And now Klara, the mayor’s youngest daughter, stands to inherit the bit of woods on the hill called Schäferberg. The lower edge of the woods borders the lake, and its upper edge, the meadow with the raspberry vines that belongs to the estate; on the right it extends to the property line of Old Warnack’s land, and on the left borders the meadow of a smallholder who for years has been in conflict with Klara’s father over illegal pasturing, as Wurrach claims this meadow as his own. Given these circumstances, Klara’s Wood is seen by her father as an island that they cannot expect to combine with other properties through marriage.
When the fisherman comes ashore on her bank, Klara doesn’t know what to say. The fisher lad doesn’t say anything either, he just tosses her the rope, which she catches and ties around an alder tree. It’s just coincidental that she happens to be in her woods today. After Hedwig’s unfortunate incident, the father stopped taking his daughters for rides in the carriage. Today Klara is alone here and on foot, she picked raspberries up on the meadow and then made her way down the hill among the bushes and trees that belong to her: oaks, alders and pines, to see the water glittering, since from the Klotthof farm you can’t see the lake, even in winter when the trees have lost their leaves.
The unknown fisherman holds out his hand, and she helps him climb out of the rocking boat and then lets his hand go again. Only when he holds out his hand to her a second time does she understand that he wants her to lead him further. Halfway up the slope where the earth is no longer quite so dark and the grass is drier, there will surely be a place for her and the fisherman, whose hair is so wet that the water is dripping to his shoulders and running down his arms all the way to where his fingers are intertwined with hers. Only now, when she is looking for a good spot to sit down with him, does it strike her how many people there are all around her in this bit of woods, and everywhere there might be an attractive spot to rest, someone is already sitting or standing, some are reclining in the shade, asleep, others are having their evening meal, and yet others are leaning against a tree, smoking and blowing rings in the air. It’s no doubt because all these people are so quiet that she didn’t notice them before. In a sunny spot under the big oak tree the kind of grass she likes is growing, tall, dry grass, tuft after tuft of it, and when she kneels down there and draws the fisherman down beside her, the others finally begin to move, they put their sandwiches, apples and hard-boiled eggs back in their baskets, fold up their blankets and calmly rise to their feet, while the ones who are leaning against the tree trunks now toss their cigarettes on the ground and crush the stubs beneath the soles of their shoes. One at a time, all of them turn to walk back up the slope, leaving behind this place without addressing a single word or even a wave to Klara and her fisherman. The fisherman lays his head in the lap of the mayor’s youngest and as yet unmarried daughter, and she begins to dry his wet shock of hair with her skirt. On the far side of the oak tree directly behind her, two last silent visitors to this bit of woods whom she had overlooked now rise to their feet and leave as well.
Red is birth, / green is life, / white is death.
I know a little creaturely, / its features are quite mannerly. / Good manners has the creaturely./ It wears its bones atop its flesh.
In our cellar lies a man / who has a hundred petticoats on.
Something crosses the floor, / it doesn’t tip, it doesn’t tap.
Toss it up on the roof white / and it comes down yellow.
In our garden stands a white mare / whose tail reaches high into the air.
A queen was drinking tea. / Three hinds were swimming / across the lake. / What was the queen’s name?
I’m a poor soldier and must stand watch, / I have no legs but have to march, / I have no arms but have to fight / and tell all the people what is right.
Nothing but holes. / And still it holds.
At first the sisters don’t notice anything except that Klara is now sometimes particularly courteous when she wishes them good morning and inquires as to their well-being, as though they were strangers, or as though she hadn’t seen them in a long time. On other days she might look away when her sisters wish her good morning. The second thing that strikes her sisters as well as the people in the village is that Klara often leaves the farm with the bucket of scraps intended for the hogs instead of emptying it out in the sty. With the bucket in her hand, she walks through the village, passing the butcher shop and school, and after the brickyard turns left onto Uferweg. Old Warnack, whose grounds border Klara’s Wood on the right-hand side, reports to Wurrach that Klara always first empties her bucket there somewhere in the bushes and then sits down in the grass, leaning her back against the oak tree and propping her feet on the upside-down bucket, and talks with the air or else is simply silent. After her father forbids her to leave the farm, she begins to hide within the farm itself. She squats down behind the bushes and trees in the garden, or under boards that are leaning up against a wall somewhere, she also climbs into barrels and chests. Everywhere on the farm and on the property, the sisters and farmhands have to be prepared to come across Klara. She can often be heard wailing or arguing in some hiding place or other, but if you pull her out, she is always quiet and friendly. Once Grete opens the closet door to take out a broom, and Klara is standing there in the cramped space smiling at her calmly as though she had been waiting in the dark for her sister all the while. Another time she puts her hand into her bowl during lunch and in front of everyone smears the hot porridge all around her mouth as though she were intentionally resisting finding the entrance, but all this time she is smiling and appears content. For a moment everything is very still at the table of the village mayor. During this period there is scarcely a farmhand or maid willing to enter into the service of the powerful Wurrach, for it is no trivial matter to arm oneself against possible attack by someone who has veered from the world of appropriate behavior. Her sisters place all the sharp knives in a drawer with a lock, the farmhands lay their axes high up on top of the compartment built into the entry gate, which a woman cannot reach without a stepstool, and in Klara’s room her father removes the window latches and the inside door handle, during the night he himself locks the door from the outside. During the night, Klara, the last daughter of the village mayor, sometimes turns her chamber pot upside down and uses it as a drum.
This is the key to the garden / for which three girls are waiting. / The first is named Binka, / the second Bibeldebinka. / The third’s name is Zickzettzack Nobel de / Bobel de Bibel de Binka. / Then Binka took a stone / and struck Bibeldebinka’s leg bone. / Then Zick, Zett, Zack, / Nobel de Bobel de Bibel de Binka / began to weep and to moan.
And then nothing further happens except that Grete and Hedwig and Emma and even Klara grow older, and their father grows old. Nothing further happens except that in Klara’s Wood one of the old oak tree’s branches breaks off, remains lying there in the grass and rots. All the villagers have long since gotten used to the Mayor’s Old Maid, as Klara is now called by the villagers, sometimes limping through the village with two different shoes on her feet or perhaps only socks, walking as far as the butcher shop, the school, the brickyard but never farther, and if you ask her: Where are you going? she will reply: Dunno.
Last glove / I lost my autumn. / I had to find three days / before I looked for it. / Then I walked past a garden, / and saw a gentleman there. / Around the gentleman sat three tables. / Then I took off my day / and wished them all a good hat, sirs. / Then the gentlemen laughed to begin / until their bursts bellied.
Old Wurrach sells the first third of Klara’s Wood to a coffee and tea importer from Frankfurt an der Oder, the second third to a cloth manufacturer from Guben, who enters his son’s name in the contract of sale in order to arrange for his inheritance, and finally Wurrach sells the third third, the part where the big oak tree stands, to an architect from Berlin who discovered this sloping shoreline with its trees and bushes while out for a steamboat ride and wishes to build a summer cottage there for himself a
nd his fiancée. The village mayor enters into conversations about so-and-so-many square meters first with the coffee and tea importer, then with the cloth manufacturer, and finally with the architect, for the first time in his life he is measuring ground not in hides or hectares, for the first time in his life he is speaking of parcels of land. For several hundred years Klara’s Wood was considered logging grounds, every thirty years all the land surrounding the big oak tree was cleared and then reforested, and now a number of the trees are to remain there forever just as they stand, the architect’s fiancée says: For the shade. While her father is negotiating the price for the third third, Klara, whom everyone now calls the Mayor’s Old Maid, goes limping through the village as always, one of her feet shod, the other with just a stocking on, she limps past the butcher shop, then past the school, then past the brickyard, and later back again. At dusk, snow falls for the first time. As the seller of the third parcel of land on Schäferberg, Old Wurrach signs the contract in the name of his incapacitated daughter, and on behalf of the architect, the architect’s young fiancée signs as the new landowner.
Not until the next day does Emma discover Klara’s footprints in the freshly fallen snow, down at the public bathing area they lead directly into the gray water, always in alternation: a shoe, a stocking, a shoe, a stocking, a shoe. Soon thereafter her body is found as well, near the shore beside the brickyard it has gotten entangled in the pine roots laid bare when the soil washed away beneath them. The pastor doesn’t want to give the suicide a Christian burial, but the mayor, who has meanwhile, despite his advanced age, been chosen as the local leader of the Reich Farmers League, puts his foot down.
In a household where a death has taken place, the clock must be stopped at once. The mirror is covered with a cloth, otherwise you will see two dead people. The uppermost windows are opened, and if the roof has no dormers, one roof tile is removed so that the soul can escape. The dead person is washed and dressed. A man is dressed in a black walking coat, a woman in her black dress. The dead person’s shoes are put on. A virgin is buried adorned as a bride in a white dress, myrtle wreath and veil. The dead person is placed on a bed of straw. The dead person’s face is covered with a cloth soaked in brandy or vinegar. Nettles are strewn on the body to keep it from turning blue. On either side of a male corpse an axe must be placed. A female corpse has an axe placed upon her torso with the handle pointing toward her feet. When the corpses are placed in their coffins, the axes are removed. The vessel containing the water with which the corpse was washed must be buried beneath a rain spout. The straw on which the dead person lay is burned or buried together with his old clothes. The death is announced to the animals in the stable and the trees in the garden with the words: Your master is dead. Before the coffin is carried across the threshold it must be set down three times. To prevent the soul from entering the house once the coffin has crossed the threshold, all the windows and doors must be closed at once. Pour water on the floor and sweep the floors with a broom. The chairs the coffin rested on are turned upside-down on the floor. To exclude every possibility of return, water from a bowl is thrown after the funeral procession as it moves away, just as one does when the doctor or knacker leaves the farm.
THE GARDENER
WHEN THE FIRST VACATION homes are built on the shores of the lake, many of them with thatched roofs, the gardener helps cut the reeds for the roofs as soon as the lake freezes over, and here too he proves unusually deft, the frozen stems crack like glass before him, he manipulates the board used to transport the stalks so skillfully that the roofer finds it difficult to believe he has never before helped out during the reed harvest. With great vigor he pounds the stalks across his left knee without ever growing weary, the short pieces and bits of grass fall to the ground straightaway, then he lays the neat bundles off to the side.
The gardener doesn’t speak much, and he’s never been heard to say anything at all about events in the village, whether someone has drowned in the lake, a smallholder has secretly changed the position of a border stone, or Schmeling has knocked out the American boxer Louis in the twelfth round. That’s our Schmeling, the roofer says from his perch high up on the thatching stool down to where the gardener is handing him the bundles of reeds, our Schmeling going up against the Brown Bomber, that was something, or don’t you have a radio? The gardener shakes his head. The house upon whose roof the roofer is currently sitting belongs to Schmeling. I put the roof on the Thorak place too, the roofer told the gardener when they were first beginning to work together, perhaps in the hope of impressing the gardener, who was known for being taciturn, and moving him to speak, but probably the gardener didn’t even know who Thorak was, and in any case his only response had been a silent nod.
Many in the village find the gardener’s silence unsettling, they declare him cold, call the expression in his eyes fishy, suspect his high forehead of harboring traces of madness. Some, on the other hand, point out that while his communications with others are kept to a minimum, when he thinks he is alone in a garden or field, they’ve clearly seen him moving his lips constantly as he hoes, digs, weeds and prunes or waters plants—in other words, he prefers talking with vegetables. No one is admitted into his hut, and children who peek through the window when he isn’t home see only a table, chair, bed and a few items of clothing that have been tossed over hooks. So the hut, too, is silent, just like its owner, and as is always the case with silences, this might indicate that it is hiding a secret, or else simply that it is empty through and through.
When the thatch roof on the house that a Berlin architect is having built for himself and his wife on Klara Wurrach’s land is already almost finished—the roofer and the gardener are just taking a break before they incorporate the last bundles of reeds into the roof—the householder-to-be joins them and asks the two villagers whether they might know someone in the area who could help transform the woods into a garden. And as is to be expected, the roofer recommends the gardener who is sitting right beside him and continues to maintain his silence but then, by giving the architect a brief nod, he indicates his assent.
The landscape architect, a cousin of the householder who resides in the nearby spa town, now comes by on a daily basis to discuss the plans with the householder and gardener and oversee the work. On the flat upper stretch of land between house and lake, the pine forest is to be cleared away and topsoil added so that the lawn will take root well. The smaller part of the meadow on the left-hand side, directly in front of the house, is to be ringed with evergreens and elderberry, and only a rose-bed will separate it from the terrace.
The boundary of the larger part of the meadow, to the right of the path that leads down to the water, will be defined in back by the wooden fence running between it and the next-door property, which is still in its natural state, the edge facing the hill by the big oak tree and a grouping of fir shrubs, the edge nearest the house by forsythia, lilac and a few rhododendrons, and the edge fronting the sandy road by shrubs planted along the row of fieldstones marking the border of the property.
The addition of a few new trees will contribute to the impression of a natural gradation: a hawthorn at the edge of the meadow to the left, and on the meadow to the right a Japanese cherry, a walnut and a blue spruce—in each case placed so as to lead up to the bushes or the larger trees already standing in the background.
To supplement the pines, the young oak saplings and the little hazelnut shrubs that grow naturally on the slope leading down to the lake, additional bushes will be planted close together to make it more stable.
A path paved with broken flagstones leading down the slope in eight times eight steps will provide access to the lake.
Since the patch of land down near the water is particularly shady and damp thanks to the alders that grow along the shore, the landscape architect in consultation with the householder instructs the gardener to fell several of the trees there and drain the land along the shoreline. In order to make the most of this spot, which isn’t ter
ribly inviting, the householder decides to have a workshop and a woodshed built there according to his own specifications. Later it can be established where a good place will be to build a dock.
Each of the two upper meadows with its natural frame will become an arena, the landscape architect says to his cousin, the householder, while the gardener is dumping out a wheelbarrow full of compost-rich soil on the site of the future rose-bed in front of the terrace. The householder says: Basically it’s always just a matter of framing the view. And providing variety, the landscape architect says: light and shade, open spaces and thickly overgrown ones, looking down from above, looking up from below. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed. The vertical and the horizontal must stand in a salutary relationship to one another, the householder says. Precisely, says the landscape architect, and that’s why this naturally cascading slope leading down to the water is ideal. The gardener wheels the empty barrow away. The two men stand on the terrace and from this vantage point gaze down at the lake, which is gleaming and sparkling between the reddish trunks of the pines. The gardener wheels up the next barrowful of soil and dumps it out. To tame the wilderness and then make it intersect with culture—that’s what art is, the householder says. Precisely, says his cousin, nodding. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed. To avail oneself of beauty regardless of where one finds it, the owner says. Precisely. The gardener wheels his empty barrow past the two men standing on the terrace, both of them now silent.
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