The Tidings of the Trees Page 5

  Here I was…I’d been here for a near-eternity, and already I was almost a ghost…a monster, shaped from the substance of eternity, a sculpture of ash muffled in ancient ghostly garments…and the garbagemen, who believed in mythical creatures, had long ago accepted me as their ghost, slinking around me breathlessly and on tiptoe; and they’d consigned the citizens from the shop windows to the garbage, for I was the true artwork of their time, I was the statue which alone fulfilled all their time’s aesthetic requirements, their time that was no time at all… the trees of the cherry lane have vanished; this single sentence, long since extinguished and grown cold, stood there upon the page, and they’d given me infinite time to write a second one. That first sentence was like the uniform sifting of the ash, it was followed by a relentless flood of thoughts, but nothing was willing to go down on paper…nothing, not since I’d been sitting here lurking, watched over by the garbagemen and with memory flowing through me, memory in which I saw myself progressively transformed into one of them: into a figure of their ore-gray, faceless sort, speechless before eternity; and I saw myself living in the ash, deaf and blind and mythical. I sat here evening after evening and thought of many things, but the motive that had led me here refused to come to me.

  I recalled how confined this country had become back then, back in my twentieth year. The rumor had come true at last, and the borders had been sealed off. The confinement oppressed me more and more, though the roads I had to take were still there for me.

  Again Waller paused and uttered a laugh: a response, it seemed, to some conclusion in his mind that he did not clearly voice.

  Even then it was the sense that I had no place to sit…an absurd sensation that only grew stronger once the country had become a closed society. For me it had almost transformed into a soundproof room, paralysis setting in wherever I looked: the leading figures of the movement were statues…that couldn’t fail to have a certain effect. — My daily route to work now seemed too short and monotonous. In the morning hours I wandered through side streets and alleyways where I hadn’t set foot in years, just to have more time, more space for my thoughts; hemmed in by the state of the country, these thoughts were a maelstrom that drew me in inexorably. Every day I arrived for my shift a few minutes later, a few quarters of an hour, soon hours late; my life became fraught with conflict, and all my boredom was a thing of the past. My relations with the outside world took on a threatening character; routinely I had to stay on at the factory in the afternoons to make up lost hours, and soon, as I couldn’t be integrated into any coordinated production processes, I was used only for more loosely scheduled, incidental jobs; all that prevented my dismissal was the felicitous labor shortage that afflicted all of the industrial enterprises. Meanwhile, my roundabout ways grew longer and longer; in the morning, anticipating more accusations and admonitions at the factory, I was filled with particular dread and procrastinated still more. I spent hours pacing back and forth along out-of-the-way streets, desperately pondering how I might sneak into the factory unnoticed…I seldom succeeded.

  Soon I extended my morning rambles out past the town limits, and it was just a question of time before I ranged so far that I no longer managed to show up for work at all. By evening, unrest had already chased me from the house, and I’d wandered around all night; in the morning, back home, I’d collapsed from exhaustion and fallen asleep. Or I’d already reached the ash fields in the morning and suddenly felt severed from all the grounds for my existence in town. So I’d walked on until evening, walked and already saw myself walking through the night again, a dark bundled-up figure, down the bare track of the former cherry lane, on and on in the wrong direction, as though summoned by the errant chiming of bells in the night, a doleful tone as of cracked metal that barked out over the forest and merged into a sawing and a crunching. — Soon I’d reached the end of the woods, abysses gaped before me, their depths barely touched by the moonlight…the village of W. had stood here, a place I’d never visited while it still existed. It was too late for that, as it was for so many things, time had hurried onward, and I hadn’t heeded it; I headed back; I couldn’t afford to let my mind stray. — The woods had been chopped into sections, sliced apart by countless aisles for the vehicles that had cleared the land; perhaps that too lay decades in the past; it was too late even for my thoughts or for the words I chose to ward off forgetfulness; and it was as though I’d headed back without doing what I’d come for. I hurried down the moonlit aisles as though to outrun melancholy, and again I had the sense of walking back through the years.

  As I stepped out of the forest, the full moonlight behind me now, I saw that the broad vehicle tracks continued out over the ash. They had even broken through the matted, dust-dry weeds: one of these aisles led me straight to the garbagemen’s metal shed, which I could see from a great distance. At first I thought the shack was lit from within, but then I realized it was the moon reflected in the windowpanes…from a certain angle, as I came closer, it gave the illusion of a figure, upper body visible in the light of the lamp overhead… The window wasn’t far above the ground, so he had to be sitting: and thus I saw that shadow once again, and his posture showed that he was bent over some unseen thing in the glare of the lamp that revealed him to me so blurrily. It wasn’t hard to believe I saw him writing…or pausing in the strain of seizing a distant thought, his gaze sunk into the paper on which his hand with the pen poised, trembling. — There was no doubt that I’d seen myself again… I’m the one sitting there by the window: sitting there always, never knowing how I got to this place! Or they really did just seat one of their mannequins at the table! Perhaps to frighten me…or to make up for the loss of my existence? For perhaps one day I really did vanish beyond the woods, where the sky still held the echo of vanished bells, where the abysses gaped. And perhaps in all these twenty years they haven’t grown used to the loss. And in this way, as a perfectly replicated effigy of their thoughts, I really have spent twenty years sitting by their window…

  Twenty years, filled with thoughts—at least giving that appearance—bending over this table by the window and probably long since thinking the thoughts of the garbagemen, nothing else being possible in this place! For twenty years—or so they saw it—I viewed the world with their eyes, and finally felt the sun with their skin. Twenty years, the breath of the ash on the skin of my brow, and nothing on the plain outside escaped me. — Who was that young man out there—younger than he looked—who shuffled at such a slant through the wind of the ash…? And how he kept glancing around: a hunted man, straining his senses in all directions like an animal…so we set up a dummy to show him the way. Of course it was only as a joke, but he went that way…the next day we turned the dummy around, and he went in the other direction…we turned the figure around again, he followed, and we laughed until the metal of the shack laughed with us. There was just one path he rejected; it was impossible to show him the way back to town. He preferred to spend the night in old wrecked cars on the grounds. Or he slept in the storage shed; we made him a bed of old mattresses, we’ve got plenty out here in the garbage heaps. Or he’d perch in a tree over there, staring this way…the municipal office had long since instructed us to fell them; the first tree was felled, and the next day he perched in the second tree.

  What people that town produces! Nothing but dead, useless things come out of the town and can pass across the borders. Perhaps we used to be something like that…there’s no one here but people who never learned to make their fortune in town. And people who prefer misfortune out here to misfortune in town. Out here, it has the advantage that it can’t be confused with fortune. Here no one needs to deceive himself. Here no one needs to forget. Each of us remembers the moment when he wanted to snuff himself out. A moment like a bolt from the blue! — I’d always deceived myself that I was living… over there in town!

  From the town, from the municipal offices, almost nothing reaches us on the grounds, except letters. Directives, for instance—most of them a year
out of date. Accounts settled, far too late. Fat envelopes stuffed with cash! Overdue sick pay for people who’ve been gone for years. Years ago the beneficiary bit the dust. Sometimes the folks in the office remember some jubilee that’s rolled around out here, and we’re sent an enormous gift basket, topped with spoiled salamis going oozy. But the guest of honor is already a corpse…we might have buried him long ago on the edge of the grounds. Then he gets his basket from the Party; you see, there were people who came out to join us rather than leave the Party, it was simpler that way, and in the end we buried them with all the honors. No one in town seems to know how many of us still exist. They seem to think in terms of four or five men per shift, which means we get money for fifteen to twenty. But even if it were fifty men that emerged at the crack of dawn from their dwellings at the edge of town—a whole swarm of ants setting out into the ash in the dark—they still wouldn’t know. In reality there are only three or four of us, but they’ve long since forgotten that back at the office. When they drive their cars up to the boom gate at the edge of town…they call it an inspection… they peer through the haze and the smoke and see the mannequins at work. These inspectors are used to living with mock-ups of reality…and they pay the dummies quite well, for as we all know, the sanitation department is understaffed. That’s not due to a lack of mannequins—far from it, rarely have so many bitten the dust—it’s solely because of the increase in garbage. You see: progress reigns in town! Progress is the order of the day in the town’s shop windows and all across the land, especially now that the land has been transformed into a closed society…that was a step in a desirable direction, they say, fond of that sort of alliteration. Quite right: progressive times bring a revolution of forgetfulness, and in the process lots of new designs grace the shop windows. And then out here we neutralize what has been forgotten. Yes, all this is executed outside town, past the boom gate, past a warning sign: Unauthorized Dumping of Household Waste on the Grounds Is Strictly Prohibited. — The Town Council.

  We don’t concern ourselves with that; to each his own private revolution, we think. At the same time—one hand washes the other—we make sure we pocket no bribes less than ten marks; we let them pay for their forgetfulness. — That’s another reason why we never stop thinking about all the forgotten things. There’s something in all the junk here on the grounds…in all this property, in all the abandoned secondary wealth, in the old-fashioned cultural artifacts: amid broken coffee mills, radios and toilet seats, rusty bicycles and desks; amid Party congress leaflets and Party personnel files and photo albums and ash; amid the thousands and thousands of tons of the past…in all this there’s something that hasn’t yet learned to be silent. And we haven’t learned silence any more than it has. We’re always thinking about what all this junk has to say to us, out here on the grounds. What food for thought it gives us, the junk that the town’s digested and thinks is now eliminated. It’s as though all these cultural artifacts would rather be with us, we think, grinning. Before that we watched the people sanctify their property. They hung banners on it, celebrated it with fireworks and carillons. They took pictures of it, kept files on it; they gave it new names and showed it on TV and went to bed with it. We simply waited, knowing that all these things come out to the grounds once they’ve been digested and shat out. We’ve always been here. We’ve always waited here and we’ve always existed: here…we’ve been here since time out of mind, grinning expectantly, here on the grounds. When they held up the icons of the new gods and hauled them through town—gigantic, twenty times life size, painted on red pasteboard—we watched them. They always turned back at the edge of town, those processions with their pasteboard faces and flags and brass-band music…as a joke we set up our dummies to show them the way. But they turned around at the boom gate; of course they never saw the dummies. Unperturbed, we grinned; impatience is no strength of ours. For one day they’ll all end up here, on the grounds: whole generations of pasteboard heads are already buried in the ash beneath us. All those faces that got to be God for a while are buried down below now; we’ve got a whole grove of the gods down there. Layer upon layer, era after era, and if we thought a bit, we could even say what order they’re stacked in, down there in the depths. But why should we think about it? It’s enough to think that we’ve always been up here and are likely to remain. At any rate, we’ll never get down very far…we think, never far enough to come close, say, to God Number Ten, between the royal court and the accounting department, we think, because only our thoughts can drill down that deep. We ourselves will always stay up on the surface: as though the world were a garden, we think, the blossoms always bloom on top…

  Of course, some of us have already lost our bloom. And one day perhaps we too will be digested—it’s quite certain, of course. And even then only a tiny bit of us will be washed down to the bottom; it rarely rains out here over the ash, the storms are short and dry. The greater part of us will whirl through the air as fine dust. And in the summer, when the hot inland breeze blows from the east, we’ll infiltrate the town like fine bitter salt; we’ll creep through all the window cracks and the new acquisitions in the rooms will be coated with gray, and for the first time these new possessions will be looked at askance. In the summer heat, when the dry storms echo in the atmosphere, we, dust that we are, will be borne up to prodigious heights, flying through the air with the storm, and the thunder will be below us. And we’ll hear it like bells…far below, in the abysses below, like the forgotten gods’ self-celebration.

  And perhaps the trees are down there too, and in a little spell of madness we’ll see them again. — Doubtless it’s the madness that rises from the empty papers on the trembling table by that dust-blind window that distorts the reflections and granulates the contours, and between the glass striations they seem to rise from the depths once more, streaks of trees, limbs of trees: and so the ash has long since described them! — These are some of the melancholy thoughts that cross our minds out here on the grounds. Yes, they emerge from the glaring light in which we sit motionless, and the dust on the paper seems to increase with them; they are so filled with madness and peculiar, static fantasies that dust is all they can become. — And the trees should long since have been described as ash. Clearly they can’t be described in any other way: and thus they remain indescribable. — The thought of the cherry trees is painful as a fissure a nail draws across the glass, diagonally across the glass that cries out: Described! And their reality seems crossed out for all time. — Only in the ash to which the trees have reverted has their essence been revealed. And they have always told of this essence, though without any subject… a sujet, an idea for a story, those were things the trees disdained. If there were such a thing as a language of the trees—and suddenly I refused to doubt it—it was storytelling without motive, a stream of story that followed only the slow rhythms at work in the place where the trees were…imperceptible to me as I incessantly searched for the sujet for a story. They had spoken without cease—they had spoken to me, but through all these decades I’d never noticed it, because my sujet was the stagnation in this land—the endless flux of ebb and flow in their silence was their speaking: speaking about the eternal twilight of the seasons whose comings and goings surrounded them always, slower still than the revolving of day and night and the converging of the storms. And there was a speech in the trees that always ended in darkness…no, even in darkness it didn’t end, it merely spoke more softly than ever, and I recalled the nameless whisper of their leaves in the unseen. It was a language of return, permanently revolving around the existence of those leaves themselves, and thus around the permanence of the Earth itself, and thus it spoke of the universe in which each leaf revolved with the Earth, and in the darkness the leaves went on rippling…like ash, and the swells of the ash went on into the darkness, and never ceased, even when the ash-red gloaming came, inaudibly soft, and the short day with its blue gloaming at dusk, when autumn sank its cool claws into the blue ash, or when the spring loosen
ed the ash again, and on and on when the leaves and the ash required no more words, and the leaves of paper chafed together in the dust, and the dust chafed whisperingly at time that turned in space, on and on with that empty chafing in the dark that passed like years and had no age.

  And the years of age had begun to chime, long and hollow, and there was no more escape. This was what befell me when the country’s borders closed; from one day to the next all hope of life was past. And I thought that here I’d found my place to stand now! The life that lay ahead of me was in the stranglehold of borders… and at that moment I knew I couldn’t accept even the mildest form of a border. No! — Youth had passed, I could toss it on the refuse heap. I had to hurry; in the greatest of haste I had to make for the place where I’d be old…sick, invalid, senile, a wreck, an inconvenience. I had to be an unserviceable part in this society if I wanted to cross its border. That was the truth, and no explanations, no tricks of philosophy, culture, economics, or social policy could hide the fact: the years of youth had passed. Once I’d staggered around like the embodiment of all human misfortune, like world-weariness personified…now that romantic bluff had been called. It was time to muster all my malice and turn myself into a cripple. And the dialectics of this maneuver seemed to entail looking like an unthinking idiot and stoically going along with everything. This thought, and it alone, had induced me to climb back down from the branch of the last tree left standing on the cherry lane.