by H. G. Adler
From the west a light wind blew, rustling the beech trees and the more tender birches that stood out brightly amid the rest of the garden. The earth rose up soft beneath us, our heavy shoes making no noise upon it. We floated along, hurrying. But as the tongue of ridge narrowed ever more and finally fell away steeply, we had left the garden. A couple of steps farther stood a pole with many signs in the middle of an empty clearing that pointed to a number of different directions. We had reached the country’s border. Two paths offered us a choice—one running along the border which had followed the crest to here, another which fell away from the border and ran a bit lower, and which was not as arduous and was better protected from the wind, though it stretched out in almost the same direction as the one that ran along the crest. I recommended to Anna that we take the easier one. She thanked me for being so considerate, yet I should have been the one to choose, not she, since the day belonged to me. I pointed ahead of me and set out on the path that ran along the border. Anna followed in silence. After a brief climb, we managed to scale the Zwercheck without halting. There then followed an easy stretch along the narrow seam and down the hillside, after a short while winding through the ample forest, first right, then left along the border markers. White and new and carefully spaced out, these marked one of the oldest borders on earth.
For this border has existed for a thousand years or more, no war large or small having changed it, no one having called it into doubt or seriously questioned it or needing it to be marked by anything other than the mighty heights of the mountains. There had hardly been any battles on the border, the dense and massive snowy outcrops of the ancient forest having defended it from all the wars. Even the feuds that neighboring lands continued with one another gave way to the inhospitable mountains and pushed on across the passes, taking place in the surrounding lower hills or seeking out other areas where there was more room to maneuver. The villages and isolated farms on both sides of the border held peaceful people hidden by forest and weather. Yet still a son, or even a stalwart warhorse, would have to go off to war, for it wasn’t possible to do so in this blessed district, and so they would go, the army marching elsewhere. No battlefield was pointed out to the visitor, nor any destroyed fortress. Even Bayregg, the fallen castle that guarded the entrance to Angeltal, situated with its old streets built of salt which narrowed as they neared the mountains that had hardly been touched by war. The border kept it away. Over generations, the surveyors always happily came to the mountains and worked together on figuring out just where the border ran. They first did it in the 1760s and, as a memorial to their visit, dates and names were chiseled into stones. They lasted a long time, graying and becoming covered with spots and disappearing into the thickets only when people forgot about them. I saw them once myself, here and also farther south. I was fond of them, and they strengthened my faith in the peaceful survival of people in these neighboring countries. These stones faithfully did their duty for a hundred and seventy years, and served the needs of the forest people no less than those of the distant regents. But then, finally, someone recalled the advances that had been made in the world and sent the surveyors out again, and even they found themselves in agreement. They just knew everything much more precisely, which was the mark of progress. Nonetheless, even after such a long time the art of measuring had not advanced that much, because the men moved a stone only here and there, when they didn’t end up leaving it in its old spot, moving it a step or two into one country, then elsewhere into the other. Rarely was it three steps or even four. None of it did any harm to the border and the countries, and it could be hoped that it would suffice for the next hundred years.
Yet this time things were different. After only a few years, the border fell. There was no battle over it—or at least it was one that took place far away from here in a magnificent hall, where, bent over maps, red pencils held in greedy hands, the supreme leaders had gathered. They didn’t look at the mountain forest; they hardly knew anything about it, never having even seen the border. There they sat in the cold, bright splendor, envious, blasphemous, and afraid, pencils quivering in their fingers. Then they swept away the border, not considering the price to beloved peace, which the border had never destroyed. And as the border ceased to exist, so they pledged themselves to war, which those who were afraid wished to avert and those who were defiant wanted to unleash. The battle didn’t happen in the mountain forest, for the murderers kept their distance, the fields of ruin lying far from here, they not having the heart to attack the forest, sparing, as well, the villages far and wide that also did not suffer as cities on either side were smashed to pieces. From each country people were rounded up and sent away, denied any sense of security. And anyone the leaders—who paid no heed to any old border—no longer wanted around, because they were not worthy of living in their borderless tortured empire, were shunted here and there until they were knocked over the head and were dead within the hour.
When the war was in its last days, there being nothing but moaning and spasms and decay to the east and to the west of the dark-green mountain forest, powerful formations of the fast-moving tanks of the victors pressed through the mountains, though not over the ragged peak, or through the dense forest or through the narrow thickets and the inextricable wood; instead, upon a few wide roads they moved through the passes here and there without paying any attention to the border. With just a glance at the map, they knew that they had crossed the conquered border, after which they leaped into the heartland, in order to finish off the beaten opponent, who hardly amounted to anything and was soon whisked away in dirty bunches to prison, every last one of them.
Now the old border meant something again. Undisturbed and secure, it cut off suffering from the newly separated countries that sensed it and wondered what to do. The border markers on this path do not look as if they have ever been ripped from the ground. Did the old ones just crumble away and disappear? It is astounding, yet they have survived and have just been freshly painted, given a new white coat of lime. I was surprised that the reestablished border was not guarded, no guards to be seen anywhere. Did the border mean so little? It was clearly not secured, as if the war had never happened, the mountain forest shared peacefully by the two countries as always. Yet whoever lived on this side, be it in the nearby valleys or farther off in large and small towns, he no longer had a homeland when raised to speak the language that was spoken beyond this border. The border here in the forest, besides providing smugglers with protection, no longer protected anything the way borders should but instead only threatened. He who yesterday had a home, who wanted to set down roots, had lost his rights. With feeble mothers, with old gray fathers, with babies and children the women could pack their things in a hurry and be off, everything they’d worked for taken away at a single command, the love of one’s country ripped away from its home source, thrown together with others into a couple of prison camps and there sometimes mistreated, often no husbands with them. They had wanted indeed to leave home years ago and had listened either knowingly or unknowingly to the evil ones—and now they hang on somewhere in many different countries or waste away, shoveled into unmarked graves. Many women don’t know what happened to their husbands, no known address, given over to fate and abandoned. But if there were still men among those who were displaced, or if they returned home, they were given orders straightaway and were taken, sometimes with their wives and children, while they who had been sinned against had to make amends for the sins of their neighbors through the torture and misery of forced labor.
But here the border rose up on its own and had no notion of the debacle afoot in the valleys; the living and their scars were not brought into the exalted silence of the forest but, instead, those stolen away were sent across the border in sealed trains with officials riding on them, armed and in uniform. Nothing of them remained here. The path along the border of lost dreamers that one can think of as having wandered off into the tall forest, it didn’t get us into trouble. We saw no one wh
o secretly slipped across the border to bring news or carry away goods. No one wanted to flee; none took the opportunity to do so. If it weren’t so bad, fear would not have forced those threatened to steal away on secret paths. Sometimes I stopped and listened to hear if anyone might crawl out of the underbrush in order to block our way and demand to see our papers. I had a valid pass that stated that I had been released. Out of sheer faith, I had been granted it when I applied at the office for returnees on the second day. They looked at my face and gave me the red card, which said I was a part of them. Some returned home across the border under duress, penniless and pale, while others were forced out in twos. A border unable to be healed, superfluous amid the worlds of the harsh patriarchs—isolated, ignored, and undisputed. I sought nothing from the other country, and from this one I’d already been cut loose. “When at last we are gone, then it will be different. No longer will we belong, not us, not to the mountain forest with its border!” Anna didn’t hear me. I looked at the path that fell away from the crest, promising, shady, and narrow, winding down to the valley of the other country, though from that country no one approached the border. Was it meant to be closed? Who needed this path? Who ever used it? Now we had reached another peak, its top a stony flat ledge covered with impenetrable sticky young trees, with a couple of taller ones rising above it. No view of the countryside offered itself.
“I can’t see where we are,” said Anna.
“Are you afraid? Soon we’ll come to a place where one can run away.”
“Without any bags?”
“If you don’t want to stay, then you don’t worry about the bags. It’s best to escape inconspicuously. If you’re stopped, you can say that you are just out for a hike, a carefree wanderer out for his own pleasure.”
“Do you want to leave? Where to?”
“I don’t know if I want to. And to which country? Where it all happened? There’s a wall between me and it.”
“Then why do you talk about moving on?”
“I just do. I’m toying with the idea. I’m searching for me. The feeling of being lost in a bottomless alienation. There’s no home for me here anymore; it only leads to anchorless thoughts. Look, here’s another little path. It looks quite pleasant.”
“Will you try it, just for a bit? Not in earnest, just for fun. Just a couple of steps, so that you feel in your fingertips what it feels like to escape.”
“Please, be serious!”
“I am, really. I only thought it could help you.”
“It doesn’t help me. It’s also enough that I can imagine precisely what it means to enter the unknown. The forest is the same there as it is here. I know it, because I’ve wandered around over there a good bit myself. Down there lies Lohberg or Egersberg. I can show you on the map. First, you walk down. When you reach the first buildings, it will release such a shiver of joy inside your tensed-up soul, for you will be saved, your escape complete and a success, nothing more can happen to you. I will be recognized as a political refugee and will be able to begin a new life. I will speak to the first wary farm boy I encounter. No, he won’t be afraid of me, for I mean him no harm and want nothing from him. He only needs to point the way ahead, the next best path toward Lam. There I will certainly be taken in, perhaps not happily, but I can talk with the people. In Lam there is also the last station of the little train that will take me out of the mountains.”
“So you want to leave? Just tell me somewhere in the world where you’d like to stay!”
“Stay? Here! I don’t mean exactly right here, not in sight of the border. But nearby. In a little forest cabin or a warden’s hut, in a forester’s house. There I’d like to stay, where I cannot be, where I cannot remain, where I do not belong. Can’t you see that, since I know I don’t belong, I can’t stay? I have to leave, and I’ll land somewhere—somewhere that hardly pleases me, or only a bit. There I’ll stay, because I can. Where that will be, a country that awaits me, I can’t say today, but that doesn’t matter. It just can’t be here—not here, not on either side of this border.”
I said it all calmly, yet Anna stood there listening carefully. But I wanted to move on and give Anna the chance to see that she might learn the peace that the path grants to the wanderer when he follows a stretch of woods through the mountains and doesn’t see a single soul on either side of him. Anna should see how the tree line grows ever shorter, how the soft lobes of the leaves shift ever lower, as before us in the distance a train crosses the valley flats and disappears, appearing again from its depths to climb abruptly, the spruces towering up around it, and the chug of the train gently swaying off to the left and up, seeming to disappear. There the forest wall rose up, mighty and tall, reaching for the dark-blue stretch of sky and touching it with its tall peaks. Carefully I urged Anna along, hardly saying a word. She needed to sense what enchanted me here, the green feel of an inevitable end that we could never escape, except to know that it is not an end but rather something soluble through which we could carefully stride without knowing what happened. This type of wandering suspended us in a silver rush, expectancy taking hold of us, it being good when the path is arduous, such that we have to pay attention to its peaks and valleys, the view of the endless open distances also requiring one to observe the near-at-hand, constantly thinking about the next step in order that it be made safely. In this way, we moved right along, neither too fast nor too slow, a wavelike, disjointed syncopation stepping into the glowing high afternoon.
I felt grateful, grateful was what I felt behind the woman striding ahead of me, who wanted to be united with a man again in order to seek a new life, though I was even more grateful for the undeserved moment of grace that this place had granted me in such pure fashion, such that in these enchanted hours I could rise above my plight. It was wonderful to be able to show Anna this forgiving secret place after such difficult days. For so long I had been denied the chance to share its freedom with another person, the border almost hidden and not traversable. It would have been good to say something, but speech seemed imponderable, and no one said anything, nor was I able to. Much as I was moved to say something from deep inside, nothing came out when I tried to put it into words. Everything remained clogged up inside, tightening upon itself, stagnating and unable to be shared with another. Yet here was a place that dissolved the source of comprehensible speech. The grave that first turned consciousness into something unsayable, confusing and burying it, had opened up before me again. I sensed that Anna followed suit and sensed something, herself blossoming in the distance of the mountains. Only children can speak correctly and be understood, I thought, and that’s why one loved them and feared them. We, however, Anna and I, were forced into childhood through the benediction of the border, its echoes reverberating through it.
Now the path wound back and forth more often, our goal for the day near, the mountain path rising ever higher, always steeper, sharper, more sparsely overgrown. Not many crests were as craggy as this within the mountain forest, such that the trees that crowned it were not as dense as the others. The first thing the hiker encountered was the hard, naked cliffs with their jagged thrusts. From the path that we had chosen they were the first things we could see, a wall that rose up above the forest wall. The steep path grew smaller, embedded among the rocks, the border not following along and remaining behind. Above the Kegelberg, it bent like a horn and shot its bare crags high above the neighboring land. And, farther down, the hiking lodge stands across the way—indeed, closer to the border.
“The border is not entirely straight,” joked Anna.
“The border is too old for that. Who knows who came up with it.”
“That anyone could even think of agreeing on it. I can’t imagine how they even decided to construct it.”
“It’s hard to imagine. They think too little about it. The lake, the river, the crest line, the way things are laid out here, or where languages divide people—that’s all obvious. But to divide it up haphazardly across areas that are not at all di
fferent on either side, that’s astounding.”
“As a child, I was really afraid of it. I always thought behind the border everything must be different. Almost every summer our parents traveled with us children outside the country. I was always really nervous. The border station, that I understood, but then I was told that was not the border. I looked out the window in order to be sure not to miss it. My father had to point it out to me. Whether or not he knew where it was I don’t know. He’d suddenly call out, ‘There, look!’ Then I was satisfied, no matter if it was there or not. I just imagined that the air was different here than there, a different smell, and that made me happy.”
“It was the same for me. The crossing into a different country, which I believed could hardly be noticed, and yet there was something wonderful about it, just as you say, be it the air or the smell. Maybe the people would look different as well. But here in the mountain forest, even above on the crest, we noticed no difference. The land was the land, and the forest the forest. It could be that you had to seek out the people in the valleys in order to be convinced that the countries were at all different.”
We had reached the hiking lodge, but we wanted to walk up to the peak before we turned back. The day belonged to us alone. The afternoon had already passed, nor were there any other hikers nearby. But earlier visitors had left traces, the ugly remains of bits of food and thoughts scratched into the placid rocks. The peak had already been conquered. Last came the flat top of the cliffs, with a stile marking the summit. We didn’t say a word; only the west wind blew upon us. We could see a long way, but our gaze remained on the nearby forests, heavy and thoughtful, and then immediately around us. Then we looked back in the direction from which we had come, the blackish-green arched ceiling that stretched all the way to Zwercheck, where it fell away. Then we turned toward the south, where the mountain forest split and branched off far into the other country. That is Pfahl, a name meaning “pile” that was well chosen. I pointed out to Anna the peak whose name I knew to the south of the great Arber, the only mountain of the range whose round top towered so high that it would tolerate no trees. All that grew there were knee-high evergreens, while farther up there were only the muted colors of mountain meadows. Separated by a chasm, the ridge ran down to the smaller Arber. Then we were closer to the mountains, yet separated by a valley that widened, each peak a step lower—the Enzian, the Schwarzeck, the Ödriegel, the Mühlriegel—smaller mountains following, then many other high peaks that looked about the same, stretching out ever farther into the countryside. They could be distinguished by their greenish-brown or blue spots while sinking ever lower and more gently into the milky gray distance. Between us and Pfahl was the Valley of White Rain, which greeted us nearby with its bright fields and meadows. There its peaceful villages showed themselves so dainty and humble, the mountain on which we stood rising up from the valley so broad and powerful that it dominated it entirely. The Osser is a proud, majestic mountain, though it is not by far the highest of the mountains in the range, and yet it rests its case on being the last high northern bedrock of both countries.