Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  I whispered to Herzog, “He’s a weasel!”

  To which Herzog whispered back, “He’s not a weasel—he’s The Weasel.”

  Commencing his meal with a piece of bread and a bowl of clear broth, Scheitz confessed that this acting job was a particularly hard task for him, as it was keeping him away from two other projects that, as far as he was concerned, were much more important. First, he said, he was in the final stages of “a magnificent Mass” that he was composing. This Mass possessed elements both musical and spiritual that, until now, were “absolutely inconceivable,” and he went on to say that upon completing the work in a year or so, his proven worth would exceed that of any composer in history.

  “Except Beethoven,” he admitted.

  I carefully followed what The Weasel had to say and sensed the hushed sound of Thought, afraid to speak. I further observed that the more Scheitz pondered, the more he’d eat. Filling his plate with sausage and potatoes, Scheitz next mentioned his second unfinished project, his “Universal Treatise.” Scheitz explained that for thousands of years, man has sought to find the meaning of his existence through theories much too complex and misguided to matter. Isaac Newton was wrong, he said. So were Copernicus, Kant, and, most of all, Einstein. He declared that the only philosophers worth considering other than himself were Galileo and, again, Beethoven.

  Scheitz went on to say that the nature of the universe was truly quite simple. On the back of a Heart of Glass production information sheet, he illustrated his point. Scheitz drew a vertical line; adding two arrows pointing upward, he said that, essentially, one must realize that out of the four points of the compass, only north and south really exist, and of these two, the one that counts is north. The dynamics of magnetic attraction explain this, he continued, drawing three diagrams on the top half of the page. Attending to the larger one first, Scheitz showed that accepted notions of magnetic attraction are indubitably false. He quickly marked an auxiliary diagram above while maintaining that all east-west activity is doomed due to the north-south activity running through it. He then said that on any ordinary magnet, energy of a primary—meaning “necessary”—nature runs around the magnet, leaving all apparent magnetic action inside as the hidden and truly significant action takes place outside, always heading north.

  The same thing applies to atomic energy, Scheitz asserted, directing attention to a little illustration he’d made to the right of the larger one. The only difference between the two types of energy, he allowed, was that the atomic and subatomic particles don’t actually exist, no matter what Einstein said.

  When I asked Scheitz to account for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Weasel said they were just more Hollywood forgeries.

  “Forget about it,” he recommended.

  Scheitz put a hard-boiled egg on his plate and resumed. Working now on the bottom half of the information sheet, he demonstrated how universal energy operates. The core of creation is always stable—which is the secret, in his estimation. Although energy forever flees south, he explained that this merely reinforces the north-oriented equilibrium, which needs some deviation to maintain a proper balance. Scheitz added that all of this might be elucidated mathematically but, then again, one has to understand the fundamental fraudulence of mathematical theory and technique. Declaring that the only valid mathematical device is the square root, he set down his calculations very persuasively. Then he turned to me.

  “All of this abstraction is meaningful and good,” commented Scheitz, “but two exceedingly simple things can expose the lies of Kant and Goethe and Einstein more comprehensively.”

  For the first point, he accused the men of deliberately misrepresenting their notions, of ignoring or supporting the deceptive yellow-blue illusion that trades upon the key to universal law, of knowing their theories were groundless.

  “Yet they wrote those books anyway,” Scheitz charged. “How dare they. It is perfectly obvious that the first essential point is this: No matter what you think, no matter what you see, there is no such thing as the color green.”

  I asked The Weasel what the second point was.

  He replied that with the illusion gone, a gap remained and awaited definition, a gap wherein the key to all universal law might be found.

  “It is one word,” Scheitz said. “‘Feilgau.’” He proceeded to write the intriguing word across the bottom of the page.

  When Scheitz excused himself and went to converse with Friedrich at another table, I was left with “Feilgau.” The word was baffling. I split it in two, linking “feil” to “vile”—but “vile” in a very big way. Then I got to “gau” and got nowhere. I thought that it was related somehow to “grau,” the German word for “gray,” but instead decided that “gau” was closer to “chaos,” which in German sounds like “cows.” So the word assumed the aspect of some terrible emptiness, or murderous gray pit, or endless yawn.

  Having learned the dark secret of the enigma, I turned to Herzog, asking, “What is ‘Feilgau’?”

  “It cannot be explained. Scheitz made it up,” Herzog said.

  The team began to head back to the castle one hundred meters away. As they strolled along, some of the townspeople came out to catch a glimpse of their visitors and, pointing excitedly at the rickety Scheitz, were heard whispering in awe to their neighbors, “There is the director Herzog. There he is—the puny one!” Obliviously Scheitz stepped along like an antique prince displaying his incognito wherever he goes.

  Once the scene inside the cluttered office was shot without much trouble, the team transported its gear inside the bedchamber, where the prayer scene would ensue. Herzog sat with the factory owner and Scheitz to give them their lines and to preface the instructions they’d be given while under hypnosis; then they went inside to begin. Herzog hypnotized the two men simultaneously, suggesting to them a mood of grave piety, then placed them at the altar. The factory owner kneeled head down before the altarpiece; his servant kneeled on the floor beside him, hands clasped ardently at his breast. While the cameramen and the lighting man, Huck, prepared the set, I wondered aloud why a somber scene like this wasn’t more stylized, with dramatic lighting effects and the like. Herzog informed me that such treatment didn’t suit him, at least not then. Expounding further about this, he mentioned that “my characters have no shadows.” I was staring at the entranced factory owner; on the wall behind him was Herzog’s shadow, fist upraised.

  The scene was shot. It went as planned, except for one minor deviation. Before Adalbert peeps his “Amen,” the factory owner was to say, “After the Sin there is no sound.” In German, the word for “sound” is pronounced like the English word “tone”; the hypnotized actor, however, uttered the word “tod”—pronounced “tote”—meaning “death.” And so the line became, “After the Sin there is no death.” Herzog decided that he liked the second version better, but the shrill chirping of a sparrow outside ruined the take.

  “Birds are nothing but a nuisance,” muttered Herzog.

  With the day’s shooting finished, the team began packing up. Scheitz waddled downstairs and out into the yard, where the Priest was waiting for him.

  “I want you to make your confession to me, Herr Scheitz,” ordered the Priest, who ushered The Weasel to the side of the castle where a large easy chair was sitting. The Priest sat in the chair and told Scheitz to kneel on the grass beside him. Scheitz complied with nary a word of doubt or protest, and he commenced to confess to the priest his vast and secret knowledge of life and his awareness of the pretenders to such knowledge. Suddenly, just as he started to inform the Priest of his “Universal Treatise,” he spotted me fifty yards away behind the Priest’s sixteen-millimeter movie camera, then discovered a small microphone poking out from under his priestly robes.

  “You too?” whispered Scheitz. “I could have lied and saved myself.”

  Scheitz stood up.

  I rode back to the hotel in Arnstorf with Herzog. I commented that it seemed to me that the film, considering t
he actors, was as much anthropological as it was a fictitious narrative.

  “All of my films are anthropological,” responded Herzog, as the van passed a roadside shrine that had been stripped of its holy image by vandals. Seconds later, Herzog hit the brakes—then, a thump. We jumped out to find a bloody hare on the road. Herzog pondered the carcass and wondered what to do with it. I said it would surely stink up the van. Herzog, seeing that the fatal injury was a crushed skull, placed it in the van and said its meat could be salvaged for eating. Across the field where night had fallen, giant flames hit the dim horizon. Herzog thought it might be a building burning, in which case he’d grab his cameramen and film the glass-factory fire then and there. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be an infernal garbage dump.

  Finally I got back to my hotel room. The word “Feilgau” was on my mind, and, after thinking over my dissection of the imaginary word, I decided that it could be translated best to mean “The Great Vile Yawn of Creation.” But when I checked the word out properly, the dictionary said it meant “Region for Sale.” So I switched off the light and went to sleep, with a tightness under my chest, in a bed too short to spread out in.

  WA’HID

  “My characters have no shadows,” Herzog had remarked prior to shooting on location in Pischelsdorf. “Each of them is a character without a past, or whose past does not matter. They come out of the darkness, and people who come out of the darkness cast no shadow. The light always hurts them, so the character is there, at the moment, and then is gone to his obscurity. Their actions are somehow oblivious, it seems, to them.”

  That morning’s work would take place in a barn behind the inn, on the threshing floor where Wudy and Ascherl had flopped, seemingly dead, one atop the other. When Wudy and Ascherl arrived on the set, Herzog led them back to the spot on the threshing floor, where they were instructed to lie down on the hay-strewn ground. For several minutes, Herzog experimented with angles and positions for the men to sprawl in, finally deciding to leave them crisscross, with Wudy atop the dead Ascherl. Herzog again repositioned the men as the cameraman established the scene’s perspective. The director took Wudy’s limp hand, spaced the thumb apart from the fingers with each delicate finger straight, the extended arm curved.

  The cameraman shot a medium close-up of Wudy and Ascherl, then moved the camera to the rear of the barn for Paulin’s entrance and her discovery of the knotted bodies. Paulin, whose head was shaved (against her will) for the film moments before, was placed under hypnosis by Herzog on a crude bench beside an aged thresher. He told her that she would find the two men inert on the ground, that she would stare at them quietly until, seconds later, she would imagine a voice telling her the men were dead, and she would scream, horrified. But Herzog emphasized that the scream must not be one of uncontrollable panic; rather, it should emit slowly, first from below, up through her arms to her hands, and, finally, forcefully, from her mouth. He placed her in back of Wudy and Ascherl, holding her tenderly from behind, whispering gently in her ear.

  The cameras rolled. Paulin stood gaping at the sight of the men. Slowly her hands rose toward her mouth, her elbows reaching out to either side. Her breast heaved with a stifled shriek, and her hands lowered with arms outstretched, stiff. Then Paulin drew her hands back upon her heart and, suddenly, screamed, stopping immediately, strangely so.

  Herzog ordered a print of the take but wasn’t satisfied. Paulin performed her stylized trauma once more, but now, upon reaching the brink of her scream, she simply gasped, then shuddered, then sucked in her breath. It was an extraordinary moment, yet Herzog told the script girl, “No take.” During the filming, Herzog heard a reaper move across a distant meadow. No one, not even the soundmen, heard it. But Herzog insisted he did. The soundman, Haymo, replayed the tape, and through his sensitive headphones the faintest rumble of a tractor could be discerned.

  Third, fourth, and fifth takes were ordered, then a sixth. This time, just as an uneasy languor was descending upon the production team in the cold barn, a gray cat stepped onto the threshing floor as the camera rolled. Paulin, her concentration focused solely on the lifeless men at her feet, never noticed as the cat mimicked her movements . The team held its breath. When Paulin slowly put her hands to her mouth, the mesmerized cat arched its back and froze. Paulin dropped her hands, her neck snapping forward like a whip; the cat uncoiled, its eyes glued to the bodies of Wudy and Ascherl. Paulin relaxed and inhaled deeply; the cat calmed down and stepped over to the barn door. There it hovered, in frame, gazing back upon the scene-in-progress as Paulin screamed for the camera. Then the little intruder fled, and the camera stopped rolling. This was the take Herzog had been looking for. For all his precision and preparation, it was kissed by pure life, by chance.

  Herzog later discussed the work that morning. It had been difficult for him, he admitted. “It’s strange. I hardly have any memories of what’s happened during the filming so far, of how and why and what the impulses were. Sometimes I think, Have I dreamt that I’ve been making a film? Or, Have I done anything at all?”

  Martje Herzog remarked that she and her husband had been married for ten years as of this day. Herzog related an incident from the night before.

  “I was asleep at home, and Martje appeared before me. She walked over to the edge of a cliff and stood there, tottering. I felt frightened and dashed toward the edge, where I seized her, saving her as she was about to fall off the cliff and die. Right at that point, Martje awoke in a panic. My hands were around her throat, and I was squeezing—”

  “He was choking me to death,” said Martje.

  “I was trying to protect her virtue,” Herzog countered.

  On lunch break, Herzog was told of a bird at a farmhouse nearby that had a flat-billed rooster’s head and the body of a duck. As it waddled, it grunted a most frightening sort of grunt, the squat monster’s hybrid physiology horribly grotesque and awry.

  The instant he heard of the bird, Herzog grabbed cameraman Jörg and got into his van, driving over the green farmland to a little house, where he found his prey. Herzog pilfered the fowl and brought it back to the set. As the team readied for shooting, he handed the grotesque creature to Paulin, who cradled it like a baby before giving it to Hias, the herdsman seer, who set it down on the table in front of him. The strange creature remained on the table obediently during the scene, in which Hias whispers a grave apocalyptic vision amid the drunken din as Paulin stands over him.

  In the doorway prior to the next take, Herzog took a piece of chalk and inscribed WA’HID on the wood lintel above his head, an Arabic word whose unknown meaning mystified him, then moved out of frame and signaled for the camera to roll. The actors, who had been hypnotized, performed according to plan. With Hias staring beyond the fat, freakish bird before him, uttering his poetic prophecies, the dim-witted Paulin climbed onto his table and started stepping round and round, ever so slowly, in a tiny circle. Hias never batted an eyelash as her dance became an odd striptease. Paulin removed her rags with peculiar herky-jerky moves and gestures, creating a stifled kind of drama as she bared her chest, leaving her on the table top wearing nothing but her boots and pantaloons. But, abruptly, the stolen white-and-red fowl rose and spread its enormous wings with stunning grace, dominating and transforming the image to steal the scene.

  “Chance is the lifeblood of cinema,” reflected Herzog. He ordered a print of the decisive take.

  Herzog and his wife drove back to the little farmhouse with the bizarre bird. Handing the monster over to the kindly old woman who lived there, Herzog explained to her just what he had done and why. Then he asked her if she could say exactly what had caused her bird to be the way it was. The woman looked at him, perplexed. Herzog simplified his question, asking her simply what the creature was. She said it was a duck.

  LUDMILLA

  Once more, on the last day of shooting in the Castle Walchsing, Herzog confessed to a persistent uncertainty about the film. He asked me what I thought. This time I sugges
ted that Herzog make use of close-ups, saying that this would add an intimate dimension to the effects lent by the actors’ hypnosis.

  “I never use close-ups,” Herzog replied firmly. “Mostly, as close as I allow myself to come is from the breastbone up. Close-ups are a personal violation of the actor. They destroy his privacy, and at the same time they intrude upon a viewer’s solitude. I have more respect for those who view my films than to ruin their solitude.

  “But,” he went on, “I have resolved something. I thought before we shot the last scenes that we would have reached a breakthrough by now. If all went perfectly here, there would be nothing for me to worry about, nothing to doubt. However, that doesn’t matter anymore. Everything will come, and I know what the answer will be: the answer will come in the editing.”

  Three small scenes were planned for the Walchsing finale, each one featuring the servant girl, Ludmilla. In the first scene would be the image of the frail girl gazing upon the display case filled with objects made of glass, and she would weep. Herzog sat her down and put her under hypnosis. Then he told Ludmilla what she would feel upon opening her eyes. He said that she’d be very, very unhappy, that this horrible unhappiness would make her cry, that she would cry and cry until tears fell softly over her face. Ludmilla stood and faced the glass, opening her eyes. Instantly her chest filled with sorrow. Tears appeared and flowed from her eyes as she began to weep from the heart. Jörg filmed the scene in a single take.

  The next scene had Ludmilla standing behind a door, unseen. She knocks, and Adalbert opens the door to find her standing there holding a heavy tray. Herzog put Ludmilla under hypnosis again and closed the door. He found the scene quite difficult to do because of the need to give Ludmilla her cues through the closed door. Several takes transpired, with the servant girl standing all the while alone with her tray in the other room. As Jörg leaned over to discuss the upcoming take, Herzog lent an ear, then, suddenly, bolted and ran into the next room, where he took the tray away from Ludmilla. He felt it was too heavy for her, even though he knew that she could feel no strain, being hypnotized as she was. Herzog ordered the team to set up for the last scene.