The Tower: A Novel by Uwe Tellkamp

Author:Uwe Tellkamp [Tellkamp, Uwe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780241004906
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-11-05T21:00:00+00:00

Interlude: 1984

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

Andropov died.

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

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

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