Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  VILLAGE

  Some poor houses lie there; they lie there, dead. Rain has fallen, cold and autumnal. From the chimneys, smoke is rising; it hovers, immobile, at the height of the roofs in the wet air.

  A house from its side. Agide is standing under a window, hammering away on a piece of beech wood that has been cut flat like a shelf. Agide has the log attached to a rope, which is fixed around the center of the length of wood. He hammers it with a wooden mallet in different places so that distinct sounds are produced. When repeated, the sounds result in a kind of signal.

  Agide beats the beech board as if it were the Great Music.

  MANSION

  Adalbert, plump and sentimental like a pastry baker, dresses the owner of the glass factory as if he were a nobleman of the Century of the Braid. He adorns him high and low for a scene of celebration. Finally the factory owner equips himself and puts his hat on. Adalbert slowly opens the glass door to the balcony, which looks upon a small overgrown park, and he steps out into it.

  Following his gaze, we behold Mount Rachel, beyond the park, where the sun is just now rising. We hear Agide’s signal whirring through the air. In the villages, doors are slammed.

  Adalbert opens the door to find the maid, Ludmilla, with the breakfast tray. She is very young and as pale as wax, like a girl afflicted with anemia. Her hair is brushed back unbecomingly and tied in a knot. Behind her frailty, something of a backwoods Madonna radiates out.

  ADALBERT

  My gracious lord does not want to have breakfast now.

  From the background comes the factory owner’s voice.

  VOICE OF FACTORY OWNER

  Ludmilla may wear her hair down today.

  ADALBERT

  (condescendingly) An honor for the servant girl.

  Ludmilla hesitates at first, then retreats. Adalbert closes the door.

  The closed door.

  SWAMP

  The Forlorn Bluff. On the crest of the Bavarian Woods, there is a nearly open space with some reed grass, which is bordered by dark fir trees on all sides. Like monstrous corpses of trees, enormous beeches lie prostrate on the ground and molder in the bog. Lichen grows over the rotting wood. Some stand far away from each other in loneliness. One is bare; it has been split from top to bottom by lightning. The landscape is primeval, one in which dinosaurs might live.

  Parts of the high plain have turned into swamps, with flowering moss and, every now and then, round waterholes, like eyes emerging from the darkest Dark. From the forest, a hush blows over. We can gaze far into the Bavarian Woods. Hillcrest after hillcrest and woodland after woodland—all are of a deep darkness. A great quiet over the treetops. Hias crosses the bog, sloshing, swaggering. He pauses.

  HIAS

  Moooo—

  He listens.

  HIAS

  Moooo—

  Hias advances a few steps and spots the bull he has been looking for. He attaches a little bell around the calm beast’s neck. Hias goes first; the bull follows him. The bull sinks in the boggy mud almost up to his back, but he moves on. The bell is jangling. They disappear into the woods. A cold autumn fog draws near.

  VILLAGE

  The village is awake now. Something is going to happen. Women are peeking discreetly from the windows. On the clay road, many people are moving diagonally, to the left. The glass-factory owner is proceeding forth in a grandiose state. There is some strange enchantment lying over the people. Some move ahead in dancing, stamping steps. It is like a religious trance, just before the end of a pilgrimage.

  Behind the factory owner, crippled people dribble in pursuit.

  We can hear Paulin’s cry. The cripples come to a halt, glance at each other, and move on.

  THE FOOL ON THE ROOF

  En route to Lostallo, a microscopic cluster of abandoned huts beyond the San Bernardino Pass in southern Switzerland, the team stopped at a café for some food. When the impromptu party was finished—after Fritz Steinhauer had tamed his Judy Garland routine and Herzog decided not to swipe the engraved prints hanging on the walls—everyone tumbled onto the lawn outside. There van Anft blasted his blues harp; the hash-starved farmer, Ahmad, whacked monotonous rock-guitar riffs; and Steinhauer resumed his falsetto fantasies for every dog in town, who were now looking dumbstruck, confused.

  The last drop of Irish brandy vanished, so Herzog ordered the team to drive on. “You take the Hystericals,” he whispered to me.

  The cars moved in procession back on the road. Herzog, his fist thrusting skyward out the window, signaled to me to look at the passing landscape. I contemplated an ethereal, green, velvet meadow gently rolling upward toward the horizon, where a tree and church steeple stood in the blue.

  The Hystericals, meanwhile, chattered away around me. Ahmad pondered over his soon-to-be-meteoric acting career and bemoaned the scarcity of jobs available to him. “Jumping jack flash, man. Fuck,” he often sighed. The beady-eyed Kossick caressed his pompadour, reflecting that this Heart of Glass undertaking was the most fascinating he’d had since he’d worked on a kibbutz for two weeks as a Lutheran theological student five years before. And Steinhauer talked about his face.

  “You would cry,” he said to me through the rearview mirror. “You would cry if you knew how beautiful I really am. It was funny, so funny. My face was the most wonderful face. I looked like an angel, and everyone fell in love with me every day.”

  Steinhauer began ruefully fingering all the natural folds and furrows around his mouth and eyes. “But then I had the most terrible accident, in a car. It was funny. It cut my face so badly, that beautiful face, and all I could do was cry. Cry and cry and cry. I cried all the time, and I never came out of my mother’s house, until now.

  “Look at these ugly, ugly scars,” he continued, pointing to some lines engraved by the pain of his vague cradle fate. “Once my skin was like silk. It really was like silk. But the car crash—these scars—are a bad feeling, a sad, sad life. A sad, sad life. This face was the face of an angel. Believe me. Promise that you believe me. I cried so much. I cried and cried—it’s funny, very funny—”

  I drove onward, following Herzog. We crossed the San Bernardino Pass, an awesome, yawning gap of gray and white peaks. Then we descended toward our destination near the Italian frontier. I ogled hillsides dotted with hundreds of stone huts, all of them blind to the valley, being windowless. As Steinhauer performed a medley of Broadway and Bob Dylan songs, the convoy pulled into Lostallo.

  Two hundred meters off the highway, the team set itself up among five forgotten, rough-hewn dwellings nestled in the shadow of the mountains beyond. The first scene to be shot depicted a religious procession down a dusty road. First, Herzog envisioned the villagers to be approaching their salvation, but afterwards he decided that no, they were leaving it. Most of the film’s actors partook in this scene, with several members of the team appearing in the procession as well—the Priest, the psychoanalyst, and me included. Martje Herzog donned a peasant’s dress and, standing on the threshold of an empty hut, appeared in one of her husband’s films for the first time.

  A motley throng of believers assembled on the road, and Herzog explained what he wanted them to do. He told them to walk forward with evenly paced steps, their eyes wide and uplifted toward some mysterious thing beyond the clouds. Then he placed the regular actors under hypnosis. Four minor characters were positioned at the fore of the march, with Adalbert and his master, the factory owner, to the rear. They were followed by the insane father in his easy chair, seemingly sad to be alive, and four workmen carrying him.

  Herzog started putting his final touches on the scene. Leaving the pilgrims, he ran ahead one hundred meters to check the camera placement, then sprinted to the women amid the cluster of huts. Next, tirelessly, he picked up three tin basins filled with a smoking powder and placed them far apart to lend the setting an atmosphere of mist.

  When he raced back to the hypnotized actors waiting on the road, the scene hit a snag. A farmer drove up in his pic
kup and began removing the smoking basins, complaining that they would ruin his ruined land. Saxer went over to reason with the farmer, but the man was belligerent and refused to give in. Herzog brought the actors out of hypnosis. A waiting game began. Ten minutes later, his pasture tilled, the silly farmer put his shovel away and departed. Again, the actors were hypnotized.

  The procession started, and the camera rolled. One of the entranced men in front lifted his broad cloak, appearing birdlike, as another tossed his walking step aside in ecstasy. The scene seemed to be working. Herzog ordered a second take. The same as before. Good, but something was wrong. Herzog pointed at me.

  “You stick out like a sore thumb,” he said as he yanked the novice thespian out of camera range.

  “You were pitiful,” added the assistant cameraman.

  “My acting career is in ruins,” I moaned.

  The next image depicted the villagers flocking to hear Agide make his odd musical signal. Rather than the log hammering that the scenario had called for, Herzog decided to make the signal with an ancient Swiss instrumental recording he had recently unearthed in a supermarket and found to be more effective. The instrument was a heavy, painted ceramic bowl, inside of which a silver coin rolled in a circle, making harsh, hypnotic sounds that altered in pitch according to the level of its route around the bowl.

  Two minor scenes were filmed the following day, with just a skeleton crew on location at Lostallo, as the others took the day off. First was a look at the glass-factory owner walking alone through the desolate night with a burning branch in his hand. To get the movement right, the actor would step out from under the camera, pivot on one foot, then move away. Herzog demonstrated this and made it look easy: he rose up facing the camera, planted his left foot, swung his right leg around, and walked off. He told me it was a shot he picked up from Luis Buñuel in his film Nazarin.

  The young factory owner, however, was not as agile as the director. Time and time again, the actor rehearsed this movement, never quite getting it right until Herzog simplified it a half hour later.

  As the rehearsals dragged along, the assistant cameraman improvised a day-for-night filter needed for the scene. He combined two dark filters meant for other purposes, then stretched and taped blue translucent plastic over the second one. This device would transform the actually sun-swept landscape into the eerie depths of a charcoal blue night. The assistant cameraman mentioned that a twenty-four-millimeter lens would be used for this scene.

  “It’s Herzog’s favorite lens, I’d say,” he asserted. “He’d probably use it every time if it were only up to him.”

  With the factory owner’s scene finally finished, the cameramen walked to the rear of a hut to prepare the last scene to be shot in Lostallo. Herzog went looking for me and found me standing upside down across the road. He joined me. For two minutes or so, we conversed while upside down. Herzog stood on his hands; I balanced on my head.

  After righting ourselves, we had a quiet talk. I asked him how he could maintain such keen concentration amid so much distraction and with so many responsibilities to handle at once.

  Herzog explained, “I learned how to concentrate by necessity, when I was very young. As a child, I lived with my whole family together in just one room. There were four of us in this tiny place, and each of us did what we chose to do. I would read. I would sit on my bed with a book and read for hours, no matter how much talking and activity was going on around me. Often I would read all day long, and, when I finished, I’d look up to see that my family had completely disappeared.”

  He rejoined his cameramen to shoot the final scene. It was to be a strange image, an improvised dance by the herdsman, Sam—whom Herzog referred to as the Fool—on the roof of a hut in the illusory, day-for-night moonlight. For this slow, awkward ballet, he chose a Jesus Christ look-alike named Wolf Albrecht, who once was involved with Julian Beck’s Living Theatre but now was an organ-grinder in the Munich town square. Albrecht isolated himself and meditated intensely prior to the filming. Then Herzog called for him, and he went up a tree to the rooftop, moving like a wounded snake from one emotive pose to another.

  As his Fool uncoiled dramatically on the edge of the sloped roof overhead, Herzog, looking a bit disturbed, sat down beside me again.

  “Tell me,” he asked quietly, “do you think that what I’ve done will seem ridiculous?”

  “No,” I replied. “Never.”

  THE SOUNDMAN HAYMO

  When the work in Lostallo was done, I returned to my small hotel room in Bellinzona, a town south of the Swiss-Italian frontier. That night, the remaining team members had planned a party in a chalet outside of town, and Herzog had asked me to come along. Just as I was leaving, however, I was told that the Production Manager, who had arranged the affair, had also arranged for me to be excluded and left behind.

  So I headed back to my room. Upon reaching the door, I bumped into the soundman, Haymo Heyder, a native of Yugoslavia who was now living in Germany, Venezuela, and the United States. His bright, undeniable spirit uplifted the team from its doldrums on several occasions. Haymo collared his brooding teammate and ushered me into the room next door. Then he grabbed his cassette recorder and slipped in a tape. I sat down, and for twenty minutes listened to a recording of someone who was fast asleep. The vigorous snores were unforgettable.

  “It’s van Anft,” whispered Haymo. “God, isn’t he beautiful …”

  The Scenario

  BARN

  Paulin stands with a pitchfork on the threshing floor, staring straight ahead. Abruptly, she erupts with a mad cry that emits from her bewildered brain.

  Now we realize that, at her feet, Wudy and Ascherl are entwined in a lifeless tangle.

  In one wing of the huge barn door, the hostess appears.

  HOSTESS

  What are you screaming about?

  She catches sight of the flopped, limp duo.

  HOSTESS

  My God!

  She makes the sign of the cross.

  GLASS FACTORY

  The glassblower Gigl is a man with the chest of a bull, his face glistening with grease in the heat of the furnace. This is his hour, this is his scene—he is aware of his importance.

  A large crowd of townspeople, glassblowers, farmhands, and even farmer’s boys and lumberjacks surround him in heightened expectation. The glass-factory owner is among them; respectfully the crowd keeps him at a distance. Adalbert pushes forward slightly.

  ADALBERT

  Isn’t he wrong? Does he really have Ruby glass?

  Gigl is so sure that, without giving an answer, he takes a big lump of white, glowing glass from the furnace with the aid of his glass pipe. He takes a deep breath so that his chest expands, places the pipe in his mouth, and begins to blow the molten glass into form using nothing but his hands.

  The farmhand beside him nervously opens the wooden mold and causes a rattle amid the breathless silence.

  Gigl shows that he is a true master. He lets the pipe, with its glowing molten lump of glass, dance with the wondrous and knowing movements of his palms. During the process, he is always faster than the inclination of the glass to drip down to the floor. Masterly Gigl plays against the will of the molten, whitish, glowing matter. He blows a gigantic breath into the glass and puffs a balloon out of it all at once, a balloon as big as a man’s skull.

  The glass cools off and begins to show some color. Gigl is holding the balloon, which deftly he sets into large circular movements, first against his apron and then against the white glow of the furnace.

  The glass has an opaque brownish hue.

  The factory owner, who is closest to the object, is so dumbfounded that he makes some downward pumping gestures with his arms, as if he were pumping air into himself. Bending over, when he reaches his shoe tops, he roars.

  FACTORY OWNER

  No!

  He draws the sword and gives the glass a blow. The glass balloon is still soft and sticks to the blade. The factory owner cannot s
hake it off; he throws the sword to the ground.

  Abruptly he turns and moves away with wild steps. Only Adalbert follows him. The others remain motionless, a tableau of petrified horror.

  FOREST

  The herdsman Sam, a lean, elderly day laborer, disappears behind some bulls’ asses into the woods. He and his cattle are driven off by a bear’s distinct grumble.

  Sam is approached by Hias, who is trotting just like a bear while giving out bears’ sounds. When Hias is one step behind Sam, Sam raises his arm in the air and abruptly turns around, ducking down while drawing out his knife. He thrusts it into the upper arm of the imaginary bear. Both are very theatrical, as if partaking in a stage scene.

  Hias roars with pain and drops down, as one would on a stage. Now the bull with the bell appears. He sniffs at Hias, who lies in the bracken.

  OFFICE

  A large, dusty room, almost bare of furniture. The parquet floor is so dried up that it is full of crannies and groans beneath your feet. Some bookshelves crammed with old, yellowed files packed in bundles. On one of the walls, a sofa and an easy chair, both covered with white linen. On the wall opposite, a mirror taller than a man, partly covered, as if blindfolded. Next to it, a display case holding precious samples of Ruby glass. Near the window, which forms a small bay, a desk.

  The glass-factory owner stands before the display case. He wears no overcoat and seems beset by bad dreams.