The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

by Martha Baillie

  The mole’s small but muscular body is covered in velvety black fur. Its eyes are very tiny but sight is not important to an animal that lives mostly in darkness. It does not have a good sense of smell or hearing but is extremely sensitive to touch and can sense vibrations in the soil around it. Each mole has its own burrow system, a network of firm-walled tunnels. The territories of several moles may overlap, but the residents avoid each other if they can, except in the breeding season. If two males meet, they may fight fiercely, which can result in death. A mole can run backward through tunnels and turn right round by doing a somersault! Its velvety fur lies backward or forward so that the mole does not become stuck against the tunnel walls when squeezing through them.

  He closed the mammal volume, opened the volume dedicated to insects, and read the word “Monarch.” Again, the letter M.

  The monarch butterfly, in certain regards, defies understanding. Every autumn it flies over three thousand kilometers from its North American home to a forest of pine trees in a mountainous region of Mexico. How knowledge of the route to be taken is passed on from one generation of butterfly to the next remains a mystery, one that the most eminent scientists have failed to comprehend. No single butterfly in its entire life makes the journey more than once, and so cannot lead others along the route but must somehow convey complex directions to be followed. According to the indigenous people of Michoacán, each monarch butterfly is the soul of a deceased person, returning.

  Heinrich set butterflies to one side. He flipped through the reptile section. The words “Snapping Turtle” leapt at him. The letter S caused him to pause and consider its sinuous shape.

  The common snapping turtle often lives a full one hundred years and can grow up to about twenty kilograms. When angered it is capable of striking as speedily as a rattlesnake. It can reach with its head halfway back along its shell. Should you feel compelled to take hold of a snapping turtle, you are best advised to grab it by its tail and lift it swiftly from the ground, holding it well away from you.

  The second time that Heinrich visited Inge in the hospital, he stayed only a few minutes.

  Through her bulging eyes, Inge watched a nurse bite the head of a rose from its stem, and the doctor rear up on his hind legs. The sight of the nurse made her laugh, whereas the doctor’s behavior sent shivers of fear along her limbs, so that, weeping and giggling, she pulled the covers up to her chin. She peered at the doctor, who thumped his chest while lashing the wall with his tail. It would take several more days before her brain calmed itself from the effects of the pills she’d swallowed by the fistful.

  She’d hoped to die, she, the smart one.

  Outside the hospital, Heinrich sat on the curb, his feet in the gutter, and became very old. He tried to get up from the sidewalk but was unable to. He’d been alive far too long. He waited, indifferent to what might happen next. Someone from a nearby shop brought him a glass of water. The kindness of this stranger amazed him. It floated toward him in the form of a hand holding out a glass of water. Too tired to respond, he glanced down. His legs looked far away, as did his ankles and feet. Time passed. Cars sped up and down the street. He had no idea who he was, but who he was tried again to stand up and failed. He took a sip of the water. The person from the shop asked once more if he was all right. Naturally, he couldn’t answer. Who he was stood up and walked away.

  He must have walked in the direction of home, opened the door, and gone inside. He found himself reading Brehms Tierleben. He turned to the text on moles and again encountered the letter M. As he examined its shape, he remembered that once, long ago, M had been his favorite letter. He skimmed over page after page, until a drawing of a tusked and hairy animal made him stop and read:

  The wooly mammoth died out about the time of the last glacial retreat, when a mass extinction of plant life occurred in Northern Eurasia and the Americas. Most mammoths were no larger than the present-day Asian elephant. The biggest mammoth species, however, reached heights of five meters at the shoulder. A four-meter mammoth tusk has been discovered in Lincoln, Illinois. The Siberian permafrost may well contain millions of mammoth remains.

  I have created a separate file for all papers, drawings, photographs, and other evidence relating to this very painful and disorienting period in Heinrich’s life, when Inge made her first suicide attempt. I go through the contents of this file frequently, doubtless more often than I should. Is my intention to destroy these documents through too much handling? I keep promising myself that I’ll bring them to the office of the architectural firm where I work and discreetly scan them; then I fail to do so. I turn these documents over repeatedly, hoping that they will tell a different, less distressing story than the one they told me the last time I contemplated them. I hold them up to the light, weigh them, and examine their texture with my thumb. Once, I tried counting how often certain letters of the alphabet appear in a given passage. I cannot diminish the anguish experienced by Inge and Heinrich; I can do nothing for them.

  10 It is this article that I was searching for, six months ago, turning my archive inside out while others marched to prevent a gravel company from destroying over one thousand acres of potato fields. At last the article surfaced, misfiled. I have only myself to blame for its temporary disappearance.

  6

  Generative Order

  Following her release from the hospital, Inge redecorated her bedroom with Heinrich’s help. He accompanied her to the paint store; he assisted her in every way he could think of. She packed her dictionaries out of sight. She returned the language learning kit, Inuktitut for Beginners, to the gymnasium library. It had long before been marked “missing” in the catalog.

  Her appetite improved and she applied for a job as a typist at a small accounting firm. Her medications she took without complaint. She was hired on by the accounting firm and acquired a routine that she experienced as salutary. Every morning at exactly seven, at the sound of her alarm clock, she slipped promptly out of bed, showered, and pulled on her clothes. Her secretarial duties she performed with a combination of speed and meticulousness that won her unequivocal praise. Too much social interaction she found arduous. Conversation, on the whole, she experienced as a painful exercise. As much as possible, she avoided her fellow workers.

  “With you it’s different, Heinrich. I know where we’re going. When we talk, it’s like following a well-worn path. I don’t mean I’m bored. Don’t look at me like that. I mean that I can trust you not to say something that will suddenly destroy everything. I have to put all the bits of me together so many times a day. Someone smiles, somebody uses a tone of voice I didn’t expect, and who I am collapses. A smile can contradict itself in three hundred and fifty ways, in seconds; a tone can suggest a thousand different interpretations. All of these possible messages come charging at me; I try to hide but can’t. A comment about politics or the state of the world and I’m lodged inside the hypocritical chaos of someone else’s thinking. I’m a mental ligament being ripped apart.”

  Inge quit her job with the accounting firm. She secured employment as a letter carrier with Deutsche Post and moved into a tiny flat in Munich. To visit her, Heinrich traveled by bus, then by train.

  On a sunlit Saturday afternoon, they strolled beside a stream that flowed smoothly through the verdant calm of the vast Englischer Garten.

  “It must be great, your new job. You get to walk,” said Heinrich, offering his sister a radiant smile.

  To the ducks paddling close, Inge tossed bits of stale crust, and to the shy ones on the opposite bank, she threw whole chunks of hardened bread that she’d taken from the cloth sack behind her kitchen door.

  “Walking is wonderful,” Heinrich insisted.

  “And you. Are you still going to Canada?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “When will you go?”

  “First I have to go to university.”

  “Do you?”

  “Don’t you think I should?”

  “I didn’t
say you shouldn’t. I asked, ‘Do you have to?’ Is there something you want to study? If there isn’t, wouldn’t you learn more from traveling?”

  Home once more in Tettnang, Heinrich shut the door to his room. He was not ready for the North. The North belonged far away. He pressed his back against his bedroom door and behind the door a ravenous wind blew. The gale ripped his tent from its pegs. Rain turned to snow. He felt a numbness spread through him. How could he really leave for the North? Where would he find the necessary courage and skills? Perhaps, once he’d earned enough money for a plane ticket and supplies, he’d discover bravery? Inge would not miss him.

  He grabbed from the floor beside his bed Samuel Hearne’s Reise vom Fort Prinz Wallis in der Hudsonsbay nach dem nordlichen Weltmeer, and from the page where the thick volume fell open he read:

  In this deplorable condition, he was laid in the center of a large conjuring house. . . . The piece of board [which was to be swallowed] was prepared by another man, and painted according to the direction of the juggler, with a rude representation of some beast of prey on one side, and on the reverse was painted, according to their rude method, a resemblance of the sky. . . . After the conjurer had held the necessary conference with his invisible spirits, or shadows, he asked if I was present; . . . and on being answered in the affirmative, he desired me to come nearer; on which the mob made a lane for me to pass, and I advanced close to him and found him standing at the conjuring-house door as naked as he was born. . . . When he put it [the piece of board] to his mouth it apparently slipped down his throat like lightning, and only left about three inches sticking without his lips; after walking backwards and forwards three times, he hauled it up again, and ran into the conjuring-house with great precipitation. . . . And notwithstanding I was all attention on the occasion, I could not detect the deceit. . . . It is necessary to observe [however] that this feat was performed in a dark and excessively cold night; and although there was a large fire at some distance, which reflected a good light, yet there was great room for collusion: for though the conjurer himself was quite naked, there were several of his fraternity well-clothed, who attended him very close. . . . As soon as our conjurer had executed the above feat, and entered the conjuring-house, as already mentioned, five other men and an old woman . . . stripped themselves quite naked and followed him, when they soon began to suck, blow, sing, and dance round the poor paralytic; and continued so to do for three days and four nights without taking the least rest or refreshment, not even so much as a drop of water. . . . And it is truly wonderful, though the strictest truth, that when the poor sick man was taken from the conjuring-house, he had not only recovered his appetite to an amazing degree, but was able to move all the fingers and toes of the side that had been so long dead. In three weeks he recovered so far as to be capable of walking, and at the end of six weeks went a hunting for his family.

  Heinrich set down the book and opened his bedroom door. He nearly ran down the hall to ask Inge, “Do you believe in miraculous cures?” He almost burst into her room to ask, “In Canada, will I be cured of my doubts and confusion? Or is it you who will be cured, if I go there?” But Inge was in Munich and not in her room at the head of the stairs. He returned to his bedroom, sat back down on his bed. He opened his spiral notebook and copied out the passage he’d just read in Hearne. Then he wrote:

  Inge believes that I can become an adventurer. But is this what I want? I hope that in Canada I’ll see lots of animals. Perhaps in Canada, I will also make a few friends? But my English is not good like Inge’s and I don’t know any Inuktitut. I’m not like Hearne; I’ll have no guide and I won’t know in what direction to walk. I will have to find a guide. I am good at walking and not afraid of long distances or of carrying a large weight on my back. Maybe in Canada I will succeed in becoming the person Inge thinks I can be? What is it, if anything, that she wants from me? Who knows what will be possible in Canada? In any case, I am going there. It is too late to turn back.

  Heinrich’s thoughts, his doubts and assertions, advancing across the page of his notebook, surprised him. He was unaccustomed to valuing his own ideas enough to keep a record of them. The ideas of others, the insights and facts that he came upon in books, on museum labels, in newspapers and magazines—these deserved to be inscribed. The written word was a territory he entered in order to pilfer, to borrow, to place between quotation marks. Yet, suddenly, he’d declared, in ink on paper: “I am going there. It is too late to turn back.”

  Disconcerted, he closed his notebook, picked up Hearne’s diary, and continued to read:

  Cos-abyagh, the Northern Indian name for the Rock Partridge . . . since that time [of his cure] . . . always appeared thoughtful, sometimes gloomy, and, in fact, the disorder seemed to have changed his whole nature; for before that dreadful paralytic stroke, he was distinguished for his good-nature and benevolent disposition; was entirely free from every appearance of avarice . . . but after this event he was the most fractious, quarrelsome, discontented, and covetous wretch alive.

  The outcome of Cos-abyagh’s story disappointed Heinrich. Irritated, he once again opened his notebook and wrote:

  Should I trust Hearne? He sounds pleased that Cos-abyagh’s personality changed, pleased that the healers partly failed. They cured their patient’s paralysis, but his character soured. Hearne claims that Cos-abyagh became nasty. Hearne calls the healers “conjurers” and he’s convinced that their skills involve deception. I’ve always accepted Hearne’s observations as accurate. He sounds so certain of his objectivity. But can I rely on his perceptions?

  Heinrich stepped into the hallway and lingered at the top of the stairs, painfully conscious of Inge’s absence. He could not imagine what she might be doing at that moment. Her Munich habits and routines were a mystery to him.11

  A list formed in his mind of several necessities to be packed for his journey to the North, and he went back into his bedroom and jotted down: “Take with me: thick wool socks, matches, the warmest jacket I can buy, a wool hat, scarf and mittens, and also a knife. In what month will I be going?”

  He opened Hearne’s diary and was confronted by catastrophe:

  The wind blew with such violence, that in spite of all our endeavours, it overset several of the tents, and mine, among the rest, shared the disaster, which I cannot sufficiently lament, as the but-ends of the weather tent-poles fell on the quadrant, and though it was in a strong wainscot case, two of the bubbles, the index, and several other parts were broken, which rendered it entirely useless. This being the case, I did not think it worth carriage, but broke it to pieces, and gave the brass-work to the Indians, who cut it into small lumps, and made use of it instead of ball. . . . I cannot sufficiently lament the loss of my quadrant, as the want of it must render the course of my journey from Point Lake, where it was broken, very uncertain; and my watch stopping while I was at the Athapuscow Lake, has contributed greatly to the misfortune, as I am now deprived of every means of estimating the distances which we walked with any degree of accuracy, particularly in thick weather, when the Sun could not be seen.

  I must take the best maps available, Heinrich told himself, closing Hearne’s account of how easily wind and weather had destroyed his ability to measure. I must not lose my way, I must advance cautiously, Heinrich warned himself. He pictured Hearne’s delicate instruments of calculation cut into pieces and shot from a gun. He jotted in his notebook:

  I do believe that Hearne recorded his experiences as honestly as he was able to. I am not more honest than he is. My journey will be so much easier than his, and still I am frightened. I must select a route that has been clearly recorded and marked. If no marked routes exist, I will have to abandon the idea of going.

  The year was 1979, the month, March. Heinrich celebrated his nineteenth birthday and Inge presented him with a gift—a compact volume, titled A Pocket Guide to Arctic Plants. His date of departure as yet uncertain, he thanked her and placed the book on his shelf.

  In the year 1979,
as Deutsche Post employee, Inge delivered a great many bills, requests for charity, personal letters, and other printed material. All too often the words concealed inside the envelopes that she handled appeared in her mind’s eye. They imposed themselves upon her imagination:

  “As you are aware, there are millions of children around the world whose bellies . . .”

  “Your father feels strongly . . .”

  “I didn’t want this to happen. Please believe me, you’ve got to believe me . . .”

  “If we do not receive payment by the end of the month . . .”

  “Soon, soon I’ll be holding you in my arms again . . .”

  “Even a small donation will go a long way . . .”

  “Listen, pussycat, if my music hurts your ears . . .”

  She tried to clench her mind shut against these linguistic intrusions but couldn’t.

  Only once did she intentionally unseal someone’s mail. The envelope was releasing a heat that threatened to burn her palms. She tore it open, causing the scalding sensation to stop. She read:

  Dear David,

  I am now quite convinced that the implicate or generative order is primarily concerned not with the outward side of development and evolution in a sequence of successions but with a deeper and more inward order out of which the manifest form of things can emerge creatively.

  Regards,

  David B.

  A letter from one David to another. It was postmarked 1969, suggesting that the message must have begun its journey a decade ago. She went into the nearest store and bought a roll of tape. Having taped the envelope shut, she dropped it in the mail slot of Professor David Peat, Brotstrasse 32.

  David Bohm’s words, addressed to David Peat, filled her with a relief that spread through her body, reducing the intensity of her solitude. After that, she was tempted to open other letters but did not do so. Nothing, in her opinion, could match the content of David B.’s note to David P.