The Tower: A Novel (26 page)

‘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.