The Tidings of the Trees Read online

  Who is it that burned all those masses of time? Waller asked himself. How did that come to pass? — I seem to have changed into a silent ghost after shutting myself in my secluded room. There, in the gloom above my wreck of a desk, I’ve gradually faded away, and for them, my relatives as I called them, I’m a ghost they’re reluctant to recall.

  I shall proceed with a year when the cherry trees were already felled, said Waller. It was summer, I sat in that room, trying to think back…I stared out so steadily that the images blurred outside the window. In the street the light faded, and as a pale dusk began, the distant noises of the town sank away, and finally every sound from the adjoining rooms, including the TV’s unintelligible murmur—I heard it through the wall, sounding rhetorical—petered out as well. — As always, in the evening sky, almost white above the roofs, I thought I saw the shadows of the cherry lane…they appeared when I raised my head, but always disappeared again: perhaps it was just the star-shaped splatters the sweat made on the paper as it dripped from my face; their shapes left reflections on my retina as I tried long and absently to decipher the faded squiggles of ink beneath the dried liquid…how long had those scribbles already been sinking into the dusty papers’ ground!

  Is it true that they’ve vanished? I asked myself then. Hadn’t I only just seen them again? A week ago perhaps…in a sudden glance out the window, their silhouettes dimmed by the unclean glass, their crooked growth blurred? And from what window was it that I suddenly seemed to see the cherry trees? A few days ago I actually had been inside the garbagemen’s shed, watching a storm through the makeshift window in the corrugated iron wall…but hadn’t that been years ago, with the cherry trees still standing, torn from the darkness and magically lit by a rapid succession of lightning flashes? A glance at my trousers, tossed onto the bed beside me, confirmed it: I’d been on the ash just a short time ago; the legs were covered with pale gray filth up past the creases of the knee, the fabric was virtually saturated with ash.

  How long ago, I asked myself, had I last been in that area? Years must have passed, and the terrain had changed utterly. The ash had grown into an extensive plain, leveled, but in contrast to earlier times impossible to survey: it was covered with dense brush, strange weeds that stood yards tall, and nothing led through that tangle but narrow paths forming a bewildering labyrinth. I had no idea what that jungle of plants consisted of: dry, tough grass, burdock, reeds…things whose yellow flowers caught the eye at a certain time of year, scrubby mugwort, dingy goldenrod, thickets that thrived better on barren ground than in fertile soil…all the ash seemed ravaged by the breath of their acrid toxic-yellow blossoms or umbels; they steadily filled the air with suffocating clouds of dust, pollen, or fine ash that smelled of evaporating vinegar…or those were the insects rising like swathes of smoke from the bushes; myriads of tiny, barely visible insects wafted up when I approached one of those walls of brush; for a time they’d surge rhythmically through the refracted light like a cloudy flaw, a glimmering discoloration of the air, only to sink into another tangle of bushes a few yards away. For a long time I’d been stumbling down the barely foot-wide paths; believing myself hopelessly lost, I was already forging a new path through the weeds…which I could see over only by jumping into the air…a path toward the sunset, toward the west where the town had to lie, when the bushes unexpectedly opened up before me: I was standing in front of the shed used by the garbagemen, who had kept a wide level space clear in the center of the ash. First I ducked back into the thicket to observe the shack, but I was coughing and gasping, hawking bitter yellow dust from my throat…if they were there, they had to have heard me in the evening hush.

  The shack opened up like a memory…I realized at once that I knew it from inside as well, that I’d sat in there by the window already, staring out at the cherry lane…when the trees still existed, perhaps even later…and as though to bear out the memory, at that very moment I heard the first, still-distant rumble of a storm approaching above the woods.

  Over the years, rust had covered the corrugated iron walls; in places they had rusted through and were patched with pressboard. Several of the wooden posts rammed slantwise into the ground to shore up the walls had given way, but so much scrap and junk was piled up the walls all around the listing building that they seemed quite stable and unassailable. Next to the charred front door, salvaged from the ash, a window with multiple panes in two casements had been fitted into a hole in the wall…it looked as though the patched-together shards of glass had recently been washed: in other words, the shack had only just been abandoned. — And I recalled the shack’s single room, where beams supported the roof from inside as well, with nails for hanging up jackets and tools…and I thought of the long hours I’d spent inside, by day or by night, at a little table by the shoddily glazed window that gave me an unobstructed view over to the cherry lane. Like my window in the apartment on the edge of town, this one opened to the southeast, and caught the light of the rising morning sun… in the afternoon I saw the shadow of the shed’s wall stretch across the ash field; into this shadow the glass through which I gazed inscribed its strange reflections, and in this rectangular spot of light I saw a shadow of my own form: I had switched on the lamp that hung behind my head.

  To my astonishment, the garbagemen left me in peace; perhaps they’d agreed among themselves to tolerate this strange intruder in their shack…perhaps, I speculated after a time, they had all ended up here just as I had, had come in quite a similar way to the occupation they pursued here. They were leading a life tossed aside from the bustle of the town… they were (to use the technical term) recycling that life on the ash.

  Still, I always began by reassuring myself that they’d abandoned the place; first I circled the shack to make sure all was quiet, and on the side opposite the entrance I was usually in for a scare. Again and again I thought I was faced with a heap of corpses piled up by the wall of the shed, the ash field’s thickets already encroaching upon them. Of course they were just naked mannequins, I’d seen them before…in the dusk I seemed to see that only male individuals were gathered there. It was an astounding assemblage; apparently the expressions on their faces had fallen out of fashion, they’d been tossed away as refuse, but the garbagemen dug them up again and stacked them behind the shed in a strange and grisly monument. The bottommost dummies had long since gone the way of all flesh: nothing but puddles of liquefied plaster interspersed with filth and ash, metal skeletons sticking through, a mush into which the next layer of dummies settled; they lay on the west side of the shack, where the rain quickly made them one with the ground.

  The door and window were on the southeast side, and it was there that I sat at the table, sensing the sophisticated image of transience behind my back, contemplating the decay of all forms: the ash, whose expanse had brought forth an undreamed-of abundance of worthless weeds, was a splendid place for such thoughts.

  See how fiction has lost all its charms! I’d think, filled with melancholy. And all pleasure in meaningful games is gone…so it seems, now that I do nothing except hunker in their shack, devoted to my writing… should anyone not believe it, they need only to watch me devoting myself! — It occurred to me that the taciturn relationship between the garbagemen and myself had begun with strange, reciprocally staged tableaux. Once a sort of gatekeeper was set up to meet me at the entrance to their shed: a naked mannequin, leaning on a stick that might have been a sword, its face adorned with terrifying Indian war paint. I stood a second figure beside it, putting a pen in its right hand; I turned the head of the first dummy toward the second one, washing the paint from its face, so that it looked as though the two were in communication. The day after that they turned my figure, the second dummy, and leaned its forehead against the wall, taking the pen from its fingers and inserting it between the buttocks of the slightly spread legs, where it stuck out two thirds of the way, rather obscenely; the other dummy’s face gazed into the distance again, one arm raised and outstretched: the gatekeepe
r gestured out past the grounds, pointing alarmingly eastward, over the cherry lane, toward the woods and beyond…

  Against the wall of the shed I placed a discarded park bench I’d found nearby, and sat my figure on it, first freeing its bottom of the writing utensil; now I surrounded the seated figure with more dummies fetched from the depots, forming a semicircle—almost a barricade facing the man on the bench—standing, sitting, or lying in the dust, and, unable to resist a bit of utter kitsch, I had several of my audience members stand around amicably holding hands.

  Then several days passed with no new installment to the dialogue, no alteration made to the arrangement…until my seated figure had a book thrust into its hands, which rested on its lap: it was reading, or reciting to its considerable audience. The book was a battered prewar edition of Dostoevsky’s Demons. — The gatekeeper remained unaltered, now a warning figure: arm outstretched, he pointed across the forest…and it was as though the chiming of bells had just wafted up from the church in W. But beneath this ringing there was suddenly something like the shrill squeals of a herd of sows plunging into an abyss…it was the creaking and screeching of the bulldozers bearing down on the village of W. On top of all this noise came the rolling thunder of a storm.

  What an eerie scene! I thought. — Little by little I came to the conclusion—just as eerie, if not more so—that in this day and age only the garbagemen could bring a poetic thought to fruition. Was it because they spent every day in the immediate proximity of an almost mythical experience? It was to them alone that things still spoke of their decay… in their presence things had at last achieved a state of utter worthlessness: and with that they could be contemplated in their authentic being. The essence of substance opened up before the garbagemen… while all the others, the consumers whose place was back in town, turned away from this essence in horror. In the garbagemen’s presence things had escaped the constraints of their utility and begun to tell stories…in our eyes they transcended their transience.

  And so it was too, I said, with the cherry trees: in the end even they were no longer good for anything. Having grown to the point of stony rigidity, they stood like meaningless threats at the edge of the ash, and when plans were made to broaden the road, they were in the way. Filled with black melancholy I gazed across at the place where they had been…where they had in store one last unforetold episode: they loomed as shadows in the sky; from clouds that had grown darker and darker, several strangely forked shadow-branches trickled like skeins of water from above, washed in a smoldering yellow light.

  I’d already switched on the lamp in the shack; I sat at the little table by the window with several empty pages spread in front of me. Sometimes I glanced around the room in surprise: the lamp that gave me light was a so-called trouble lamp, a work light cased in black rubber with its bulb protected by a wire cage, the kind I knew from my factory’s assembly department; it dangled on its cord from the ceiling behind my head, powered—along with a small hotplate and two machines, a steel saw and a tiny bench drill—from a wooden board with a row of outlets, a rickety and precarious contraption that left all the electric appliances suffering from defective connections. The board lay on the floor; the power cord for the outlets ran up through the roof and, supported by two or three crooked makeshift pylons, extended in the direction of town: just where the road began, sloughing off the bushes and the filth, there was a brick substation. The shed also contained a metal locker that held a tin of ground coffee, an assortment of dishes, mostly unwashed, bent aluminum utensils, an open packet of sugar cubes, and a deck of cards that had turned nearly black; apart from that, the room contained a few chairs cobbled together with wire and a wicker armchair full of holes, in which I sat at the table, and in the corner behind the drill were several mattresses with a pile of dust-caked wool blankets.

  Contemplating this interior, I felt like an explorer who had drifted off course… that was something, anyway…in a squalid ship’s cabin, a makeshift shelter on an island, or a wilderness…the ground beneath me was unsteady, and the storm was unleashed outside. And I tried to make my notes; the pen hastened across the stinging, salt-like dust, the ink ceased to penetrate these sediments, leaving nothing behind on the page, and the pale paper seemed to sink in the ash upon the table… It’s the same dust on the desk in my apartment in town, I wanted to note, the ash that’s covering the whole town little by little! — The letters no longer fit together. And soon my papers were completely invisible, the dark gained the upper hand; either I hadn’t switched on the lamp yet, or it had gone out again in the storm gusts. The rising shadows rubbed themselves thin on the cracked and patched-together window glass; a new rumbling rolled in from the east, over the forest edge swallowed by dark clouds, as though the steeple in W., bell and all, had plunged into the depths of the strip mines… and suddenly, in the first flashes of lightning, I thought I saw the trees of the cherry lane, their grotesque forms emerging once or twice from the darkness, seemingly on the run, making for the edge of the woods with the haste of storm-chased wanderers. Now the wind began to rattle at the shed’s metal walls, a menacing noise; I saw the withered shrubs of the ashen steppe bend in waves, and these waves, as though driven by the lashes of a whip, seemed to circle the shack; it was as though the shed stood in the dead-still center of a churning lake. In the lightning’s blueish flare, I saw vast masses of ash raised up in the turbulent air and whirled across the plain; they too seemed to gather toward a center above me, then lunge down on the roof like diffuse black beasts, instantly enveloping me in deepest night. Instinctively I held down my papers on the desktop; the shed metamorphosed into a lurching, madly clattering conveyance flying pilotless over raging waves…but it didn’t fly away, the building bore up amid the surge of the ash and the storm. And the storm stayed dry, not a drop of water fell from the sky. Amid deafening noise—rattling metal walls, howling wind, and crashing thunder—I got up to search for the board with the outlets; after jiggling at the connection the lamp flickered pathetically, then burned once again…I huddled in the wicker chair at the table, the world impenetrable beyond the window in whose glass shards the lamplight strayed; at last the raging of the storm settled down to a steady course, and around the shed it grew clearer again.

  It seemed the storm would pass without a drop of rain. And now I realized that it had grown hotter and hotter inside the shack, perhaps because the storm found no real release. I felt how I was bathed in sweat…for a moment, to my horror, I’d thought I saw myself in the distance, on the sturdy branch of a cherry tree; now, one hand shielding the windowpane from the light, I strained to see whether a lightning flash would reveal the dark, disheveled form again. The trees of the cherry lane had vanished for good.

  Sitting there, thought Waller, he was like an enormous bird, feathers ruffling in the wind, struggling not to be hurled from the branch. The lamp swayed back and forth, and its reflected light kept interfering; I couldn’t find the uncanny observer again, though the lightning came thick and fast, immersing the terrain in one continuous blue-white conflagration. But, said Waller, I even thought I saw the rope that held that raptor-like figure upright in the tree…a frayed rope, stretching from the neck of the figure—as motionless as a dummy wrapped in an excess of dark rags—to another branch higher up, and it was impossible to tell whether it was already hanging or still hunkering on its perch… If you tried to describe such an image, thought Waller, the whole thing would be nothing short of absurd.

  I had fixed my gaze on my papers again, as though to glean some hint about my memory’s true circumstances. The sheets were almost buried by fine strands of dust that recalled the rippling forms of a flat sand beach as the water receded: the wind had forced great quantities of fine ash through the cracks in the ramshackle windows, shrouding everything within the shack. And the ash, I thought, coats all my thoughts as well…the ash has inscribed my papers with its uniform and illegible writing. And I’ve watched these waves of writing rush back and forth, thought Wa
ller, along the lines of the paper, like thoughts that wrote and instantly erased themselves. And in the lower margins, forgetfulness seemed to toss the fleeting eddy of its signature upon the empty pages.