And as the forest slowly seals itself off into dusk and darkness, my uncle exits it again, a small, lone forest wanderer, or that’s how I picture him amongst the huge trees, almost lost in the scene, a person alone at the edge of the forest, alone under the skies, alone with himself, and yet perhaps in this very moment connected by and with everything and parted and separated from things like never before. And the automobile is waiting down below; he heads there and drives off, over the Johannisberg and over to the forest sports ground, where the first team is training. Most of them come here by car now.
My uncle drives higher and higher up into the forest and is then released from it, under open skies now, driving across the countryside with the Taunus before him, darker and darker, the Autobahn alongside, the cars all with their lights on, rushing through the scene like tiny glow-worms. If J had been born just a few years earlier, he would have been able to come here as a child to marvel at the construction of the Autobahn. It would have been the biggest building site he had ever seen in his life, and certainly the longest. He could have seen an entire army of machinery making its way through the Wetterau, slowly lumbering through the landscape and leaving a multi-lane Reich Autobahn in its wake, along which people have been able to drive ever since, always straight ahead and internationally connected from Sicily to Oslo, maybe even to Helsinki. Today it’s called the Federal Autobahn. Back then, the Wetterauers stood at the edge of it and thought, Now we are at the centre of the world, and everyone celebrated, and the newspapers celebrated too. A new world. Wherever they built these Autobahns, everyone always suddenly thought they were at the centre of the world, just because the whole world was driving past them. Yet when it came down to it, the whole world was driving past everyone else too. But in every district, each new slip road was celebrated as though the world had finally taken notice of this particular corner of the world, as if, like Sleeping Beauty, it had finally been awoken from its deep slumber. And anyone who had a car drove past Bad Nauheim on the Autobahn on the very first day, to try it out just the once, and then came off it again a few kilometers further on at Friedberg, able to say from that day forward that they too had driven along the Autobahn. In essence, the Wetterau is just an Autobahn with a service station attached. Now my uncle sees the construction site for the service station, towards the back of the scene, where the glow worms are hurtling up and down as if they’ve suddenly gone mad and all they want is to strive forwards as quickly as they can and arrive somewhere. In much the same way as my uncle sees the packages at the central postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as always having come from the big wide world, like Barcelona perhaps, or Appenzell, here he sees the cars as having come especially for him, from Amsterdam or perhaps Milan or even from Rome, where the Pope lives, the descendent of Christ, for whose birth the bells of St. Stephen’s in Vienna ring when my uncle sits in front of the radio to listen to them. Inside every glow worm was an entire world. And so J feels safe and calm and like he belongs and is connected to the whole world, the world he is able to be part of, and that is all because of Route 5 of the Federal Autobahn.
Now my uncle is on his way up to the Winterstein. The Variant is struggling noticeably. The path goes straight uphill and is tarmacked. Half-way along, a light comes towards him, a vehicle, and suddenly an American is standing before him on the side of the road in full uniform, shining a light into his face and shouting, Stop! The American, like all Americans in the Wetterau, has a chalk-white face that’s visible even at night. He seems agitated and frantic, coming up alongside the car and making gestures which my uncle takes to mean that he should pull over to the side of the road. My uncle pulls over and stops the car. Now there are suddenly another two Americans there too, who seem to have come out of the forest. One is smoking, and all three have American soldier’s helmets on and seem occupied with something. Now an off-road vehicle comes driving past, but without taking any notice of the three soldiers. One of the Americans is speaking into a walkie-talkie. My uncle gets out of his car.
Hey you, calls one of the Americans.
I, says my uncle. He can’t actually speak English.
Yes you, calls the American, grimacing as if disgusted that a German would have to turn up here at this precise moment.
As my uncle has not mastered English, with the exception of words like I or you and yes and no (essential tools for understanding the occupying forces), he is of course unable to follow what the American is about to say to him. The American waves his machine gun in my uncle’s direction, with the result that J chooses to stay close by the Variant. And now, softly and from afar, a noise that my uncle is familiar with resounds out. All four of them, the three Americans and my German uncle, look up the road. A light shines down the road from above, the noise gets louder, a second light becomes visible behind the first, and they come rolling down one after the other, almost too wide for the road. It’s not implausible that my uncle knows the tank models and is able to identify them, just like the birds in the forest and the meadow, or at the very least he would have claimed that he knew them, but perhaps he doesn’t know them after all and is just overwhelmed by excitement. They get bigger and bigger and louder and louder, shining their headlights on each other, turning into the forest path one after the other. My uncle can see the first one clearly now, its immense gun pointing straight ahead as if the gunman wanted to shoot the way clear and perhaps even sweep the Variant from the road, and an American is looking out from the top and has a helmet on and is allowed to drive the tank and maybe has full responsibility for it, controlling everything and with everything under control and his chalk-white face looking important and officious and stern all at the same time. Even though the tanks are already very close in the darkness, they keep getting bigger and bigger, and then they glide past my uncle on the Winterstein forest path, immense, raucous metal mountains, and no one can hear themselves think anymore, and the Americans can’t make out each others’ words, so a rapprochement is out of the question. The tanks and the Americans staring out of them roll heedlessly past the group of people by the Variant, each of the Americans with his gaze fixed as straight ahead as the tank he is on, or so it seems to my uncle, as if they had grown up together and belonged together always, and it would be impossible to think of them any other way, and yet my uncle, back when they had military shows on the Friedberg fairground, wasn’t even allowed into the little German armoured reconnaissance tank, because he was no longer a child and in any case had the appearance of someone you preferably wouldn’t want to put anywhere. My uncle had never been in a tank. He lived without it; it was only the longing that endured forever, something he was only ever able to dream of. The Winterstein, which during his lifetime was not just the Forsthaus and the TV tower but also the tank road of the Americans, who had come to the country twenty-four years ago but remained ever-young while the Wetterauers got older and older. Occupied Wetterau. My uncle didn’t like Americans. But he did like their tanks. They continue to roll past him, and my uncle stares with his eyes protruding from his head again, longing to have an expert discussion with the soldiers (soldiers in uniform, and there in the forest on a tank exercise to boot, the very highest level of Being) about the tanks and their construction and all their details and technical data, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible due to the language barrier between him, the occupied Wetterauer, and his occupiers. And also because of the awful noise that is currently engulfing the forest road as my uncle stands there next to his Variant. Has he ever been this close to the tanks before? He can almost reach out and touch them; they’re not moving quickly. And now the convoy has passed, an off-road vehicle bringing up the rear, and even the three soldiers on foot are moving away from the scene of the incident. My uncle stands alone in the beam of light that’s coming from his Variant. The tarmacked street has been transformed into a wasteland of sludge and mud clumps and is barely passable. During these years, the Americans would turn up with their tanks every few days, making half of the Winte
rstein impassable, and in the Wetterau Zeitung they would quarrel about why it was always the Germans who had to clear it all up afterwards. Or, to be more precise, the Wetterauers. They didn’t just quarrel in the newspaper, but in Jagdhaus Ossenheim too, in the Goldenen Fass, in Hanauer Hof, in the Licher-Eck (if indeed it existed back then), in the Alter Schmiede, in the Schillerlinde, in the Dunkel, in the Deutsche Haus, in the Krone, and last but not least and above all in Forsthaus Winterstein. Because if you go to Forsthaus Winterstein on a day like this, you’ll need to wash your car straight after. The mud and the slime is spread out on the road all the way to Ockstadt and down to the Friedberg barracks. Some of the metre-long clumps of earth held on for a while, riding the tanks all the way to Friedberg before splatting down on the street and—in doing so—dirtying the whole of the district capital so that everyone always knew: These are the Americans, and you are occupied. And then the Friedbergers would stand before the clods of mud on their road, become inflamed by rage and have to go for a quick beer, and ideally a schnapps too, in order to cope. Exactly how many glasses of beer and how many schnapps were drunk as a result of the dirtying of the little German town of Friedberg in the Wetterau by the occupying powers of the United States of America, no one knows: Bad Nauheim, where the Americans lived, always remained clean, and Friedberg was always soiled. By now, the rumble of the tanks has become quieter, almost non-existent. My uncle gets into his car and struggles to drive over the mud left by the tanks’ tracks; the wheels spin here and there, and within seconds everything is clinging onto the undercarriage, making the Variant heavy and then heavier. But now there are only a few hundred metres to the tank ramp, and from then on the road is in an orderly condition, because the tanks don’t drive there, or at least they’re not allowed to, and the Americans aren’t allowed to set foot in the Forsthaus either (it’s ‘off-limits’). The Winterstein is divided into two, back in ’69 there was the civilian German zone and the American exclusion zone, fenced off and equipped with signs including words like:
Immediate Use of Firearms!
In German, mind you, so that it could be understood.
Sofortiger Schußwaffengebrauch!
Sometimes, you would see the Americans on the road at night. But then again, to me, with their white faces they always seemed devoid of light. At night, these faces had a tendency to gleam. You could see them from afar, and you were best advised to let the occupying forces have the right of way, for beatings were commonplace, while at the same time the white-faced Americans would meet with the German Fräuleins, as the soldiers called them, in the back-rooms of local bars for communal getting-to-know-you sessions. Even at home, on the old company premises, my entire youth was lived in the constant presence of American soldiers, sometimes the whole terrace was full of them. None of these Americans ever saw the inside of our bars, not the Dunkel, not the Schillerlinde, nor the Lascaux, where I spent my youth, a cellar tavern in which even we became lightless figures, running around like rats and slowly grasping something about the world that we were never to forget.
Over at the edge of the meadow, Forsthaus Winterstein comes into view. The windows of the main room shine out into the early evening, there are four cars parked out front, no one comes here on foot at night. The Forsthaus lies there alone; the family that runs it lives in the middle of the forest, completely alone on the Winterstein. My uncle parks in rank and file with the other cars, gets out and stands there for a moment, hunched over a little. Then he walks around each of the other cars, studying them with interest. He walks over to the paddock, but everything is dark there, not a single horse left outside. Aside from the fact that my uncle is almost forty now, everything here is just as it used to be, nothing has changed; only the cars are newer models. My uncle walks into the inn.
The hunters were there.
. . .
Thanks for reading
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The Room
Copyright © 2010 Andreas Maier
Copyright © 2010 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin
Translation copyright © 2014 by Jamie Lee Searle
First published in Berlin, Germany as Das Zimmer.
ISBN 978-0-9891267-6-2
Frisch & Co. Electronic Books Inc.
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The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
v1.0, 20142605
About the author
Andreas Maier was born in Bad Nauheim in 1967. In addition to winning the Ernst Willner Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann Literary Competition in 2000, he received the Jürgen Ponto Foundation’s Literary Support Prize and the Aspekte Literary Prize for his first novel Wäldchestag.
About the translator
Jamie Lee Searle is a freelance literary translator from German. Her recent translations include Ursula Poznanski’s Five and a co-translation (with Shaun Whiteside) of Florian Illies’ 1913. Other translation works include extracts and short stories by contemporary authors such as Anna Kim, Vladimir Vertlib, Ralf Rothmann, Feridun Zaimoglu and Andi Rogenhagen. Together with fellow translators Rosalind Harvey and Anna Holmwood, she co-founded the Emerging Translators Network in late 2010.
Table of Contents
Cover
Contents
The Room
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
About the author
Extras
Extras
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