The Tidings of the Trees Page 2

  For twenty years I’d told myself the same thing: There’s no ground beneath my feet! There’s no place for me, I said over and over, and I sensed how confused these phrases were, running through my head… There’s no place for me to sit, I answered myself, as though recalling a question as to the aim of my roamings, a question I’d asked myself twenty years before.

  Each evening I met up with myself on the bleak fields of refuse, each evening I had a rendezvous with my past…in the ash, as the area was tersely referred to in town: after the war they’d begun to fill in the unproductive strip mines, first with the rubble of the bombed-out town, later with refuse and ash. Truly, here in the ash I am walking on the ground of my memories…

  All that is silenced is rooted in this ground, said Waller to himself, I know all about it…but I also know it won’t break its silence. And upon this ground I breathe the air of doom…

  Doom? It’s the stagnation that was sealed here twenty years ago. It’s as if the same air has covered this terrain for twenty years now…for twenty years the same ghosts have been seen in the gloaming of this plain…I am one of them. The shadow of past things, the tremble of depleted matter weaves in the burned-smelling air. Here’s the flow of what’s been voided, what no longer belongs, what’s substanceless and mixed, and the ash seems to stir with imperceptible gasping. — Soon I lost all my reluctance and let the effluvia of the refuse infiltrate me, the colors of the refuse; I absorbed the smells shed by oxidation and rot. I felt eviscerated, but suddenly I sensed I was pervaded by all the messages this historic ground transmitted to the air. It was like an ore that suddenly began to fill me. Underlying everything, like the basis of all sensations, was the unassailable, saturated sourness of the ash, which was indescribable, and which I soon ceased to perceive because my own smell could no longer be told from the ash smell. And soon I knew this smell was in the blank papers on my desk as well…it couldn’t be captured in words, but it was there in the dust that held the papers in its grasp.

  Returning to town in the early morning light, I seemed to recall that chiming bells had woken me. I looked around; the village of W. had lain to the east. Against the blinding sun the trees loomed like a mirage; before the ash that surged on toward the woods their wispy silhouettes rose like smoke released from the ground. — On my way home I encountered so many trees, mingled with their shadows, that even the cheapest words to describe them eluded me… the cherry lane was no longer to be found.

  And above me I seemed to hear the pendulum again, now like the clapper of a bell; the chimes, reeling brittle and broken through the heat, sounded like: Baum! — The strokes jarred against the hood of daylight under which I hastened, cowering, fearful that someone might see me…the noise was like a hammering on a piece of iron rail hanging from a wire: the garbagemen were giving the signal for their breakfast break. Or perhaps the sounds came from the workshop where I’d once been apprenticed; its grounds began on the far side of the road to W., surrounded by the ruins of coal factories that had loomed from the landscape, unaltered since the air raids…suddenly everyone everywhere seemed to be jangling iron rails and machine parts, the world was finishing the first third of its working day, a day that must have been bliss…but the poetry of this moment escaped me! I fled through the sonic wall of this noise; at home I sank into the stale air behind my desk, helplessly sorting my papers that boasted but a single sentence, fated to have no echo: The cherry lane has vanished.

  In the end the cherry trees, untended, had run wild, and barely bore fruit. They lined up like monstrous cripples along the barely discernible road; the asphalt surface had crumbled, now consisting of a winding strip of black debris, with spurs of forest on the right—underbrush working its way onward—and the ash heaps flooding up from the left. The outermost surges of the ash already washed the roots, and several trunks were singed; on the side toward the road the trees still had dark, leathery leaves, while toward the ash their branches were withered and bare. I imagined that the crooked branches were waving at the onrush of the ash; there was something malignant in the shapes of these trees waiting for their doom; in the evening they were like outlandish monsters whose agonized paralysis might break into a frenzy at any time, and in the morning sun I thought I saw them burning, looming over the road like giant torches, the clamor of the bells and the clang of scrap metal rising above their lurid blaze.

  Sometimes I’d sit on a sturdy branch of one of these trees, as the high perch gave me a good view across the whole desolate grounds and all the way to town; I could see over the wooded ridges until they sank down toward the village of W.…over the treetops I saw the steeple, back when it still stood, sending out the waves of its chiming all around… I had an excellent view across the garbage heaps, and I watched as they grew. This perch in the tree was a place to reflect on myself, on the perpetually shifting connections…the connections between the natural and the unnatural that preoccupied me… and an observation post from which to survey the environs of the stories that rested unwritten within me. My stories were buried in the ground of this swath of land over which I’d taken up my vigil…and the main figure in these stories was I, Waller!

  I saw that figure darting down the labyrinthine paths below like an overcautious animal, first amid the fields and the allotment gardens, searching or on the run, seemingly at random, eyes on the ground yet extremely alert…as though threatened, as though to deceive an observer who, disguised as a scarecrow by heavy black rags, huddled motionless in a tree, gazing across fixedly, perching hour after hour in a cherry tree on the edge of the ash…and in loops and ellipses, in confusingly devised spirals, sometimes in a kind of crabwalk, this form moved toward the center of the garbage dumps. — Sometimes the figure vanished completely, plunging into the underbrush and seeming to hunker down for good, a dark heap of rags…but after quite some time I thought I glimpsed it among the crew responsible for occupational safety and order.

  From my elevated perch I could watch the garbagemen, toward whom, I grudgingly admitted, I had initially nursed hostile feelings. There was something connecting us…reason enough to keep my distance, for I already had all the so-called intimacy I needed: I had to fend off the solicitude of my kinsfolk and my colleagues, their astonishment, their curiosity, and finally their disapproval, the flip side of their concern for me. Apart from that, though, I could do as I pleased; they clung to their concern merely to make a point of keeping their aversion alive. It was the completely logical outcome of living crammed together in our tiny state…and ultimately I behaved the same way: I spent hours following the garbagemen’s activity suspiciously, with inexplicable interest, but also with indistinct fear: everything they did was a mystery to me, and more and more often it seemed to lack all meaning. At first I thought they were looking for clothing: even in the summer heat I saw them swathed in heavy black rags, beneath which their bodies seemed to boil; lobster-red, as if in perpetual rage, their faces blazed forth from the excess of wrappings with which they bolstered and shielded their bodies. Indeed, all those clothes must have come from the garbage on which they lived; and they always wore their whole wardrobe at once, for ownership claims in the ash were ambiguous. Most of the time I could barely make them out, resting like corpulent animals behind hills of junk, squeezed into slim strips of shadow where they barely stood out from the rubbish. They came to life only when a garbage truck crawled up across the wide field. Scarcely had the load poured out onto the plain with a rattle and a roar, scarcely had the empty vehicle begun to trundle off, when they came running from all sides—even before the fountains of ash had settled, and it must have been hot ash, at least in the winter months—to attack the fuming heap with pitchforks and tongs, with shovels and poles; they smoothed it out in a flash, tugging out all the solid objects, which they scrutinized and dragged away. I couldn’t tell what in particular they were looking for; evidently they could use everything… once it looked as if they were hoisting a corpse by its arms and legs, carrying it across the fi
eld to an isolated spot where they seemed to unclothe it with lightning speed: I told myself I was seeing ghosts that day…other ghosts than I saw in the evening. It would have been no surprise: in the blazing noon heat I perceived reality through the film of sweat that poured ceaselessly from my brow; the world’s surface turned into a rippling image in which I saw most things double; and this image dimmed in the vapors my clothes gave off, for I too was shrouded in heavy black wrappings meant to give me the grotesque semblance of a scarecrow.

  It was hard to believe they hadn’t found me out yet. What went through their minds under the constant scrutiny of that strange bird perched over there in the branches, motionless as a strung-up mummy? — After the cherry trees had been felled, I’d found myself a place to sit in one of the cars that accumulated at the edge of the ash. Some nights I fell asleep in one of the wrecks, compelled to rest, exhausted by the thoughts that drew me to the area over and over again but refused to give an intelligible reason…and even more exhausting was the effort to suppress all thought of the outcry that awaited me in the event of my return to town, and to the factory. People would notice me there…the garbagemen didn’t even seem to see me. Woken in the morning by sawing and hammering as they cut up iron pipes or smashed metal apparatuses to pieces of manageable size, I thought it was impossible that they hadn’t taken note of me; when I crawled out from the car’s upholstered interior and stole away, they seemed to demonstratively ignore me. I decided to give them a sign that they’d be forced to answer.

  I thought I could tell that they’d created separate depots: each contained certain materials to put back into circulation, i.e., recycle, such as scrap metal, paper, or empty bottles. Other depots held unsaleable things: these were the property of the garbagemen, and all manner of worthless junk was allotted to these collections. It was redistributed property, so to speak, and on the ash a perpetual struggle appeared to rage over the contents of these clearly demarcated sites. It seemed possible to me that the most vehement battles were waged for the most preposterous things.

  Once I had an idea: I dragged a heavy cast-iron part—half of a broken slide rest from a lathe—from one depot to another and wiped away the drag marks. Sitting in a car, I waited for the arrival of the garbagemen, but as dawn broke I fell asleep. I was woken shortly thereafter by a furious howling and jabbering: at the scene of the crime the entire crew of the garbage heaps faced off belligerently, already shoving each other with hooks and poles. Later, after they’d calmed down, the piece of the slide rest lay unclaimed in an open space between the depots, and they gave it a wide berth. Later that morning they spied me up on the branch of my cherry tree and instantly recognized me as the cause of the mischief. Swinging their tools like spears, they charged me; as I froze in alarm, they stopped some distance away and attempted to parley with me. But I couldn’t understand a word of their gurgling verbiage, and that sent them into a fury again. They picked up stones that crashed a moment later into the branches near me; I jumped out of the tree and fled.

  That seemed to signal the end of my relations with them. After that they began to saw down the cherry trees along the lane—in rage, I thought, presumably overwhelmed by rage; I saw their turkey-red faces running with sweat as they attacked the trees like madmen. Within just a few days, several trees had vanished from the start of the lane at the edge of town…they lay cut into pieces, wedged together in barricades, reminding me of so-called chevaux de frise, between the piles of waste materials. When I approached the area now, I heard the racket of chainsaws and the rattling and clanking of bulldozers. It seemed wider access routes were being laid through the forest to remove the remains of the village of W.; the bucket chain excavators had advanced to the village’s edge and were eating away at its base, where only a few empty houses now huddled. The rubble was driven off into the ash to fill a relatively small hole on the northeastern edge of the plain far away from me, where the garbagemen were kept constantly busy. I skulked around forlornly on the opposite side and felt my interest in these grounds fade away.

  Perhaps, too, it was the effect of time, said Waller, imperceptibly passing time…the operative word being imperceptibly. — Once again he paused for a while; evidently he was having trouble deciding on a time with which to proceed.

  Time in a story can be compared to a river…you keep standing in the same place on the bank, but you never step into the same water twice. Probably I was thinking of standing water…the time of my past reaches beyond my present; even in the future I’ll be stuck deep in this past, or so I believed. We lived in a country, cut off, walled in, where we had to end up thinking that time had no real relevance for us. Time was outside, the future was outside…outside everything rushed to its doom. Meanwhile, we’ve always lived in the past. For us the passage of time existed only on some withered calendar page printed with a lousy humorous rhyme—clearly the People’s Paper Factory had hired someone especially to compose those words of wisdom. — For us the past was what had no closure, no beginning and no end…and that, by the way, meant we’d inevitably be accused of lacking the proper psychological distance. One day we’d have to accuse ourselves of that very thing…with horror! — With horror, thought Waller, we’ll realize one day that our thoughts have inexplicably found their way to paper all the same. From a certain distance we’ll perceive that the closed society of our thoughts on paper, circumscribed by the escape-proof margins of our pages, has been conceived without distance…without time: without present and future…and is nothing but the past. And this past shall be exposed like a disgrace to the eyes of all the world…before a decade has passed, it will be seen that we’d been lying.

  We’d been speaking of a past that kept postponing its end. And it was as though this postponement could wrest forth ever-new stories, or perhaps merely variants of one and the same story. And each story might tell of a time ten years ago, or might date back two or three decades; the sentence I set down at the top of the page—twenty years or two days ago—made no difference whatsoever: The trees of the cherry lane have vanished! There can exist, it seems to me, an infinite series of stories telling how this happened…I can fit only a fraction of them beneath that opening sentence. Or perhaps a barely graspable shadow of ash, light as a breath… for the cherry trees to return, I’d have to tell all the stories about them.

  I’d have to tell how I searched for them even while they existed in reality…later, long after I knew of their disappearance, I searched for them still. Reality, in nearly every instance, I thought, has been debased to a worthless product of language.

  I shall proceed with a time in which I increasingly began to resemble the garbagemen. It was the time in which—with or without their consent; there had never been the slightest discussion between us—I nearly had a place among them; I lived on their terrain and seemed to gradually and imperceptibly assume their peculiarities. Imperceptibly, time had become an abstraction for me, its passage manifested only in the alternation of day and night, lacking any true progression. And perhaps it was in this respect that I most resembled the garbagemen…they didn’t even seem to notice the shift in the seasons, as shown by the clothes they never changed. Increasingly, when I looked in the mirror, I discovered their dull acquiescence in my face, and beneath it I sensed the lurking aggression of which I suspected them. A pall of apathy, perhaps a film of fine ash, hid their savage resolve… resolve to do what, I didn’t know; there were just a few unpredictable moments when raw fury glowed in the pupils of their perpetually black-rimmed eyes. My attempts to understand them meant that in time I began to think just as they did, or so I believed at least.

  I felt happy for a spell when I learned to be silent like them…they had no speech, at least no intelligible speech; they almost always kept their silence, and silence seemed to grow toward them from the ground underfoot. That ground made no noise, just a whisper now and then when the wind carried off the first thin layer of ash…just the skin of the top layer, beneath which was a second layer, and mo
re layers followed, and underneath were whole strata of ash, a hundred yards thick, a hundred yards into the depths. Historical ash…within this ground was the silence of history, and I was right when I said I had no place on this ground. You can have no place in the history you walk across…I said these words with palpable complacency.

  When thoughts like these came to me, I plucked up my courage and ventured out in town again. I immediately ran into colleagues, of course, including several who had long regarded me with suspicion. They told me what I already knew: people had been looking for me, had been looking for me everywhere. I shouldn’t be surprised if the police were looking for me too by now. Hadn’t I gotten the notes in my mailbox…I’d been warned, hadn’t I? — Notes? I asked. — They went on in a more conciliatory tone, looking me over from head to foot: They’d known I’d crop up again, I always did after one of my fits… Maybe even the doctors are looking for you by now! So you don’t need the money? By now your take-home pay must be half what it used to be! Obviously it’s not even enough for a new pair of pants…you look like you’ve crawled out of a manure pile. — I gave no reply. — If you don’t need the money, why don’t you come pick up your papers? Oh, that’s it, you don’t dare to come back to the factory in those clothes. How can you run around in those things in the middle of the summer…? — It’s just a bit of ash, I explained, looking down at my trousers, but the gray-white dust had soaked them to the knee. Anyway, it’s not the middle of the summer, it’s September.

  They moved on, jeering: The doctors are looking for you, the doctors, the shrinks are looking for you everywhere! — I couldn’t stand it in town any longer. At the factory my colleagues were perfectly all right, the best, most mild-mannered people, but after work they metamorphosed into mistrustful gawkers who stood nattering and ranting on the market square outside the pub, having their beers handed to them through the open window. I’d never even tried to order a drink there. And I thought of how poorly I got along with my relatives at home, too…my relatives: I lived with my grandmother and my mother; fortunately, I was the only man left in the apartment. — I had categorically demanded a room of my own; the apartment was much too small, and with this arrangement I cooped them together in one room. Previously I’d sat in the kitchen when trying to write, and slept in the living room, which was perfectly possible, since they switched off the TV no later than 10 p.m. Now I had the back room to myself; it was the smallest room, even smaller once I stacked my books in there and finally moved in my desk. There I slept and wrote…just as unsuccessfully as at the kitchen table, where I’d felt I was constantly in their way, though in reality they were in mine. Sitting there I went through hideous contortions to hide my pages from them…they definitely had no desire to see them, but I always sat so that the light of the overhead lamp fell on the back of my neck, and as I bent forward my head and shoulders cast a shadow on the paper; what was more, I wrote into the hollow of my hand, my left hand’s inner curve, which I curled around the scribbling tip of the pen as though to guard a pearl from a thief’s gaze…though of course it wasn’t pearls I was putting to paper… When I was alone, and straightened up from my huddle, in the few still-legible sentences I made out nothing but confused reflections on the observation I had put at the beginning, that the cherry lane had vanished; and this beginning was repeated on ten, twenty different pages. The text grew dark before my eyes…and finally I thought I could read part of a description of a thunderstorm during which the trees on the cherry lane were destroyed. It was a failed experiment, I’d been confounded by the time frame, finally deciding that the description meant I’d been surprised twice by a storm out there on the ash, years apart…the years that lay in between were a vast mass of time of which I remembered nothing.