The Tidings of the Trees
Originally published as Die Weiber, Alte Abdeckerei, Die Kunde von den Bäumen by Wolfgang Hilbig, Werke, Erzählungen
© 2010, S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
Translation © 2018 by Isabel Fargo Cole
Two Lines Press
582 Market Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94104
www.twolinespress.com
ISBN 978-1-931883-73-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958708
Cover design by Liliana Lambriev
Cover photo by plainpicture/Folio Images/Peter Gerdehag
Typeset by Jessica Sevey
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This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Other titles by Wolfgang Hilbig available from Two Lines Press
Old Rendering Plant
The Sleep of the Righteous
It’s increasingly rare to meet people who can tell a proper story.
— WALTER BENJAMIN
Contents
Tidings of the Trees
What do I know now, said Waller, of the perplexities that came over me as I tried to write my first stories? Right here I falter: back then I’d never have dared to put it that way! That act of story-writing consisted in an ongoing routine of crossing out words that had found their way to paper with no effort on my part. I seemed to have set them down in some kind of madness—I found whole lines, whole passages filled with words that could have arisen in no other way, all I could accept was the branching framework of the conjunctions—and suddenly it was as though someone, not I, had shone a lamp on them: my words, if I could still read them at all, were the falsest conceivable way to express what I actually wanted to name.
For that matter, I feel I’ve mentioned these phenomena quite often enough by now—or maybe it just seems that way, since I’ve longed to join the legions of writers who think these phenomena worth mentioning—and I’ve described them often enough, defining them now as a failure of my imagination, now as the inability to think abstractly, perhaps, too, as the loss of the reality behind the images: I always meant the same thing, grappling ad nauseam with this pseudo-problem. Yet my preoccupation has done nothing to assure me that I may feel myself to be a writer, sadly not! But lacking actual stories, as often as I could I’ve let this plight stand in for the missing material. Now the whole thing has so exhausted me that in all seriousness I’d need a new biography in order to wriggle out from the rough drafts of my non-authorship. For these drafts have become the only ground on which I can still move. Indeed, I am undermined by groundlessness…indeed, these drafts besiege me like an impenetrable barrier, perhaps imaginary, but encroaching upon me in an unbroken ring: all I can really do is wait until it strangles me.
Or is it that I feel I’m about to be sliced apart? Over my narrow circle there’s a pendulum, sinking lower with each swing, hurtling through the air with a hiss that sounds like: Speak!… Speak! — Or it’s a saw drawing near, rending the atmosphere with a noise that sounds like: Write!… Write!
And I turn circles in my impenetrable, self-created thicket and cry: Out of here! — Trapped in the creations of my self-prophylaxis, I tell myself: Outside is another life! Perhaps a life just waiting to begin. Perhaps even with a different name to offer me. How much easier to extract stories from a different life… how should I explain my own? What should I make of this life, this life moving to and fro, back and forth, up and down the stairs, the streets, the edges, always on the run…life on the move: I’ve made it! In my small sphere, crossed by paths paved with precautions…as if letting me trample my misgivings underfoot…here I’m always on my way, always as if my neck were broken: Oh, how I’ve envied the lives of those who could spend life sitting down. A place to sit, a place to sit! I’d lament, circling my empty chair. When I walked past windows and saw others behind their lit panes—bent over their writing, I imagined, since I took even newspapers for pieces of writing—I believed they must be happy.
And they were, too, or at least they were at peace with their unhappiness! If that was what I wished, I thought, I must never put myself in the awkward position of starting a story with the travails of storytelling. What could be duller, I thought, or more presumptuous, than books about writing books! It might be acceptable, or unavoidable, for tools to produce tools, machines to produce new machines. But when storytelling reconstructs—or, in my case, manufactures—the problems of telling stories, it’s the pinnacle of self-circumscription. To me it seems a total submission to inefficacy…I don’t know. Literature like that is unworthy of interest.
And yet I must come back to the pendulum. It sounds as though I’ve described an old paradigm: that telling a story staves off an execution. As long as you can tell stories, you’ll go on living, says this paradigm…the executioner, fingering the release handle for the guillotine blade, wants to hear the conclusion of the story first. But this conclusion is not the end, it points toward a new story: another reprieve! Or the Good Lord, grasping the lever of the steam whistle at whose blast the heavenly hosts will speed earthward to bathe their swords in blood, waits for John to finish scribbling his book. These fantasies are all well and good, but the fear of that God and executioner is foreign to me. What drives me is the fear of forgetting the stories. I don’t feel threatened, it’s the stories that are threatened: I see a darkness preparing to fall upon them. Write…write, I say to myself, or everything will whirl into forgetfulness. Write so the thread won’t be severed…a thousand stories are too few. So the flow won’t be broken, so the lamps over the desks won’t go out. Write, or you’ll be without a past, without a future, nothing but a will-less plaything of bureaucracy. You’ll lie stored in their databases, retrievable, a calculation, an accounting factor, just part of a sum whose loss was factored in from the beginning… you’ll be cannon fodder.
Indeed, I always had the sense of walking on used-up matter, on burned-out material, on cinders, on ash, on slag. Forgetfulness covered the earth and smothered the life that still stirred within it—if it still stirred—ceaseless waves of oblivion slid layer by layer over the ground: the dead present was digested and voided until it was nothing but history. Yes, I was walking on the true substance of history: dry, sandy material, forever lifeless, that whirled here and there with the fickleness of all the winds and settled gray or ruddy on all that lay within its diffuse motion’s sphere…Waller paused for a moment, seeming to ruminate, then suddenly uttered a bleat of laughter.
What put me on that train of thought, you ask? It only seems to be a digression; I suddenly recalled that I actually did buy a writing desk. The desk, a battered and unsightly thing, was carted past my window one day on the street down which the east wind whistled into town—the wind that bore the worst heat in summer—carrying in the salty, ruddy dust that would later cover that desk’s top. The dust was very visible, because the top was black. The desk was being taken to the ash fields, not far away; on an impulse I ran down and paid ten marks for the thing, an above-average sum, more symbolic than anything, but in return the man helped me carry it up the stairs. Up in my apartment, with the help of some bricks, I tried to stabilize the piece of furniture in a horizontal position, which barely succeeded, but now I actually did have a desk.
Weeks and months followed in which the desk tormented me with the demand to be used as such: it was a place from which no one chased me away, whereas the kitchen table had had precisely that agreeable property. Now I sat at the desk and waited for summer, behind me the damp cell of my poorly ventilated, barely heatable room,
before me the fog-smeared window; there I hunched, bundled in cardigans and heavy tracksuits, in the baffled shunting of tenacious nights and half-awake days…and when summer came at last and I could open the window a crack, corrosive dust swiftly covered the desktop, settled in my eyes with every move, crunched between my teeth, and clung in the corners of my mouth. It was brought by the hot continental air, and that air carried the distorted and arrhythmic clamor of bells; and the ash had a dry, sour taste I took to be the taste of death. The dust dimmed my empty pages’ whiteness on the desk; the one sentence I’d completed in that half year threatened to vanish beneath the ash…then I saw that most of my scraps of paper already bore that sentence, and I was holding the pen, about to set down the same sentence amid the grains of dust again; how long had I paused over the thought that no next sentence would flow from my pen tip? For half a year now I’d been frozen in this clichéd situation! I realized I’d spent days pondering the hunched figure I presented to the public: a figure bent out of shape from sitting on my chairs, bent with the strain of squeezing a thought from my head…wobbling on top, the thought in that head, askew between the shoulders, as though I’d been able to approach this obstructive desk only by twists and turns, half attacking, half evading…and these torsions seemed to drill my chair obliquely into a swamp beneath me. Again a spume of ash pelted through the window, the vapors of the night overwhelmed the desk like a disabled boat, a boat in heavy seas, slipping down an endless groundswell, and I could see it only in my contortions…no wonder I was a squinting monstrosity by the time I finally fled my desk.
I had no place to sit…the blankness of my pages always had the same preposterous reasons. Meanwhile I searched for different explanations…I tried to picture a future reader for my output so as to take my cues from him. My themes were utterly foreign to him, indeed the whole environment I conjured up before his eyes could only seem abstruse and outlandish, as though I sought to transport him to a world that, though familiar to him from earlier times, now seemed thrust to the margins, so that no previously valid form of description could be used for it…I wrote for an utterly impossible reader, for one reader alone, and that reader was myself.
The citizens who peopled my streets—if it was even streets I was trying to describe—were dead, vacant figures, or reflections mysteriously left behind in the glass of the shop windows after the original images had long since moved on, and underneath these specters’ cold faces was a void; the buildings that lined my streets were mere façades behind which the gray drizzle of a broken film streamed; and at some point the streets themselves broke off for no reason… It was impossible to forget that I was writing about things I’d already lost sight of. — I’m writing about things that are vanishing, I told myself, but whenever I set out to do so, I produce nothing but declarations of that loss… I fail to snatch those vanished things back into the light. If I try to picture a tree, for instance, it’s as though I’ve never seen a tree in my life…it doesn’t seem possible to describe a tree, sadly not! If I want to put a tree to paper, I’ll have to devise a story in which a tree crops up quite naturally, I said to myself.
And I rushed outside to memorize a tree…for all time, if I can, I want to have it present, for at least one of all the stories that remain to be told, for a tree-lined lane down which I want to wander darkly someday, in one paragraph at least amid the maze of writing may the word tree one day resound! — Yet dusk was falling, and my eyes, which were weary and which I didn’t trust, could no longer make out the precise… the true nature of a tree. As always on such evenings, I recalled a road outside town that my childhood friends and I had often taken to a village several miles away, trying—a chief pleasure of those early years—to outdo each other by inventing improbable and fantastic tales. At some point we seemed to notice that the realm of the garbage dumps, which covered a vast expanse outside town, had encroached threateningly upon the road. From then on we avoided it, for the evil smells of the garbage heaps, often in clouds of smoke, constantly drifted in a broad front across the road. — Haunted by the mania that in the hours left until morning I must set down a tree in writing, I raced through the commencing night: cherry trees had lined that road, but clearly they were there no longer! For years I’d taken no notice: at some point the trees had vanished from our minds, but there must have been a time when we took their existence for granted. We called that road the cherry lane…it was that childhood time when a name so plain and clear was still possible. What ingenuity we’ve lost since then…if we walked down that road now, even if those cherry trees still lined it, we wouldn’t be able to think of the name for it.
It’s striking, said Waller, that I just used the word we. One might ask, quite rightly, what caused me to do so. — For a moment he broke off and seemed to turn inward.
Of course…he continued at last. In my childhood and youth I did have certain companions to share my experiences with…it’s strange how quickly I lost sight of them, how they vanished without a trace. It seems they vanished even before the country closed its borders; but that might be a story for another time. — Now, using this we, I feel it’s they, the vanished, who could add something to my image of the trees…and cast a shadow into my vanished image of the trees. — In the vast expanses behind town that I’ve referred to as the garbage dumps, I always sensed I might stumble across memories of my former friends. Across some sign of them, or across their actual forms… Nonsense, all I could find there now were their ghosts. Surely that was one reason why I frequented the area…every time I came from the fields behind the apprenticeship workshop—a factory where we’d spent three years of our youth learning some so-called trade—and set foot on the road we called the cherry lane, an unpleasant feeling came over me. When I crossed the road I felt awkward, and when I entered the smoke-dark district whose ground consisted chiefly of heaped-up ash, I felt I was being followed and observed: once—the thought embarrassed me—I’d perched in one of the cherry trees to perform an escape the others had pulled off more easily. They had simply vanished across the western border into the other part of the country. I seemed to have been impeded in that step by the mysterious attraction the garbage dumps held for me. — Sometimes, after darkness descended on the area, I expected to be addressed at any moment by a familiar, youthful voice coming faintly out of thin air…from sheer nervousness, or to linger for a moment, I’d urinate at the wayside; scanning the darkness before me, a cherry stump behind me, I’d piss a meticulous semicircle in the ashes at my feet. Crossing this line and looking back as I walked onward, I’d think I saw foggy vapors rise from the place I’d circled with my water, and those vapors took on almost human form, those figures’ spectral silhouettes beckoned, and words came, barely audible: Don’t forget us! —They couldn’t follow me; their souls were bound; I’d nailed them to the imaginary cross of a nonexistent cherry tree.
It was during my apprenticeship that I noticed how the garbage kept encroaching on the cherry lane…a useless road in any case, connecting the town with a village vacated some time ago. Everyone had always known that the village stood atop the coal; now the strip mines had advanced to the front yards, and the hamlet’s demolition had been decreed. I recalled the peal of bells ringing from the village steeple; over the years the chiming had grown fainter and fainter, and in the end the notes sounded wrecked by the time they’d crossed the woods to the cherry lane. The invasion of garbage escalated, the rubbish began to encircle the whole forest, advance guards of dead material set out to carve the woods into separate plots, and one of the incursions of garbage came down the cherry lane: following the depletion of the strip mine that would take the village’s place, the cherry lane would serve as one of the roads for transporting refuse, the mass of which soon called for a new waste heap. — And the air over the expanses of garbage seemed to grow more and more impermeable; the chimes from the church in the village of W. perished in the burning fumes above the ash and fell to earth like poisoned birds.
Now that I
’d remembered the road with the cherry trees, I set out for the area nearly every evening. I began going in pursuit of my memories: even in earlier days the perpetual flight from town had been a sort of ritual for me; as I walked those paths I underwent a visible transformation, the whole thing soon becoming an evening exercise in disappearance. At a certain moment that always recurred at the same spot, I sensed that the distance between the town and myself had grown nearly insurmountable, and I knew I could return to the streets between the houses only at the cost of extreme exhaustion. This moment always came when dusk fell, when the town expired behind me in the afterglow, when the walls and roofs collapsed to a jumble of black crags; and just before everything vanished, a lone water tower loomed from the heap like a strange fungus…or a black fist. Then the sky above me spread wide and seemed to swing up to the east and the north…I seemed to have passed the horizon, with nothing before me now but the plain where the low ruins of sheds or garden shacks cowered, followed by steppes of dry brush from which smoke dispersed in weary eddies, and the woods beyond the cherry lane surged into the night. — Suddenly I’d lost all recollection of town; I was cut off in a way that couldn’t be described in terms of the short distance I had covered. This stretch of road, I told myself, could only really be measured in timescales. It’s not a matter of a mile or two, it’s that I’m ten years…twenty years distant, and over the decades the memory of who I was in that town has escaped me. Returning to town—usually not until dawn—to see a few hunched figures already hurrying to work, I found myself at last in the real world of ghosts; and here I lost hold of the reasons for fleeing town in the evening. — My search for the trees had become a roaming that sufficed in itself…it sufficed to stumble across memories; what I sought was the moment when the things around me sternly recalled how I might have faced them twenty years ago… It seemed that even then I’d had no reply to give them.