The Tidings of the Trees Page 4

  No, having glimpsed that figure in the branches of those visionary cherry trees, I didn’t want to lose sight of its fortunes again… if the word fortune isn’t too pretentious. — That figure’s fate had begun perhaps twenty years prior, in a summer—no one knew now whether that summer had been hot or cold… in this country they’ve treated history so roughly that nothing is left of reality, not even the simplest things—a summer that would later be called the summer of the Wall. In fact, just a year later nothing could be recalled about that summer, less than nothing, for at once it had begun to fill with an atmospheric fiction. Up until that summer the figure I’m speaking of was hardly someone who stood out from his peers; like nearly all the young men his age, he worked in one of the town’s many industrial enterprises. After that summer it was as if he had been possessed by a fiction as well. He seemed to be pursuing a notion that could only have arisen in a very confused mind. And that mind was his own mind! said Waller.

  His transformation had begun that very same fall, and in the process his thoughts had grown increasingly confused; his explanation for it all was that his previous life had withered and dropped from the branch of a cherry tree. That sounded metaphorical and sentimental…but at any rate it was better than emulating the behavior of everyone else in town. There they all seemed exclusively engaged—almost to the point of doing themselves violence—with ignoring a certain date in that summer, getting on with their lives as before despite that date. In the end they succeeded, living on in the old way without recalling the summer that had barely passed, but they could do so only at the cost of forgetting not just that summer date, but also their life prior to that summer. They actually pulled it off, successfully forgetting all of their previous life along with that date in August…so of course they didn’t know whether they really were living as before; but because they didn’t know, it didn’t matter.

  The garbagemen, Waller said to himself, are the only ones who never forgot anything! They couldn’t forget, for their job was the constant processing of the material of the past.

  No one, I said, could know more about the past, no one could be deeper in the know than the garbagemen. But no one asked them, for in the eyes of the world they were the ones with the least say. And if asked, they’d probably have seen themselves the same way; perhaps they ultimately acquiesced in their somnambulistic doings on the terrain of the ash… In actuality, they might think, it’s we, out here, who seal and perfect the process of forgetfulness the townspeople struggle with. Yet we ourselves can never forget…and that is the punchline of the story.

  Had I approached them because I sensed that they possessed the memories? — No, I said, that’s another idea I hit on only later. Another sleight of hand, imposing retroactive meaning on the story. It was much simpler than that: in reality it was that a storm loomed that day, and sitting on the branch of a tree on the cherry lane, I suddenly feared a downpour would start any minute: so I removed the noose from my neck and climbed down from the tree to seek shelter.

  That day I’d blundered into the midst of the raging ash that whirled up in tornadoes. Black mountains of dust were raised up beneath the sky and set in scudding motion; at once my face was covered with an ashen crust; blinded and nearly suffocated I stumbled through the surging, whipped-up bushes that by now were barely visible. Reeling from one erupting geyser of filth to the next, my lungs already filled with ash, in utter darkness I collided with the garbagemen’s shed. At the last moment I found the door and, with no other choice, escaped inside: that was how I first set foot in their domicile.

  I could breathe again; as fits of coughing racked me, the paroxysms outside reached their climax. It was as though the ground’s entire top layer were being stripped off and flung at my window; at any moment I feared I’d see the entire shack fly away from over me. Everything outside was in motion: torn-up bushes, flurries of paper and cardboard, even whole panels of sheet metal cartwheeled, booming across the plain. Several times I thought I saw human forms running through the storm outside the window, tumbling, rising up again and fleeing onward; they crashed against the wall of the shack, but sought no refuge inside…later I decided it had been the mannequins, which had been blown over and whirled into disarray. Yet they were lucky enough to remain intact, for the dark cloud fronts moved on without releasing their deluge on the ash.

  They were the first things I thought of after the storm, having observed them for days beforehand: those strange naked figures kept cropping up in whole groups. I saw rows of them leaning inertly against the wall of the shed, or lying in a rough circle somewhere in the ash, apparently taking a sunbath; as a rule they lay clustered, almost wedged together—not even obscenely so, rigid as they were—somewhere amid the bushes, facing their doom. Many of them had been scrapped for trifling defects; if they were missing a hand or a foot it was enough to make them seem dispensable in town. More than once I’d tried to establish contact with them…their flesh-brown visages gave no response, they persisted in the forbidding pride of their striking profiles, clearly turned toward the future… sometimes their faces had been twisted backward, making their poses still more grotesque: stiff arms reared up from these ensembles of figures; broken fingers—still graceful, echoing the gestures of ballet school—pointed off into the distance, usually into the sky, where darkness was gathering, where a menacing clangor came from the air: bells’ brittle swan song, a storm’s thunder waves.

  Then…having blundered for the second time into a dry storm on the ash and sought shelter a second time in the garbagemen’s shack…then I seemed to see my former comrades’ faces outside the window. For a moment we gazed coldly into each other’s eyes…they did so more than I, for my lids were crusted with dust, nearly clogged, grainy ash grinding away at my pupils, and the caustic salt drawing out my ceaseless tears. I wondered if I’d really recognized their dead faces; the storm had already chased them away… Don’t forget us! I thought I heard them cry, waving wildly from the shadowy vortices before immediately vanishing again. — Another time, during the first storm—I told myself—it was tears of rage and shame that flooded down my crusted cheeks. In secret I looked back on this as though on some romantic scene…until the thought came that it must have been they who’d thwarted me back then, at least they’d played a part in it. And they’d thwarted me so thoroughly that twenty years had passed like no time at all, and I’d lost the ability to sort separate episodes in my memory into their true time frames. Their plea was unnecessary: they had slipped my mind, but I had not forgotten them. What should I call them? My colleagues, my acquaintances, my housemates, my countrymen, my neighbors…the custodians of literature who’d gathered me to their dead bosoms, my friends, the literati who’d invented me…the citizens, the natives, the indigenous people, the members of society outside and inside the shop windows, all those who were a part of it, my secret societies that swaddled me and stripped me again and pointed to the grease on my skin…all the ones I’d wanted to write about, to write as though they were within me: the ones who had thwarted my stories.

  That was it—they were the population of my stories! They were The People, and I didn’t believe that they could ever change.

  Suddenly I had to shake my head at the nonsense I’d let myself believe. Had I wanted to write about those characters, the ones who strolled through the center of town in the afternoon, reflected in the shop windows? About those citizens put on display by the State’s clothing industry? About those role models from whose chiseled masks the axioms of the State stared out? For a long time I’d actually thought I could do it. But again and again I’d found that despite all my efforts I never managed to pull off a perfectly normal character: characters like the perfectly normal people I seemed to encounter all day long at the apprenticeship workshop, at my workplace, on the streets of town, in the house where I lived…they resisted my attempts to put them to paper, just as I was resisted by a perfectly normal tree glimpsed at the side of the road. Normality was normal because it ha
d lost its stories…only when the mask of normality was torn off did reasons for stories exist once again. I had seen it in myself: as long as I fit seamlessly into the preplanned routine of the workshop, and later the routine of the factory after moving on from the workshop, there were no stories for me. Only once I was on the run, once I’d vanished in search of my stories, and stopped showing up at the factory…and had been absent for two weeks, or more…only then did the material of my stories coalesce before me. Suddenly, in fact, it was essential to tell stories, because the time during which I seemed to have gone missing had to be described…if only for my own justification.

  Even I was increasingly unclear about where I’d been, and which time I’d been in: so I had to explain myself to myself! It was for myself that I needed a justification…but these would no longer have been stories describing the life of The People I lived among…they were no longer legal stories. They were stories of the refuse, the refusal of this People! They were cast-aside stories, found only in the troubling places outside town.

  I could tell myself these things, but I had yet to prove them. And my excuse was that every morning, as soon as the sun rose, I fled back into town…into that urban terrain, foreign to me, clearly quite unfamiliar: all at once the town had become a place of secrets. Suddenly, the ideas of the stories seemed to be hiding here…while their material, their substance might be out there in the open country, their motivation had been forgotten in town. So I was always wavering: the long stagnant days in town drove me out of my room and to the garbage heaps. But there the night was as long as the day that had passed: there, amid the dark heaps, I found myself surrounded by the true stuff of stagnation.

  I have no place to sit! I told myself, and above me was the boundless block of the dark…it was like a gigantic space of soundlessness through which a sudden soft whistle floated, a tenuous, rhythmically throbbing tone that seemed to draw near, as I waited to be touched by its motion through the air. Usually I fell asleep waiting. Drawn up double, virtually crumpled by the weight of the night like a block of seamlessly stacked years, I’d fall at last into a deep sleep…waking again perhaps mere minutes later. All the while my brow had lain in ashes, in the ashes among the still-empty sheets on the tiny, precarious table, so rickety that even in my sleep I thought I had to steady it as though it might collapse beneath my head. Now the working day woke, hammering and clanging, and the sun glared through the fractured glass of the panes…by roundabout ways I slunk into town. — Perhaps I’d be able to write there…perhaps there, behind one of the corners I skulked around, would loom the spectral motive suddenly unveiling my theme: that youthful idea I’d lost, suddenly revealed in a familiar face, almost ghostly in the early light toward which I’d return after a long circuit through various streets I no longer seemed to know…and I’d stare into the pale visage of a memory, avert my eyes, then quicken my pace.

  Up in my room I pondered these things for hours: paralysis quickly caught up with me—this paralysis was quicker than I—and in vain I gazed after the light that vanished with the morning, and my memory subsided into weariness. I knew all too well that the majority of the People I belonged to lived in conformity…what a gloomy thought; of course, they had no choice. It would have been a miracle if any of my former friends had been exceptions. They too—just like the ninety-eight-percent majority—kept to the scope appropriate to them, where, except in little things, there was no cause to seek a language that deviated from the one formulated for them by the State, by language’s custodians. A keen instinct told the members of the majority—and there was no need to keep warning them—that deviant language would have pitted them against the State’s axioms; they sensed it from long historical experience, passed down to them without their conscious awareness. — These same axioms stared down at me from the walls of the trade school, from banners proclaiming things like: We Strive to Emulate the Best among Us! For Outstanding Learning Outcomes to Strengthen Our Socialist Homeland! — Though I felt that few of the town’s citizens really strived for anything, all of them, almost all, did seem in full agreement, agreeing with the selection of clothing that was promised to them, and feeling strengthened when their prescribed set of paths was described as the Homeland. And when plaster, cement, and carbon monoxide rained down on their back yards, they knew progress was at work. They were the majority, and because they were so close to me, I had no thoughts about them. There was no language in me for them—or about them—though they walked toward me on the street each day, though I saw them in the factory and in the halls of bureaucracy and sitting next to me on public transportation…though their idols had been set up in stone and on posters in all of the town’s empty spaces, though they were reflected in the town center’s shop windows, and when I stood beside them, I watched them greet their comrades behind the glass and make arrangements with them.

  At some point I had to admit that I hated them…and this thought made me lose sympathy for myself. Perhaps it had started when I left the workshop and switched to the main factory. Suddenly I’d had to realize that my life’s course was predetermined…it was their course, the one they demonstrated for me daily: and instantly I had to start hating myself too. A predetermined course? I had to admit that ultimately—if the world I lived in had its way—that course was already set. A completed course: that was what to call my life! — From that day on I never gave another thought to my age.

  My existence seemed to have shrunk to an area as long and as wide as the road I was supposed to take to work every day…hitherto I had merely intuited this, as an unrest that I alone seemed to sense! There was a rumor that the country’s borders would be closed—soon, in the near future, this very summer…forever? It was a thought you could think only if you didn’t count yourself among the ones who’d be affected. I began to seek reflections of the rumor in the faces I encountered; I’d stop next to them and peer covertly at the masks that gazed back from the panes of the shop windows: the citizens’ visages made no comment on the rumor, positive or negative. They were afraid! No…I saw no sign of that, there was contentment in their expressions; as always, they’d made their peace with misfortune even before it happened. On their brows I saw no move to escape.

  Though the wind had nearly died down, the unrest continued in front of my window. Outside was a roaming of bodies in gray darkness…or it was detached limbs I’d glimpsed, the mannequins, returned from the darkness, crippled vestiges of them scared up once more from their decay…or the vestiges of trees, split-off branches, limbs of trees… they were memory-images from the time that for me had ceased to pass years ago, images that rushed toward me when I shut my eyes, blinded by the lamp that swung through my field of vision… the pendulum of the lamp sliced off layers of thought and exposed new images when it swung back behind my head as a mere glimmer in the windowpane…in which my silhouette could be seen, framed by splintering glints, and the pendulum seemed to swing through my brain…and at last I held the lamp still to steady my reflection in the glass, to make out behind the glass the resurrected mannequins that were neither young nor old…but there was nothing to be seen, nothing but the battle between the images of reality and a few broken-off memories from my mind. It was a juxtaposition of bloated trivialities…the storm, amid one last ponderous effort to catch its breath, had collapsed, and only the remnants of scattered gusts still swept to and fro. I sat where I was in the trembling light; I blew the fine ash from the papers I saw in front of me, as though I might go on writing at any moment, as though that time…the long epoch between the first sentence and a second sentence hadn’t existed. — Outside, through the parting clouds, the first spears of light shot down, dying out within seconds only to reappear elsewhere; maybe it had rained somewhere after all, for mists suddenly rose up, rolling close over the ground in lagging waves; from enormous heights ash sank down upon the plain, having been blown so far up that its falling seemed without origin, unearthly; and its cataracts, with moonbeams swimming in the ruddy haze about them,
shrouded my view for a long time. Amid the ceaseless downward surging of this uncanny, atomized matter, I’d had an apprehension of how much time had passed me by: since the thunderstorm that first chased me into this shack… decades, I repeat, that I was not aware of; only the recurrence of this dry storm reminded me that I had aged—that I had lived without giving life a thought.

  Now I felt that for all these years I’d been shielded by the light beam of the lamp in this shack. And finally, night by night, I’d slumped down farther over this table, cut off from the clamor of the ordinary folks outside this light, which did not even illuminate all the corners within the shed…I was tolerated only by the garbagemen, who did not disturb me in my long idleness, and it seemed agreed that I in turn would not disturb them in their grim industry. And here, perhaps, I’d become a model for them: here, bowed over my endless first sentence… over the pages that have turned yellow now, while I’ve turned old and gray: gray-red ash has eaten deep into my skin, the salt in the ash has clouded my sight, my ears are clogged with the ash crystals, and my lips have assumed the ash’s stone-gray hue. And there’s ash all over my clothes, my shoes and socks are full of it…no, I’m buried in it up to the ankles, soon up to the knees, and all my pockets are filled with ash, my earnings from all these years, and all my thoughts are infiltrated by the ghastly substance of the ash, which is nothing but gray stuff, dry and thundery, hard and unfeeling and burned-out. And over the years the fields of ash encircling me have sprawled almost to infinity, nothing calls to mind the motion of time now…oh, throughout those years, faintly smiling, I recalled the concept of time, and it seemed that truck after truck filled with its dead burned substance had been driven to the margins of the inhabited territories. And I felt that those margins had spread and had long since become a massive preponderance, that the ash had long ago gained an irreversible ascendancy over the settlements of life…oh, that amid this immensity, the towns and villages were mere nutshells adrift upon a sea.