Tellkamp, Uwe

Time in the end, Quin-quin, time
cannot change things at all.
Time is a curious item.
We live as if it were nothing.
But then all of a sudden
feel nothing else but it:

– a sea green record in the night, the sloshing systole of light washing onto the turntable, Monarch Record, the crêpey, Kaiser-era sound, on the label the gramophone’s long trumpet with the white dog nearby, chasing madly round

Time in the end, Quin-quin, time,

the Marschallin sang in the voice of Margarethe Siems

– red and grey moulded seats in the tram, the humming of the heaters under the window seats interrupted at irregular intervals by a crack as the carriage started to move or braked; Wilhelminen Strasse, where there was a school for blind children and the tram would wait at the zebra crossing until the blind, led by a teacher, had felt their way across the road with their long white canes, something which in my memory always happened in silence at first, then, as the conversations – which were in any case subdued – died away, gradually became louder, the tap-tap of the canes scanning the area in front of their feet, this noise of those bound by affliction, who crossed the road with pale faces, their heads silently cocked to one side, as if listening to something inside, their closed expressions, strangely unrelated to the hands that cleared the path ahead with their canes and so, that is how it felt to me, had some connection to the present, while the faces, or rather: the masks that the faces had become, lived in another space, the tap-tap in the silence of the stopped tram, this noise not only of those bound by affliction, but of those homeward-bound; but the clocks, Muriel

– the Pioneers’ Palace, the paved drive, the fountain in the eerie light of the sparse lamps that were on at this hour, rarely did anyone get on or off here, the old Castle with its jagged, dragon’s outline lay there black and empty [...].

[...]

– three, four . . . I heard the Marschallin’s clock chime

– the tram speeded up before the last rise of the hill that dropped steeply down on the left into Murder Ravine, overgrown with beech trees, and on the right, the road cutting into the hillside, climbed just as steeply to the tower’s furthest extensions, ornately hanging edifices with oriels, roof turrets and balustrades; Lahmann’s sanatorium came into view, the red Soviet star on its gate, guards in soaking mackintoshes in the rain, and, framed by its arcades, the garden with its herms and in the middle Lenin’s block of a head painted with silver silicon paint, to the left the spacious, glass-walled room that was the lounge, and the pump room; much further back the men’s baths, only briefly visible from the tram; now soldiers and officers walked around in the shadow of the buildings, decorated with dolphins and Greek meanders, with bandaged arms and heads, on crutches, and in dressing gowns; the building’s smashed panes and skew-whiff shutters evoked an impression of stiffened sadness

– five, six . . . I heard the Marschallin’s clock chime

– the record, is it Niklas Tietze, who turns the record over with kid gloves, so that it shimmers for a moment in the light of the Advent candles like copper. That is the sleep, I heard whispered, it is the spindle in time, the deep sleep; it wasn’t Niklas whose grand seigneur’s face, its aquiline nose shining from the punch, bent over the veneered record player so that the beginning revolutions were reflected in the glass of a pair of spectacles, and the tone arm lowering in slow-motion and the interweaving lights bouncing off the restlessly undulating Eterna record that mingled with the shadowy wings thrown by the candlelit Christmas carousel onto the ceiling; the white kid gloves seemed to have a life of their own in the red glimmer of the room; not Niklas, but father, crouched down [...].