“But there are things you can only find or buy at certain places. Seashells, corals, rocks. You can use them as paperweights, to keep letters from flying off your desk.”
“I never get letters.”
“Well, not just letters. Maybe documents, or bills.”
“The wind can blow them away for all I’m concerned.”
“Still. Something always remains from a trip.”
“Surely. But you shouldn’t test me,” he remarked irritably.
She fell silent. It was quiet in the room but even quieter outside. The window was open, yet the estamin curtain was motionless. The air had a hard time breathing through it. A tardy storm, the rearguard of summer, noiselessly lit up the sky above the woods.
“Listen,” Siegelmann suddenly said, “I’ve never taken a trip before.”
She laughed. “You just want to tell me that this is your first real trip, and that the others, however nice and adventurous they were, don’t count.”
“You’re mistaken,” he gasped, “I’ve never traveled at all.”
She sat down in an old rocking chair next to the tiled stove, began to gently rock back and forth, and all she said was “Ploieşti.” And as if this word was the only one she could grasp, she began to repeat it over and over to the rhythm of the rocker.
“At first I thought I could get away without a confession,” continued Siegelmann. “Just this morning, before the ceremony, I thought I was strong enough. Before we entered this room, I hoped to keep weaving you into my dream-world, like ornament on brocade.”
She stopped rocking for a moment and stared at him in disbelief. Then she began all over again, an interminable “Ploieşti.”
“Cut it out!” he yelled. “It’s not like that. It’s different. You might be thinking: Why today of all days? Why now? Well, let me tell you, it was your things that broke me down. Not some kind of sudden insight, considerateness or even love. To hell with your ‘Ploieşti’! It’s the little things that did me in. The way you pulled them out of your suitcase, one by one. They belong to someone else, not me, these utterly foreign things. All these containers, vials and tubes, stubbornly insisting, ‘We’re reality!’ It’s as if they’ve conspired against me, all these unbearable silk blouses and scarves. They’ve made me too cowardly to even be a coward. ‘We’re real, how about you?’ they say. ‘We belong to a real person, and you’ll be part of our lives now. Are you as real as we are?’ I beg you: Stop singing!”
Indeed, while he was speaking and she was ceaselessly rocking, she had put the word “Ploieşti” to a melody.
“And I want to confess something else,” he started again. “Sometimes it dawned on me that you knew or sensed that all of my stories were mere fantasies or, let’s say, lies, and that your feigned belief was an even greater feat of acting than my feigned experiences were. Why did you smile when I told you about the tavern-keeper’s wife in Girgenti, where I’ve never been? You were humoring me when I turned the light on in my globe so it looked like a lamp. Admit it! You basically knew that I’d never been farther than Birkenau.”
“Ploieşti, Ploieşti,” she crooned, rocking like a lullaby.
“My father said that women knew things without even asking or learning or doing them. Even the simplest of them is a sibyl. She carries something within her, he said, that comes from time immemorial and points to eternity, and it’s from this point that she lives. How did my father, a mere railroad official, know that? Mind you, he didn’t say that until after my mother died. So tell me, which of us was stronger from the start: me, with my Hardangerfjord and Mont St Michel and Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, or you, who knew that there was nothing behind it but Birkenau?”
Magda got up. “Who are you?” she asked. “Richard Siegelmann, travel agent at Schenker, someone whose world has fallen apart. Who are you? A poet without a poem, a bricklayer without a trowel. You are who you are. But you were more when you created the world. I’ll be going on a journey now.”
He didn’t try to stop her, even though the storm was fast approaching and a sudden gust of wind blew drizzle into the room.
“It’s often like that with newlyweds,” said Frau Kalmus, doing her best to cheer up Siegelmann. “Only that which becomes routine is useful in life.” She brought in tea with rum. Outside, thick cords of rain began to lash the landscape, lightning crossed the sky, and dreadful, merciless thunderbolts ricocheted from cliff to cliff. And as is common in the countryside during storms, the electricity suddenly went out. Frau Kalmus came back with a burning candle. She sat down with Siegelmann, who had left his tea untouched. “She’ll come back, don’t you worry,” she prophesied, “she’s probably holed up somewhere. Nowadays girls run off so easily, but they come back just as easily. Back in my day, things were different. They used to say: Be good at something and be somebody, and any girl will be happy with you. To be somebody, that meant doing what you wanted. And being good at something, that meant feeling certain that luck was on your side, no matter if your job was swinging a hammer or setting watch springs. That kind of man was good enough for any girl, even if she was the empress. And a man like that didn’t need to talk much.”
That was it, thought Siegelmann: too much talking. A man who is nothing has to talk. And because he’s nothing he has to invent things. And now he’d owned up to it, had reduced himself to the minimum. Wasn’t that better than a phony maximum? Wrong. That which makes an overabundance phony cannot make an ounce of self-awareness more genuine. The pendulum’s still swinging.
The storm now reached that magic height where total pandemonium suddenly yields to stillness, as if the elemental powers had rallied themselves to a final, tremendous verdict. The roar of the downpour is no longer articulated but a uniform and barely indistinguishable mass. You’re full of trepidation, knowing you’re in the eye of the storm and the worst is yet to come. Like a choleric showering his victim with a flood of invective then pausing unexpectedly at the peak of his anger and looking around with a grimace of resentment and laughter, not because he’s about to stop but to let out his entire accumulated animosity in a single, terrible blow, it was thus that in the excruciating silence the final gigantic bolt of lightning came crashing down, glaringly yellow, jaggedless, with the gruesome precision of a demonic harpoon and the concentrated explosiveness in which the prehistoric still roars at us.
Then the electricity came back, spasmodic and uncertain. Frau Kalmus stepped into the doorway and called out in all directions: “Frau Siegelmann!” Then she went back upstairs to him and shook him out of his torpor. “Maybe if we call her by her maiden name. It’s her first day, after all.”
“Maiden name,” he asked, behind the fists he was propping his head on, “Arethusa, Pocahontas, Galatea.” And he muttered a long string of names like a poem. The woman shuddered and left.
With the first flush of morning she returned. The candle had burned out, the electric light bulb glared senselessly into the morning light. “Come on. We have to take a look around—ask and search.” He got up compliantly and without a word, walked behind her on the paths he knew from childhood. When they came upon a stream he let her guide him by the hand, and when they came to a house he stood at the gate and waited till she returned, always with the same news that no one had seen a female stranger. They walked clear across the vast forest, wet and sunny, as if they were on a hike, Siegelmann bringing up the rear, Frau Kalmus calling out and encouraging him to do the same. But he droned the most peculiar names, tried to snatch the season’s last mourning-cloaks, collected hairy-cap moss or turned over stones and engrossed himself in the hustle and bustle of ant colonies. This is how they walked.
Late in the afternoon they reached the narrow river valley, where the waters had dug their bed between closely overhanging sandstone rock formations. The rocks rose pillar-like, some of them imitating the heads and bodies of giants, which is why in popular parlance they were admired and feared as the “wedding procession.” The rocks reflected a variety of colors,
the cracks were filled with ferns and underbrush, a tiny spruce perched on the occasional shoulder, and the “groom” held a little white birch stem in his extended hand, as if it were a candle.
But during the night something had happened that made Frau Kalmus’s blood run cold. The stony bride, who normally followed the groom, had broken out of the bridal procession and now her rocky limbs lay shattered across the stream. There was a gaping hole between the groom and the wedding procession, through which the forest on the other side could now peer into the valley. The lightning’s coal-black trace of terror was clearly visible along a broken-down trunk, having knocked a tree right out of the cliff and blasted through the crag. The imperturbable water, however, collected silvery-cool around the shattered limbs of the bride, caressing her torso, pouring past her, creating cascades and waterfalls, and was already busy forming a new, wild and exquisite nature motif.
“Laughing Water,” said Siegelmann. “I’m finally in America.”
“America,” said a horror-stricken Frau Kalmus.
“Nothing is far away,” said Siegelmann.
BORDERLAND
IN OBERPLAN AND THE VILLAGES of the Bohemian high forest there were still people by the name of Stifter, even at a time when the poet had become so famous that it almost seemed incredible if someone said their mother or grandmother had actually met him in person. And when violence—of various stripes but equally senseless—later took possession of this landscape, there were still people living there called Stifter, until they too had to go, disappearing to unknown, distant places.
But before that happened I knew one too. He lived in an old house near the village of Glöckelberg, at the edge of the forest that stretches across the slope of Hochficht Mountain then continues to Plöckenstein Lake, then up to Dreisessel Mountain, then on to the northwest in endlessly undulating waves, dark and insistent, along the border of Bohemia.
This man, Anton Stifter, didn’t know if and how he was related at all to the family of the great Adalbert. He had neither read anything by him nor did he even suspect that a man with the same last name had consecrated this landscape in a special way by coming from it and loving it.
Anton Stifter was a cottager. His wife had died on him and he lived with his twelve-year-old daughter, Ottilie, or Otti for short, at the steep part bounded by the woods on the one side and by a narrow flume on the other. The flume, which once served to transport felled logs, was now just a narrow, neglected watercourse, useless to all but the frogs and dragonflies, the swift water spiders and the buttercups growing rampant between the mossy, brittle stones of the wall. A good and sensible use, you might say. The house included a meadow that was less than optimal for human needs; scythe and sickle were constantly striking the countless chunks of granite in the ground, with the occasional erratic boulder lying around as well that no one was able to move and that must have stemmed from the time the mountains were formed by nature or God.
But there was one spot where Stifter Toni, as they called him, was able to put in a tiny potato patch, just big enough for the bare necessities. He had a few heads of cabbage too, along with a goat and some chickens, and a stray dog by the name of Skinny. But his realm was actually much bigger than many a wealthy city dweller’s, no matter if the latter had safety-deposit boxes stuffed with elaborate, steel-engraved bonds. It included the forest, which was his for the taking, the forest with its varied multitude of berries, mushrooms, fallen wood, grass, and sometimes—there’s no need to hide it now—a hare. It included a babbling trout-brook that passed beneath the flume and continued to the Vltava Valley. It included a clear view of the gentler, rolling hills that stretched into the vast Bohemian countryside. And it included the sky, with its cloud gatherings and weather happenings, white or gray on uniform days, pitch-black and dandelion-yellow when a storm was brewing, forget-me-not- or bellflower-blue, or apple-green, or cockscomb-red in the evening. And it included the hundred thousand sounds and noises that the wind, the water, the animals, as well as many other things moved by unknown powers ceaselessly produced in all variations and keys.
Then one day someone entered this infinite kingdom, and this someone went by the name of me. To the outside world he may have had other names, but that’s irrelevant. I came from the capital of the crownland, and I knew a good deal about this forest from my father’s stories as well as from books. In a way I knew more about it than Stifter Toni did. But only in a certain way. Because he lived with the forest the way one lives with his father and mother, brothers and sisters, wife and child; he’d been born there to the cries of the jays, the racket of the finches and the tapping of the woodpeckers; he’d been nourished by it and drank its water; he knew its amusements and oddities like you would those of a spouse. I, on the other hand, knew more words and designations. I knew that feldspar was also called orthoclase, that water was H20, and that dandelions belonged to the Compositae family, also known as asters. Yet neither Stifter Toni nor Otti were concerned with such classifications. They dealt with the things of nature with an inborn trust or mistrust, whatever the case may have been, depending on whether nature was friendly or unfriendly towards them.
I came one summer day and asked if I could live with them.
“Live here, sure,” said Toni, “but there’s just a room in the attic and a straw mattress, and for food we’ve only got potatoes and sour goat milk, unless you go to Kari’s tavern.”
I was happy he didn’t stand on ceremony. He addressed me with the informal “du” and let me use the polite form “Sie.” Little Otti used the formal, old-fashioned “Ihr” when talking to him. He didn’t seem to care one way or another if people called him “Sie” or “Ihr.” He himself, in any case, always used the familiar “du,” even when talking to rocks, to the stream, or to the most important things. “Du verflixte Hacke”—you lousy hoe—“you’ve gone and made yourself dull again.” He even said “du” to much higher things, to Hochficht Mountain or even to God.
To get to the village and Josef Kari’s tavern you had to walk a brief half an hour along the flume and through the woods, a tall and ample stand of spruce trees which gave a rather cheerful impression, what with the light that shone through the trunks in the daytime and the moon and stars peeking through them at night, and even in total darkness when the sky was overcast it exuded a kind of coziness, because behind this piece of forest you knew there were meadows and the village.
At the tavern I made an array of acquaintances. First of all the proprietor himself and his pudgy wife, who wiggled her arms like wings when she walked; then some forest dwellers, the most clever of whom was a certain Hochholdinger, skilled at cards and a hard drinker who could hold up to forty half-pints. He had a whole brood of children and liked to sing a song he invented himself:
From Glöckelberg I am,
And like my fun as ev’ryone knows,
My trunk is full o’ children,
Can’t get the lid to close.
Then there was the cobbler Poferl, who had a very innocent face but knew by heart the smugglers’ paths into nearby Austria and Bavaria. Another regular at the tavern was the American Feiferling.
Feiferling had earned the name “the American” because of a lengthy stay in the New World, where after the turn of the century he had worked for a while as a cigar roller and railroad man. Then he returned to his native village to live out his life alone as a bachelor, in a house that he’d inherited.
“Didn’t you like it over there, Herr Feiferling?” I asked.
“I liked it well enough,” he said, “but at some point you’ve got to come home, don’t you.”
He didn’t have a proper profession. He lived off his savings, and his main occupation was doling out advice: “In America we turn the keys in our doors to the right and not to the left.” Or: “In America we write the number one without a tail in the front and the seven without a line through it.” Or: “In America we don’t have to register with the police.” But sometimes he would tell a real story:
for example, how he’d once spent the night in an abandoned farmhouse in the forests of Vermont and played with a dog in the darkness, which later in the morning turned out to be a bear. Some people said he told tall tales, but others said that in the expanses of America anything was possible.
In front of Stifter Toni’s house, where I was living, stood three spruces right next to each other, higher than the house and much, much older. The house had been placed in front of these three spruces on purpose, for they covered the weather side, protected against snow, and served as lightning rods. One of them had taken a hit once, leaving a char mark all the way down the trunk. Underneath the trees was a jumble of wildflowers that had once formed a flowerbed but now grew every which way without a care in the world. Toni toiled away in the fields or the forest, and there was always something to fix, a shovel handle to be fastened in place, or a shingle to be nailed down. He also had to cook, a chore he shared with Otti. Hashed potatoes with grated cheese was a feast. Otti had to tend the goats, toss some feed to the chickens; she had to knit, which she did quite well, and she had to wash and scrub, for she had no choice in the matter; had to gather berries and mushrooms, pick up wood, haul in a pile of hay—a task she and her father took turns with. In short, there was a lot to do and maintain in this poor but sprawling household.
I myself helped out a little, albeit more for my own amusement, if you can even call what I did helpful. For example, I whitewashed the entire living room, at my own expense, built a wooden bench and table that I placed underneath the spruce trees, and paved the path from the house to the flume with flat stones I’d collected from the hillside with a wheelbarrow.
“Looks like Prince Schwarzenberg’s place,” said Toni, and it was impossible to tell if his words expressed approval or disapproval. He paid no attention to what I did, didn’t bother me when I was writing, and Otti, too, was respectful of my endless scribbling, would delicately walk in on her tiptoes when she came to the attic to hang up garlands of dried mushrooms, even though you couldn’t hear her anyway, because she was always barefoot. The drying mushrooms gave off a deep, aromatic scent all around me, and it smelled a bit like petroleum too from my lamp; then there were the odors of forest, of resin and humus, that came in through the window and the cracks in the wall. The dung heap down below added its own special note.
The Last Bell Page 11