had long since moved away. The publishing house was his whole life, Goethe his lifelong love, horse-racing, which he followed at the Seidnitz and Berlin Hoppegarten racecourses, his passion. His deepest feelings and well-concealed tears were for Mozart; he could be standing in the corridor, of an evening, when the hustle and bustle had died down, the record player playing the adagio from the Gran Partita with its fragrant, elysian writing for wind and, if Meno should come, he would put his finger to his lips, take off his glasses and stay there, face turned away, eyes closed. Herr Männchen belonged to a different generation; young philistines who could see no farther than the flared bottoms of their trousers; one had to make allowances.

‘You know’ — by now Oskar Klemm was standing in the doorway — ‘ “Yellow Submarine” is very popular but it seems to me that, from a purely musical point of view, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” or “A Hard Day’s Night” are more profound. And, of course, those immortal songs “Penny Lane” and “Yesterday”. And even at my age there is no doubt that “She Loves You”, for all its simplicity, makes a very important statement.’

Oskar Klemm walked slightly bent but no one had ever seen him without a tie. When he wasn’t at work he liked to spend his time at the races and in the various antiquarian bookshops in Dresden, especially Dienemann Succrs. and Bruno Korra’s Paper Boat on Lindwurmring. Should he find a mistake in a manuscript that had already been edited, during the afternoon meeting he would lean over the conference table and look along the row of editors, a sorrowful expression on his face — apart from Madame Eglantine, Meno and Kurz, the Party Secretary, there was also Felizitas Klocke, known as Miss Mimi, an oldish spinster with a liking for hard, action-packed melodramas, samurai swords and Alain Delon as a youthful, angel-faced killer: she grew cacti, wore bobble hats, liked snakes and conspiracy theories, and couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Melanie Mordewein had the desk opposite her; she was known as Frau Adelaide, was in charge of the Romantics and dreamt a lot; she looked so gossamery it was as if she hadn’t been born, but crocheted. After Oskar Klemm — who had seen Hofmannsthal in the old Insel Verlag and in Kippenberg’s, the publisher’s, villa, and whom Stefan Zweig had shown Goethe memorabilia, whom a misplaced comma, an inadequately checked term, would cause sleepless nights — had nurtured his sorrow in silence for a while, he would whisper, ‘Please … ladies and gentlemen … Please bear in mind … It’s … It’s supposed to be … literature … language, that is. A living being of words … There is a saying that poets are like freebooters, they live from robbery under the open sky. The poet is free. But we are bound … so, please … bear that in mind. The poet is the composer. We are his musicians … We have to play what is in the score. That is how it has to be. Please be correct.’

After that Kai-Uwe Knapp, the managing clerk, reported on the situation at the printer’s. Because paper was short and the plan’s targets sacred, because printing presses were in short supply and printer’s ink had been short before now, because, in addition to all that, time was short and coordination with Central Office in Berlin difficult, the long and the short of it was that the manuscripts of Editorial Office 7 would be printed when there was a shortage of these shortages. The class standpoint, which was expressed vehemently by Ingo Kurz, an editor and Party Secretary, was no help. Despite that, he did know something about literature. During the reports of Kurz and Knapp, Oskar Klemm sat with his head bowed. He had been through the bombardment of Dresden. He always left his door ajar.

36. First love

Green water splintering off the paddle-wheels, atomizing into spray that drifted along the steamer, swirling into the wide channel at the stern in which the wake of the grinding, pounding boat fanned out and gradually disappeared. Christian was standing by the rail in the bows, holding his face up to the wind, which smelt of grass and cellulose — the industrial area of Heidenau, with its factory chimneys and effluent pipes from which grey sludge sloshed into the Elbe, slipped past. The boat was full of people on a day out, the excited chatter of children from school holiday camps and the irritated admonishments of those in charge of them; walkers with rucksacks who kept to one side, as did the few inhabitants of the Elbe Sandstone Hills: recognizable from their faces worn from hard work, their unfashionable clothes; the women wore headscarves, the men flat, brown leather caps.

The windows glittered in the newly built district of Pirna-Sonnenstein, huge concrete blocks that had been rammed into the foothills of the Elbe Sandstone range above the little market town with its church. After Pirna the wind freshened and the broad valley of the Elbe narrowed, hemmed in on either side by steep hills. The sandy yellow of abandoned quarries mingled with the light green of the birches and the dark green of the conifers in the Elbe woods. Now it smelt of summer: dry air, cow dung, wild dill in the meadows, diesel and grease from the boatyards, sun cream mixing with sweat into an oily film. He tried to stop thinking about the training camp. He’d sent off his application to do medicine in Leipzig, there’d been an interview at the university. One of the three examiners, a GP, had leafed through his file and asked why he wanted to be a doctor? The question didn’t catch Christian unawares; outside was Richard, who had prepared several answers for him. Christian wanted to decide between them himself. Because I would like to be a famous medical scientist, he’d thought, and for a moment he felt a great urge to say it just like that, the truth and nothing but the truth. ‘Because I would like to work in medical research eventually,’ he’d said.

‘Aha, so you want to become famous,’ the second examiner, a psychologist, had replied with an ironic smile.

‘… That too. Yes.’

‘Well, at least you’re honest, young man,’ the third examiner, a professor of Internal Medicine, had commented. ‘Do you know what we mostly get to hear? — Because I want to help people. Sometimes even humanity, then it becomes interesting again. If you’d said something like that, and with your file, we’d have rejected you. As things are, we’ll support your application. — How’s your father, by the way? We were at university together. Off you go, now, and tell one of those silly geese who want to help people to come in.’

He closed his eyes, listened to the thump of the engines for a while. He shivered when the steamer entered the shadow of the cliffs. Cumulus clouds were building up. The blue skies of summer, the blue skies of air raids, he recalled; Grandfather Kurt’s words.

Above Wehlen the rocky pinnacles of the Bastei rose up from the river; parties of tourists pushed their way to the stern rail, pointing up, waving. Christian didn’t wave, there were countless sparks flitting across the cliffs, he had to screw up his eyes and shade them with his hand. The Elbe passed Rathen in a wide curve, cut like a steel blade between Lilienstein and Königstein, the bases of the hills wooded, above them sandstone bluffs with steep, cleft walls on which myriads of swifts nested.

He reached down for his suitcase, suddenly feeling the need to test out the strength of his grip on the straps; it was with satisfaction that he felt the crumpled resistance of the leather that he couldn’t squash beyond a certain degree however much effort he put into it. A dragonfly landed on the handrail hardly a metre in front of him. He was fascinated: how these creatures, invisible in flight, could come to an abrupt halt and be as if switched on: blue needles with a double pair of transparent, filigree wings, and Christian would have liked to catch the dragonfly to see if the spurs of skin felt like cellophane, whether you could cut yourself on them. It shot off, with no preparation, like the tick of a second hand.

Schandau came in sight, the bridge, the dusty station, the rails and electric cables seeming to shimmer in the heat, an engine was puffing away below the signal box, sleepers stacked up on trestles and overgrown with weeds. The spa promenade with hotels, pennants from the regatta and chains with lanterns along the bank by the car park, behind it, hidden by the houses on the market square, the domed tower of St John’s. Christian breathed out. No one was waiting for him at the quay. A brass band greeted the passengers, gleaming on the terrace of the Elbe Hotel between blue-and-white sunshades and waiters calmly serving and clearing away food and drink. He weighed the suitcase in his hand. He hadn’t been expelled. He had the second-best results for his year and had even managed to congratulate Verena.

Lene Schmidken had seen him as he put his suitcase down and looked up at the house: the curtains were drawn, the skylights in the shingle roof closed; Pepi, Kurt’s Alsatian, came whizzing round the corner and sat down in front of him, panting, giving him a man’s-best-friend look.

‘So you still remember me, you old rascal. How’s things?’ He fondled Pepi behind the ear. The dog bounded over in great leaps to Lene Schmidken, who came hobbling along leaning on a stick; she seemed to be a head shorter than at his last visit. ‘D’you want something to eat, lad? Or take your case up first?’ She rummaged round in her apron pocket and took out the key from where it would have been refusing to acknowledge the presence of clothes pegs, eucalyptus sweets, rubber rings for preserving jars.

‘How long you staying for?’

‘Don’t know for sure. Two, perhaps three weeks. Depends when Grandad’s coming back.’

‘The beginning of September’s what he told me.’ She took a sweet out of her apron and he put it in his pocket, just in case.

‘It’d be nice if you could look after the rabbits. And Pepi. Come over for lunch, my lad. There’s guvech. An’ Hussar’s toast tomorrow. You like that.’

‘Thanks, but I’m not hungry just now.’

Holding on to his arm, Lene Schmidken sat down on one of the steps, shaking her head at the heat and the anti-thrombosis stockings the doctor had prescribed for her. ‘Ischtenem! They look like stuffed vine leaves. And — have you got a place at university?’

‘We’re only told when we go back to school. Some friends might come to see me. Grandad doesn’t have to know. Please?’

Lene Schmidken nodded, stood up with a groan. ‘He’ll find out anyway. If you need a bath I’ll get the tub out of the wash-house. Kurt should have filled the water tank, the old wood butcher. Keep the priculic, that black vampire, away from me.’ She jabbed Pepi with her stick.

‘Did Grandpa leave any other messages?’

‘No. All he could think about was his journeys. A real bundle o’ nerves, ’e was. I thought ’e’d drop down dead when they sent ’im that letter refusing his application. Like a bear with a sore ’ead, ’e was, the old spindleshanks. Few weeks later the acceptance came.’

‘He didn’t say anything about that.’ Surprised, Christian turned back to Lene.

‘He still didn’t have no passyport, ’dentity card, papuci for trav’lin’ in. Keeps it all locked up inside hisself. Then came another refusal. The Amazon’s out, Danube delta’s OK. And now ’e’s down there with the Lippengabors.’

‘With the what?’

‘Polenta-guzzlers. Total goulash. With the gyppos.’

‘But they’re not all gypsies, Lene.’

‘Oh, leave it, lad.’ Leaning her head a little to one side, she shuffled off to her house, where for years she’d lived alone in a Transylvania of the mind — and speech.

He was afraid of the death masks, the garishly coloured, roughly carved faces, then he would turn the television on or the radio, go to places out of their reach: the rabbit hutches by the compost heap, the earth closet in the yard at the back — it housed fly-demons and photographs of Baltic flatfish that did nobody any harm. When twilight fell with the smell of meadows and blue shadows, the things in the house seemed to conspire against Kurt’s travels and to go back; clay figures, a spatula for flatbread, crowns of bird feathers went back to the Cayapa Indians in Ecuador, copper bowls and blowpipes with curare-tipped arrows back to the Amazon, straight into the murmuring of a tribe planning a hunt. Christian had brought a biochemistry textbook with him, but in the house it became ineffective, his interest died away with the hours that he heard the voices from the colourful lips. The house, the summer in the Elbe Sandstone Hills, carried him away from the events of the previous months; he drifted away from them like a boat and they remained on the shore. Kurt seemed to be there when he went up into the loft, rummaged round in the boxes that stood there, dry and dusty among fragilely balancing stacks of junk. He could hear Kurt commentating on the rolls of film on the shelves: rain dance of the Crao Indians, 16 mm camera. Stories of travels in a folding canoe on Norwegian fjords, long before the war. Adventures hunting in the polar sea. In his mind’s eye Christian could see Kurt’s gnarled hands, his sparse gestures accompanying the stories in the smoke of the garden fire and cigars, he could see Ina, who had embarrassed Fabian and himself with her daring summer dresses, made in the Harmony Salon workshop, Muriel with her eyes closed, Meno poking the fire.

After a few days Christian stopped shaving. Lene said nothing about the light-brown woolly tufts on his cheeks, the brigand’s moustache, the stubbly hair gradually turning shaggy again. A week later the others arrived: Reina with a rucksack and a case full of cosmetics that made Christian laugh, at which she recoiled; but perhaps it was his unkempt hair that had startled her and not the washbasin he handed her, nor the earth closet he pointed out in the yard. Siegbert and Falk immediately started fooling around, both grabbed masks that immediately started emitting jungle roars; Pepi came jumping up at them, yapping angrily, Verena squealed, she was frightened of dogs.

The days blurred at the edges, turned into time. The sun cut up across the sky over the mountains. The tips of the bracken flushed red, the hollows were haunted by misty ghosts until the August heat drove them away. Cocks crowed from the village but Christian was awake before them and listened to the breathing of the others, who slept more soundly than he, even though it was hot on the air beds and the air in the room, unmoving despite the wide-open windows, was stifling. He looked at the girls, sleeping there before him, Verena in her nightdress despite the heat, Reina stripped to the waist, she was lying on her front, the sheet had slipped down to her waist. Then he got up and went out, the alarm clock said four, ten past four; Pepi wearily raised his head when Christian went past his kennel, decided he could nudge him with his nose and wag his tail: Bit early for food, he seemed to be trying to say as the meat flopped into his bowl, but OK, since it’s you. Christian filled the bucket Kurt had left by the water tank, washed himself, pouring the water over his naked body; that was what Kurt did, what Meno did and what he had done for as long as he could remember. In the winter it was an icy whiplash, tearing his tiredness apart; now the water was lukewarm and smelt of cress. He warmed it up for the girls with an immersion coil.

Meno came, bringing provisions, and settled in his old room in the attic, where, on a desk made of bare planks, there was a Fortuna typewriter, clunky as a Konsum cash register, surrounded by phials of liquid ammonia, a microscope, a bowl with ‘Carlsbad Insect Needles’, entomologist’s collecting jars: this was where he retired to when he was free and wanted to do his own work. His birthday wish had been for quiet and company, so Verena and Reina took him some flowers as a late present: the eighth of the eighth had disappeared somewhere in the far blue yonder down the Elbe. Christian waved away questions about the pre-military training camp and the possibility of being expelled from school. They were drifting. Spreading out their arms they drifted on the compressed light glazing the hills and only disappearing in the gorges. After they’d breakfasted Meno said, ‘You must be both plant and animal. Be alert, keep your ears and eyes open. A body has boundaries but they will dissolve if you wait and trust.’ They went for walks early in the morning. The Falkenstein was obscured by haze. The jagged Schrammstein cliffs were still dark as lead, beyond them rose the Grosser Winterberg then, to one side in the distance, the regular cone of the Rosenberg: Rů žová hora, Meno murmured; that was already in Bohemian Switzerland. Leaning over the rocks, they looked down at the curve of the Elbe below Schandau. In those early hours the river seemed to have to expand, at the bend it was wrinkled, bright as a newly minted coin in the middle alone; barges engraved lines on it. Verena and Falk were each trying to outdo the other in finding names for the varying shades: liquorice, pitchblende, mocha, chemist’s-bottle brown, with a shimmer of oil and splodges of purple when the sun had risen a little higher. Once, from the Postelwitz bank, they saw dead fish floating down the river, so many it looked as if the Elbe had been paved with metal bars. With a stick Meno pulled a few over, they were roach, unnaturally large. ‘Cadmium.’ They flaked to pieces when Meno pushed them back into the current. The girls turned away.

The clefts were fern-dark and full of a stench that only the midday heat would disperse. The cliffs were mossy, covered in brown iron stains and yellow patches of sulphur, as slimy as a toad’s skin. Sometimes Meno’s ‘Careful!’ came too late and Christian, who wanted to show off a bit to the others, watched in alarm as the scree tumbled down into the gorge. They didn’t take marked routes but followed Meno, who walked in front, silent and avoiding tourist paths and popular viewpoints: the Bastei, from where one could see far out over the countryside, the fields dotted around, the plain with its wide-open spaces in which the jagged-backed table mountains — Königstein, Lilienstein — seemed to be like prehistoric animals resting. At first they couldn’t manage more than ten to fifteen kilometres a day, came home too exhausted to follow Meno’s explanations. He was different here, no longer the calm, pipe-smoking publisher’s editor from the House with a Thousand Eyes who listened to music with Niklas and Richard in the evening, went to talks in the Urania group, gossiped about literature with Josef Redlich or Judith Schevola. This was where he had grown up, where he once more assumed the swift, sinewy gait of the mountain-dweller, the keen senses that Christian admired: there were the tracks of a pine marten that Meno was puzzled no one else had noticed; here the remains of a pine cone but they couldn’t tell which animal had nibbled at it; strange noises came from a tree plantation, outside which they waited, with ants crawling all over them, so long it was like torture: in the twilight a bird, black with a bright-red crown, was settling on a branch, a black woodpecker that no one, apart from Meno, had seen before.

After a week even the pale-skinned Reina was brown. They now managed to keep up with Meno without collapsing, half dead, onto their air beds in the evening. Lene did the cooking, the girls the shopping, the boys chopped wood for the winter. Ravenous, they fell on the Transylvanian dishes with the strange-sounding names like wild animals. In the evening Meno went out alone or typed on his Fortuna in his room; they stayed close to the house, just once Reina and Christian went back into the woods at twilight. They took Pepi with them and torches.

‘The way you toss your hair back, it’s so affected,’ she said, imitating him to his annoyance.

‘I’m not doing it out of vanity but because the quiff irritates me. I don’t like it when it falls down over my forehead.’

‘Then cut it off.’

‘So my hair all sticks up.’

‘It does that already. Doesn’t look bad at all. I’d leave it, if I were you.’

‘Why?’

‘Verena likes it better too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Do you really not like being called “Montecristo”?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘But it sounds so serious when I say “Christian”. And when it sounds so serious I can’t help laughing and I don’t really want to do that. — Have you heard whether you’ve got a place at Leipzig yet?’

‘No. What about you?’

‘I don’t know whether chemistry’s right for me,’ Reina said after some hesitation.

‘But you like it so much. Frank thinks very highly of you. You’re the best in chemistry, by a long chalk. It annoyed me.’

‘Really? Well, I think that’s great.’ Reina laughed, exuberantly kicking away a pine cone. ‘You’re so ambitious and always studying … do you know what they said about you?’

‘No. But I’m sure you’re going to enlighten me.’

‘Svetlana says you’ve got a screw loose. Verena thought the way you shut yourself off was a kind of immature reaction, compensation for some family traumas or other …’

‘I thought she wanted to be an art historian, not a shrink.’

‘Today Verena wants to be this, tomorrow something else. That tender butterfly with dark brown eyes. She should be glad you got her Siegbert out of trouble.’

Christian ignored that. ‘And you? What did you think?’ He gave Reina a suspicious look.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘That’s why I’m asking.’

‘I thought you were afraid of girls. You really ought to see yourself when you’re talking to a girl. Always half turned away, always in a defensive posture. I thought … you were gay. That was my first reaction. Then I thought: I wish I could be as disciplined as that.’

‘Gay, you said?’

‘You asked me for my honest opinion. Anyway, my brother’s gay. A very nice guy, I think you’d get on well together.’

‘Hey, are you trying to pair me off?’ A smell of dry wood, sweet woodruff, if the heat continues, Meno had said, we’ll have an infestation of bark beetles. Fireflies drifted ghostlike across the path. Pepi came back.

‘No one’s ever given me a flower.’

‘Not even for your birthday?’ Christian asked sceptically.

‘We don’t celebrate them at home. My father says, why should I congratulate you just because you’re a year older? If anything, we should be congratulating each other. And if you’re happy to be here you should be the one giving us a present.’

‘Sounds logical,’ he said, teasing.

‘In that case I’d rather have unlogical parents. — What will you do if you don’t get a place at university?’

‘I’ll go to the hospital, work as a nursing auxiliary. You can apply every year, eventually it’ll work out.’

‘Christian … What exactly happened at the camp? Will you tell me?’

‘Why d’you want to know?’ he replied coldly.

‘There’s too many rumours about it and that bothers me.’

Now she might well be thinking: Christian the hero. But he felt nothing when he thought back to the training camp. He saw Siegbert and Corporal Hantsch, his father’s expression of despair; he heard himself reply to the committee of inquiry. Mechanical, lying answers. The fear of being expelled. Fear of something worse: what did one know? Barbara had feared the worst, talked about being arrested, going to prison. Barred from going to university: nothing had been decided yet, it wasn’t over and done with. Reina walked along beside him, meditatively twisting and turning a twig. Fahner came to mind, and Falk, the way he’d gone down the stairs in the administration block.

‘Perhaps later,’ he equivocated. ‘What d’you want to do, if not chemistry?’

‘Dunno. Perhaps I’ll do it after all. Or medicine. But for that I’d need a better average grade. Perhaps I could do something in foreign trade, I’d be interested in that as well. — Does your father talk to you about that kind of thing? What you want to be and what you have to do to get there?’

‘All the time. He even checks my homework. He rewrote an essay for my brother because he hadn’t formulated things cautiously enough.’

‘My father wouldn’t give a tuppenny fart for all that. My parents couldn’t care less what my brother and I do or don’t do.’

‘You poor thing. I feel so sorry for you.’ All at once he felt the need to mock; perhaps she was getting too close to him, the others might already be talking, would exchange meaningful glances when they got back.

‘Not half as sorry as I feel for myself.’ Reina laughed merrily, suddenly took his hand and he was too late withdrawing it.

Was this it, then? Was this what first love was like? A profound, quivering emotion turning his whole world upside down such as he’d read about in Turgenev? Reina his Juliet and he a Romeo out of his mind with passion? — When he looked inside himself he was disappointed. This wasn’t what he’d imagined. Reina had simply taken his hand without asking. (What would his response have been if she had asked? One of his snubs, probably.) And now they were, as the saying was, to go with each other. (What did you actually do when you ‘went’ with someone? He couldn’t imagine it as anything but boring.) Reina was to be the woman with whom he’d be his whole life long, have children? Children: from the pure chance that Reina and he were in the same class, that she was here now and had plucked up the courage to take his hand. And that was to lead to something as irrevocable as children … And what if Verena had taken his hand? (But she hadn’t, which meant that her children would have Siegbert’s solitary-seafareresque figure, the bright eyes of Corto Maltese, and perhaps also a cruelty before which Verena would shrink back in trepidation.) And, anyway, what was it about love — had he not been afraid of it, did it not keep you away from your studies, turn men who could have been great scientists into narrow-minded, sofa-bellied home birds?

He didn’t mention Reina’s gesture. He decided it hadn’t happened. Reina didn’t remind him.

Mosses stayed cool in the hollows. Giant hogweed appeared, raising its threateningly thorny bell-tiers, Falk made a bow. Meandering conversation, banter about Reina, who had fallen silent and kept away from Christian. Siegbert was wearing frayed home-made togs, more and more, Christian thought, resembling a sailor stranded on some foreign shore for whom homelessness, banishment, a war was over.

‘Shall we be friends, Christian?’ he asked one evening. Meno and Falk had both gone their own ways, the girls were watching TV with Lene. ‘You and me, both at sea, that would be great. Me as an officer, you as ship’s doctor. The two of us. As blood brothers.’

‘And Verena?’

‘Women on board is bad luck stored, the old sea captains used to say.’

‘Then there’s nothing between you, between Verena and you?’

‘Who says there is something between us?’

‘Oh, come on, we’re not blind.’

‘You saved my skin. I’ll never forget that. If ever you want or need something — you can count on me.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart and hope to die. — Can I say something else?’ Siegbert seemed embarrassed. Christian waited, unsure what was to come. ‘I don’t know what’s going on between Reina and you —’

‘Nothing at all,’ Christian said brusquely.

They watched timber being stacked in the Grosser Zschand valley. At twilight they went to the Affensteine to observe the pair of eagle owls that were still nesting in the cliffs there. They took a short cut to the Nasser Grund, a damp valley where the signposts were in disrepair and fallen trees blocked the gorge. At a bend in the path there was a crow that didn’t fly off when they went past it, only a few metres away. Christian felt frightened of the animal. Afterwards Meno, laughing and shaking his head, told them it must have been a sorcerer, for he’d never before seen a bird that could turn its head so slowly, like a human being. To observe! The animal’s eyes had been full of malice as well. — She had no idea zoologists, scientists with a materialist view of the world, were superstitious: Verena’s surprise was expressed without irony. — There were still certain matters; no gynaecologist, for example, knew what seemed the most simple thing: why a birth came about, Meno replied after a while.

Spiders hunted moths. Ground beetles, wasps, assassin bugs, ants pursued insects. Bats snatched at twitching life. Tachinid flies laid their eggs in caterpillars. Ichneumon flies drilled thinner-than-thin ovipositors into the soft, protein-rich bodies, laid their eggs. Meno explained: a bottling plant, for apple or gooseberry juice for example, the automatic out-and-in movement: thus they pumped their eggs into the hapless caterpillar, which became a walking placenta and was eaten away from inside by the maggots. The pupae of braconid wasps were stuck like grains of rice to their future food, ground beetles, gleaming metallic black, dragged their prey into the darkness. — Never pick up a hairy caterpillar, Meno warned them. Verena said she didn’t want to move to the coast.

The larvae of some kinds of caterpillar had up to 600,000 stinging hairs between their bristles; they broke off, causing allergies, rashes, asthma. Reina coughed, Falk scratched himself. The oak processionary moth made caterpillar nests; Meno showed them the crackling, glittering shape made of cast-off skins, held his fingers up in the air, there was no wind. The wind blew the stinging hairs away, he told them, they could irritate the skin for years. Gypsy moth caterpillars were like extra-terrestrial warriors: black, with poppy-seed dots and red warty bumps (a forest of spears, darning mushrooms full of tiny splintered lances) commanded by a yellow head. Burnet moths flew, showing their red petticoats. They learnt how to distinguish fritillaries from tortoiseshells, ringlets from graylings: camouflage brown drew doors on the beeches.

Reina took the salt down from the shelf; Christian saw that her armpits had been shaved.

‘Does God exist, what d’you think?’

‘Christian wants to be a great research scientist, but he starts out with God,’ said Falk, still high from singing along, they’d been listening to Hans Albers records; ‘La Paloma’ had twisted the summer out of shape, homesickness and blue eyes had softened into musical pasta dough swirling round the full moon. ‘I’ve got another idea. Just imagine that at the end of the war Hiddensee — the whole of the island — had been made into a prison camp. Around five million prisoners. They’d have crapped in the Baltic every morning. That would’ve meant the Baltic’d be a sewage farm now and you could walk across it to Denmark.’

‘Why bother with a sewage farm, you can get to Denmark on the water just as well.’ Reina tapped her forehead at Falk. ‘Just imagine you and Heike got married. All you’d have would be latchkey children.’

‘A sewage farm becomes firm in the sun,’ Falk said, unimpressed.

‘And you think they wouldn’t arrest you while you were crossing your firm sewage farm?’

‘You’ve not got the point, Siggi. There wouldn’t be any border patrols with the stench. No one could stand it.’

‘I believe in him.’ Verena was sitting with her legs drawn up, staring at the ground. ‘We get born and we live — but what’s the point if God doesn’t exist?’

‘God rhymes with clod.’ Siegbert twisted his lips contemptuously. ‘And my mother used to say OhGodohGod when I’d done something wrong. OhGodohGod, leave me in peace with your God-squad twaddle.’

‘Red Eagle would say that God is an invention of the imperialists to stultify the people. How does it go? Religion is opium for the people. — What do you say to that, Herr Rohde?’

Meno, who had listened to the discussion in silence, glanced at Reina, shook his head. ‘I’m going out for a bit. I’ll take Pepi with me.’

‘Religion is opium for the people,’ Christian repeated after Meno had left, ‘how do they know that, actually?’

‘They spent a long time thinking about these things and they were a bit cleverer than you,’ Reina sneered.

‘Other philosophers thought about these things long before Marx and Lenin, and perhaps they were greater than Marx and Lenin,’ Christian replied in irritation.

‘Funny that you never dare to come out with things like that in class. Only to us. But when Red Eagle or Schnürchel are there you chicken out.’

‘And you — you don’t chicken out?’

‘Why are you suggesting they’re teaching us nonsense?’

‘Because —’ Christian jumped up and walked up and down excitedly. ‘Because they’re lying to us! Only Marx, Engels and Lenin are right, all the others are idiots … And their slogans? All men equal? Then all philosophers must be equal and therefore at least as smart as those three,’ he concluded with a malicious smile.

‘Sure people are equal,’ Siegbert bellowed, ‘all men’ve got a dick and all women’ve got a pussy.’

‘Hold on a minute — there’s transsexuals and hermaphrodites as well,’ Falk chortled.

‘Do you have to drag everything in the mud? You’re just like little children, can’t take anything seriously.’ Christian was still speaking calmly. ‘You say you’re my friend, Siegbert, but your language is … tasteless. Cheap and disgusting. How can you sink so low?’

Now Siegbert stood up as well. ‘Tasteless … disgusting … how can you sink so low?’ he mocked. ‘You’re in for a big surprise, my friend, when you see how things are outside. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth. But not everyone’s had one of those to suck, mon cher. You’re pretty snooty for someone who wants to be a doctor, I think someone needed to tell you that.’

For hours Christian blundered about in the woods, thinking of Reina’s armpit.

Reina seemed to have been looking for him, for she came to meet him as he returned to the house by a roundabout way.

‘Why did you contradict me? Is that what you really think?’ he asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘And why did you speak up for Verena after the class test? You know it was all lies, that about her period and the rest.’

‘Christian: just because individuals don’t behave as they ought doesn’t mean the whole idea’s bad. Why should I say Verena’s lying? Schnürchel’s a bootlicker, however much of a communist he is.’

‘You like living in this country?’

‘You don’t?’

Now things were getting dangerous. Christian surveyed Reina with an alert, suspicious look, mumbled something she could take for agreement.

‘This country allows you to go to school and university for free, the health service is free, isn’t that something? Don’t you think we should give something back?’

‘You sound like Fahner, Reina.’

‘It doesn’t have to be wrong just because Fahner says it.’

Christian snorted. ‘Your free health service crams old people in retirement homes, your noble state gives those who built it up a pension that’s barely enough to keep body and soul together.’

‘How d’you know that? Where did you get that information from?’

‘Where from, where from!’ Christian exclaimed, furious at Reina’s slow-wittedness, furious at himself for getting so worked up, for opening up like this. ‘From my grandparents, for example. And from my father.’

‘He has his subjective point of view. Other doctors are of a different opinion.’

‘So you say.’

‘No. I know. My uncle’s a doctor too and he’s not one of those who only see the negative side or are only in it to earn money.’

‘What are you suggesting about my father!’ Christian cried angrily, waving his hand as if he were trying to mow down whole swathes of grass. ‘Oh, forget it. — Do you think it’s right that boys have to spend three years in the army?’

‘They don’t have to. Eighteen months is what they have to do, anything beyond that is voluntary.’

Christian dropped his arms. He couldn’t believe Reina really was so naive. ‘Fahner “suggested” we think about volunteering for the three years — the file with our assessments and what we want to go on to study was very visible on his desk. And they call it volunteering!’

‘The American soldiers have to go to Vietnam. They have to kill people for the interests of the ruling classes, of capitalism. Or do you think they’re there for humanitarian reasons? And what about the Falklands War?’

‘The Russians have to go to Afghanistan. That’s just as much an invasion. And they have to kill people there too. Can you tell me what business the powerful Soviet Union has in poor Afghanistan?’

‘That’s Western propaganda. I don’t believe that’s correct. You’ve got it from West German radio, that’s just imperialist propaganda.’

‘So, in your opinion, what are the Russians doing in Afghanistan?’

‘Responding to a request from the government, for help against the counter-revolution.’

‘Of course. Just as in ’68 in Czechoslovakia. They also asked the Russians for help. Funny that the population wasn’t of the same opinion.’

‘That’s Western propaganda again. The people cheered the Soviet soldiers, we saw that on TV. Christian, you really ought to think about what you’re saying.’

It didn’t sound threatening, just puzzled, but it brought him back down to earth at once. But he was interested in the topic, he couldn’t leave it just like that; there was also the urge to be right, so he changed the subject. ‘You told me your brother’s homosexual. He doesn’t have any problems?’

‘My father threw him out. And for Mother he doesn’t exist any more. She says she never had a son. Otherwise — not as far as I know.’

‘There used to be a law according to which your brother would have had to go to prison. Just because of his nature. He can’t help it.’

‘The Yanks have racial discrimination. Anyway, that law was abolished. — And my brother’s going into the army for three years.’

‘Because he believes in it?’ Christian asked dubiously.

‘What are you suggesting?’

He had to laugh. ‘It wasn’t meant as a suggestive remark.’

‘I’d wait for you,’ Reina said.

Turgenev’s pounding heart after all; he knew he’d blushed and stuck to the dim light of the path; Reina’s armpits, her body the sheet had slipped off, how simple it would be to touch her now, to seek the lips of her wry, freckled face, to stammer the usual things, but he resisted: her fingers, stroking the pus-capped bumps of his acne, would say: a nasty rash; a shudder of nausea, I don’t want to catch acne, then, out of consideration for him, she’d murmur something soothing, yet still feel nauseated: a lead balloon the whole thing; what would it be like to sleep with Reina, he longed for it, feared it.

‘Would you stick to your convictions whatever happened?’

‘I’d try to,’ Reina replied after a while, without looking at him; the distance between them was more than her outstretched arm; his hand would have had to do its bit.

‘Even if you were blackmailed or tortured?’

‘If I say yes, you’ll think I’m bragging or overestimating what I’m capable of resisting. Who can know that? — Do we have to talk about this?’ Reina was getting irritated, he could tell from her voice and yet he continued to provoke her, now because it gave him a certain pleasure. ‘And if they didn’t torture you but someone you love?’

Reina took a deep breath. ‘Who should torture you?’

‘Beware of Reina,’ Verena said one evening, ‘I think she’s one of them. Be careful about what you say.’

A magnetic needle swinging round the compass, indecisive fluttering, floundering movements; Verena seemed out of reach, she now openly held hands with Siegbert, and Christian could stare at the musical-instrument brown of her hair for so long that he noticed streaks of sweat and a powder of dandruff on the shoulders of the dark velour pullovers she wore; he could bear her looking at him without feeling he immediately had to make a contribution to the ongoing discussion or conceal the directness of this exchange of looks with some fidgety gesture — clenching his fists, scratching his head — firmly push everything away from him. Suddenly the magnetic needle had come to a halt.

Beware of Reina.

But now he had to be where she was; he hated it when she lost her balance going downhill and Siegbert or Falk grasped her flailing hand; when they had a rest he stared at the down on the nape of her neck, that vulnerable hair bent in bright whorls that exuded a dangerous attraction: several times already he’d stuck out his finger because there was a mosquito on them or he needed to check something, he also thought that the scar must hurt and the pain would go away if he touched it. He remembered in time that Falk was keeping an eye on his movement and it was only a matter of seconds before the conversation would die away and Reina sit there, mortified; in the evenings he wished she were still on the mattress next to him and he could decide where she should feel the shudder of his first kiss — but she’d moved to a different place well away from him. On her back, the side of her shoulder, the spot with the whorls of hair (too predictable, he told himself, perhaps she’d have forgotten later on when he asked her: Where was my first kiss, do you remember? or another boy had already kissed her there, immediately he assumed that must be the case, probably on the scar, that’s what happened in pirate films — he didn’t even know whether he’d be Reina’s first boyfriend; it was unlikely, there must have been crushes in her earlier years at school; did she actually have a boyfriend? he decided to give him a good thrashing, the swine); perhaps on the scar after all or, better still, a point on the line the sheet had made, where her back merged with her pelvis; her earlobe (the right or the left? both were well perfused), her navel (at the thought of that he gave a soft cry of pleasure: just before the kiss her stomach would draw back as if electrified, as if an ice cube had been dropped on it, would slowly come up again, as when you breathed out, and he would hold his lips precisely over that rising movement so that her navel would touch his lips, not the other way round), her elbow (unusual, but dry, the way he imagined model-railway enthusiasts kissed), the tip of her nose (but she wasn’t a cat after all), or better still her ring-toe, the one next to the little toe (no one ever placed a kiss there, but would she realize that? perhaps that was too far-fetched, too complicated?), her breasts (sure, where else? he went on walks feverishly visualizing the colour of her nipples, whether they were pink or light brown like milky coffee, whether he could nibble at them delicately without hurting her, whether they would respond to his tongue, his lips, possibly even his nostril — that when he snuffled particularly lasciviously), or the back of her knee?

No.

He would kiss her armpit. Of course there was always her mouth as well but that was out of the question for his first kiss, he’d go there later. His first kiss, he decided, would be on her armpit, that shaven, sweating, bread-roll-white dove-bellied cove under her left arm.

Kurt didn’t have a telephone, invitations came to him by post; Lene didn’t have one either; Christian went into the town to ring Barbara. He didn’t want to worry Anne and he could well imagine what Richard would say. As he dialled the number, he could see the dilapidated balcony of the Italian House in his mind’s eye, the staircase windows with the dame’s violets he and Meno had admired during the winter, the night of the birthday party. It was Friday, Ina would be out; it would have disturbed him very much if she’d answered. Barbara often came home earlier on Fridays, she’d probably be in the kitchen, cooking. She answered. He told her about Reina.

‘And you’re asking whether you should fall in love with the girl? Tell me, have you gone soft in the head? Now you just listen to me. Do you think we were interested in politics when we were your age? Do you think Ina gives a damn about the politics of whoever’s her latest?’

Perhaps she ought to, Christian thought.

‘But that’s something you get from your father. Just between you and me, Christian, your father’s a bit … well, how shall I put it? Inhibited? Recently we were talking … oh, but now I remember it’s something you’re not to know about. Enoeff. You need a girlfriend, a boy of your age without one, if I were your mother I’d be wondering. — Why haven’t you rung Anne?’

‘I don’t want her to worry, Aunt Barbara. Please don’t say anything to her.’

‘No, enoeff. Silent as the grave, that’s me. You know how a girl kisses and what else comes after … Red roses, sure, etc. etc. — all that has nothing to do with politics.’ Barbara sighed and in his mind’s eye he could see her splayed fingers with all the rings, he heard her bangles clunk against the receiver. ‘You’re only young once.’

Meno warned him. Christian had never seen his uncle so exasperated. He would have liked to talk to him about Hanna but no one in the family seemed ever to have asked why Meno’s marriage had failed.

‘If she informs on you? — From what you’ve told me you should be prepared for that.’

‘You really think she’d inform on me —’

‘Even though she’s in love with you, you mean? That kind of romantic stuff is Barbara’s cup of tea, not yours, Christian. What do you know about love? What do you know about what’s possible?’ Christian felt hurt; Meno seemed to sense it, he said, ‘They kiss you and they betray you. Both in the same breath. It doesn’t have to be like that, but sometimes it is and you can’t take any more risks. Perhaps Reina’s an exception. But only perhaps. What if you try it out, just to see, and walk straight into the trap?’

‘I like her very much … The way she walks, the way she moves and …’ Christian hesitated, watching his uncle out of the corner of his eye. ‘… her armpit,’ he concluded with a trusting smile. Meno burst out laughing. Christian felt as if a machete were cutting apart the flesh between his forefinger and middle finger.

‘Her armpit? And you call that love? That’s just sexual. It’s about time you started to learn that in this country you can’t behave like a little child.’

‘Now you sound like Father,’ Christian retorted indignantly. ‘Just because you and Hanna —’

‘Don’t talk about Hanna.’

Christian was sorry but he refused to apologize, he felt hurt.

‘We want the best for you, especially your father, but he won’t be able to help you any more if something else like the training-camp business should happen. If you let Reina know what you really think and she tells others … She doesn’t even have to do it with malicious intent. Perhaps just out of pride in you, out of naivety, or simply to get over an awkward pause in the conversation … Lots of things happen out of boredom. Do you want to risk your future for this girl? Have you absolute trust in Reina? Do you really know her that well, how she will react, what you mean to her? Does she know herself?’

‘So in your opinion I have to make a dossier on a girl before I can fall in love with her?’

‘That’s the way things are,’ Meno said coldly. ‘I understand your feelings better than you perhaps think. No, this country’s not the place to be young. I wouldn’t be talking to you like this if I didn’t know someone who’d gone through what I’m warning you against.’

‘Who was it?’

Meno prevaricated. ‘Later perhaps.’

‘No, now,’ Christian insisted.

‘Your grandfather Kurt,’ Meno said after a long hesitation.

‘Oma informed on him?’

Meno shook his head, started to speak then broke off. ‘No, the other way round. It was in the Soviet Union, at a terrible time. He told us children on his seventieth birthday. I don’t want you to talk to anyone about it.’