An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

  People appear as if out of nowhere. A boy speeds across the clearing on a quad bike. A spaniel follows him, barking. A group of adults walk by with a young child in tow and disappear behind the pumping station without a word of greeting. I stand still and try to locate the confused landscape on the map. The air is fresh and clear, and for a moment I even imagine I can taste spring. The map shows neither a riverside path nor any entry point into the forest. All the marked footpaths start out from the inside of the wood.

  I want to follow the watercourse into the willow marsh, but after a bend in the ditch I come upon a festering black bog. The squelching sodden soil impedes my every step. The ground grows ever softer, and I sink ever deeper in the miry, bare earth. Water holes of fathomless black shimmer from the bottom of the hollow. I realize that I can go no further this way and must turn back. So I pick my way through the pale-green dappled woods of the water meadow, bending young branches aside with my arms until, some way further south, the ground, now concealed by undergrowth, hardens. From beneath the faded carpet of leaves, light-craving anemones raise their heads, showing as flecks of white on the cool forest floor. A woodpecker raps a tattoo in the treetops. Filtered light falls on the slender shoots of hazel, the young beeches and slim birches. Before long tall spruces cast deep shade on the ground, which is springy now, and strewn with scaly pine cones and yellowed needles, then, as I pass under oaks and beeches, it grows lighter again.

  There are signs everywhere of animal activity: the reddish loose detritus churned up by wild boar, the dark entrance to a fox’s earth or badger sett under a root, the hieroglyphic drawings of bark beetle larvae on a bare stick, and the high-pitched voice of the bullfinch. Several times I reply to its cheerful single-syllable call. And when I lie down on the soft grass of a small knoll in the dappled semishade of some pine trees, the bird ventures out from his cover and perches in the boughs directly above me. Its breast is a radiant vermilion. I answer it again, and so we go on, taking turns for a while, until all of a sudden it launches into a rousing, completely different tune in five verses, which I am unable to imitate.

  I close my eyes, and the tangle of branches reappears, imprinted on the blazing red of my eyelids. The shrill cries of birds of prey can be heard in the distance.

  When I set off again, the sun is high in the sky, and its light, for a moment entirely undimmed in the dusty clearing, gives a foretaste of the shimmering, scorched sand-flavored heat of the summer, the sound of the sea. From time to time, the rhythmic loop of the bullfinch’s song rings out again. I amble through plantations of young and more mature trees. The ghostly shadows of the kites circle over the washed-out sandy soil, which glistens with the burst, honey-scented pods from which hornbeam leaves have unfurled.

  I reemerge into the open, and a hare darts out from the young rye only a few meters from me, doubles back on the farm track, and disappears into a tilled field. To the east, a flock of rooks passes above some drooping power cables, cawing hoarsely. A stork sails over them with outstretched wings to its nest overlooking the gables of all the houses in a nearby village, and in the shady margin of the wood another ditch peters out, bordered by an ash-colored belt of strawy sludge. It must have been washed up by floodwater, along with the succulent finger-leaved yellow irises, and masses of pale-violet mollusks, which resemble fossils on the dried mud.

  The Ryck itself runs further to the north. I want to take a shortcut, so I clamber under electric fences and cut across country, directly through grazing land. But soon every step I take is hindered by the wet, and wherever I tread, the waterlogged ground yields beneath my feet. Further north, the Ryck is eventually joined by the abundant waters of the river Riene, before flowing, contained by slightly concave dikes, towards a village. A prefabricated high-rise is already visible from far off. When I finally reach the riverbank, the first seagull appears in the sky without a sound, black-headed, ready for the breeding season. For a moment the air tastes salty. The village street leads across a level bridge. A siren wails. And above the wooded horizon, the deep-blue sky is turning a misty white.

  When I cross this same bridge three weeks later, the riverbank is lined with knee-high grass. The sky is leaden. Heavy, bulging clouds cast a gloom over the land, all except for the western seam of the horizon, behind me, which glows with a streak of ivory light.

  I follow the watercourse eastwards past tousled clumps of withered reeds. A Haflinger mare and her foal graze in a lush green paddock. Warblers babble from hedgerows newly in leaf behind drifts of gangling stinging nettles. From a farm building comes the whine of a chainsaw. Its rising and falling din accompanies me for a long while along the small dike streaked lavender gray with vernal grass, and mingles with the call of the cuckoo, clear as a bell, from the green-tinged white willows on the south bank. When I return its echo-like call, it hisses like a cat and flies from tree to tree in search of its rival. Above it, in the higher reaches, three gray herons drift solemnly, with angled, unmoving wings towards the bay. House martins zigzag busily back and forth over the rippled surface of the water, on which the occasional lily pad floats. Lupins hold their pale-blue flower spikes majestically aloft. Herbaceous speedwell with its little bluish-violet flowers and the tiny feathery shoots of yarrow appear dainty and fragile by contrast. Rotting amongst the fibrous broadleaf plantain is the scaly-blue gleaming rear end of a half-eaten perch, which must have been left behind by an osprey. Lanky bittercress dots the hay meadows birch white. Caramel-breasted whinchats flit, chirping, from stalk to stalk. From the quivering reeds comes the vehement call of the reed warbler, followed soon after by the melodious piping of the golden oriole from a nearby wood.

  I try in vain to locate it. Instead, way out to the east, I spot a black and white creature rising up out of the water and spreading its boardlike wings wide. The sheer size of it alone makes it seem strange, almost unearthly. I stop walking and take up my binoculars. An osprey? No, it must actually be a sea eagle, which has now found itself a lookout point some distance away, ready for the next stage of its hunt. Not far from it, beyond fields of buttercups, the oilseed rape is a blaze of brilliant yellow. Standing tall again in the distance are the wind turbines with their gray propellers. All but one are motionless. Further eastwards, a crop sprayer makes its way across a field of barley, sprinkling as it goes.

  Because all this is happening on the other side of the river, it seems far away, as does the group of people, even though we are separated only by the river channel. They stand, arms folded, next to a tractor with a large water tank. A Saint Bernard pads around, brushing past their legs, examines the submerged red pipe, walks to the small blue-and-white-painted pumping station, and barks across. Are they collecting water? Or pouring something into the Ryck? For decades, newly dug ditches have been draining ground water from the marshes to transform the poor grassland into arable land. Indeed, I soon stumble across an offshoot which disappears into the thorny scrubland bordering an adjacent wood. Bubbly black mud oozes in the undergrowth. Tired light filters through the tree canopy. Silence reigns now; there is not a bird to be heard. It is not long, though, before I am back in bright light again, because a swathe of the wood has been chopped down to make way for overhead power lines. Japanese knotweed has run riot here, growing several meters tall, with large oval leaves and flailing bamboo-like canes. I walk on and take the first turning leading out into the open.

  On the edge of the wood, a profusion of hawthorn flowers forms a luxuriant froth abuzz with insects—while the middle of the white clover-dotted meadow is home to swallowwort and western marsh orchids with purple, helmetlike flower spikes and broad leaves marked with reddish-brown spots. And for a moment Greifswald cathedral and directly in front of it the brick-red pyramid of the tower of St. Jacobi’s appear between the riverside copse and a far-off embankment.

  A barely distinguishable path leads alongside the waterway, now framed by dikes on both sides. Behind the strawy palisades, graceful,
clean-limbed birch trees stand tall, their fresh leaves fluttering like bunting. Swaying in front of these are the frayed pennants of the reeds. Yellowhammers repeat their uninflected tune, a chaffinch chip-chips. Soon another, smaller pumping station comes into view on the far bank, its facade daubed with graffiti. An angler casts out her fishing line in front of it. Two large brown dogs are lying next to her. Soon afterwards, in the middle of my path, I come across a thick bronze-colored bone sticking up out of the dried earth of a molehill. It appears to be a cow’s femur. A thicket of eared willow is lush with bristly yellowy-green flower spikes. The Ryck, entirely overgrown with buckthorn and reeds, is no longer visible. The reeds rustle. Azure damselflies flit among the branches or sit on stalks of meadowgrass, the hint of a horseshoe mark on their iridescent abdomens.

  A sound now reaches my ears that I cannot place, a dull metallic clicking, which is repeated soon afterwards. And then, behind a bank, the freshly mown green of a golf course opens up before me, its artificial hillocks continuing right up to the bypass embankment. People in brightly colored peaked caps hit balls into the air, while from the dense hedgerow next to me a thrush nightingale pipes up, more strident than a nightingale but just as brilliant.

  The hedges that hemmed me in a moment ago have given way to a carpet of butterbur. Snails have munched holes in its rhubarb-sized leaves. A trail leads through a boggy willow grove and under the road bridge, then up again to a pedestrian bridge. I rest my hands on the railing and look at the peaceful, brownish, roughly three- or four-meter-wide watercourse, which only officially counts as the Ryck from this point, the outer limit of the city. Lily pads float at its edges.

  All at once the sky clears, and I feel the sun burning my neck. I take the sandy farm track along the top of the small dike on the south bank. I pass a meadow of buttercups, before coming upon the municipal cemetery. On the far bank is a row of detached houses. This group of dwellings is not shown on the map. It must have been built only recently. In the branches of a hawthorn bush choked with knotweed glows a spot of rusty red. It is a common linnet, and a hand’s breadth away from him, larger and less colorful, is the female. But before I can get a closer look at them, they both swoop down and disappear. Soon the Ryck is hidden by the reeds again, and only the blue railway bridge in the distance reveals which way it flows from here.

  My path takes me further south past a firefighting pond ringed by barbed wire and pink-blossomed apple trees. The trunk of a willow has been colonized by ocher-yellow slime mold. It looks like construction foam. Tall poplars line a cracked asphalt road leading into town. Horses graze in a paddock, and soon after, beyond a small stream, are some apartment buildings. There are plastic slides and trampolines in the gardens. On the other side of the street is a huge derelict storage depot behind a holey wire fence. Soon I reach Grimmer Strasse with its narrow, pastel-colored old buildings. I walk past a farmyard and across a supermarket parking lot park. In a paved yard in front of a stonemason’s premises, two Rottweilers growl behind high fences. They have rubber chewing rings in their mouths, drool hanging from their chops. The Ryck is a long way off. It is only when, walking along the earth rampart, I turn into the park surrounding the zoo that am I able to spot its reed-fringed bed again behind a disused railway line. I follow the pavement downhill, past the old hospital building where I was born. After the bridge on Stralsunder Strasse, the river opens out and flows into a trapezoidal basin some seventy or eighty meters wide and several hundred meters long—Greifswald harbor. Two floating restaurants are moored to the paved northern quay, and several tall-masted sailing boats to the southern quay. Behind them, the prefabricated buildings cast long shadows.

  I sit down on the south bank. On the other side is a line of low buildings and wooden sheds, boatyards and a rowing club where, as a youngster, I trained one spring. Somewhere behind it, in the Rosental valley between the Ryck and the Baberow, is where the salt flats must have been that—together with the river—were the reason why woodland was cleared here and a market town established on swampy ground. A dead bream floats in the brackish water. Swifts dart low over the rippled surface with shrill cries. Three swallows are perched on the taffrail of a schooner, their fox-red breasts aglow in the evening sun.

  Valle Onsernone

  Encyclopedia in the Wood

  * At the age of fifty, Armand Schulthess, a clerical assistant in the commercial section of the Swiss Federal Department of Economics in Bern, decided to start a new life from scratch in Ticino. Schulthess, who in his younger days had run a ladies-wear company, Maison Schulthess, with branches in Geneva and Zurich, gave up his office job in 1951 and moved to Valle Onsernone, having already purchased several plots of land there, eighteen hectares in total, in the 1940s. From that point on, his life revolved around a grove of chestnut trees, which he gradually transformed into an encyclopedia in the wood, organizing human knowledge by subject area and inscribing it on more than a thousand metal plates. The often multilingual inscriptions included summary descriptions of different fields of knowledge, lists, tables, and bibliographic information, as well as suggested leisure activities, interspersed with invitations to get in touch, though any actual attempts were always emphatically rebuffed. Schulthess lived the rest of his life in seclusion. He died on the night of September 29, 1972, in his garden, from exhaustion and hypothermia following a fall.

  † In July 1973, his legal heirs had his house cleared, which had been crammed wall-to-wall with books, papers, and household items, and burned or disposed of virtually its entire contents. During the clear-out, which took two days, a library of around seventy handmade books, probably collage, on the theme of sexuality was incinerated. The outdoor collection was completely destroyed. Only a handful of the metal plates and nine of the handmade books were salvaged; three of these books ended up in the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, while the rest are now in private ownership. Today the house’s name is the only reminder of its former owner: Casa Armando.

  Testing, testing, one, two, three, four, five. You’re listening to Radio Monte Carlo. Testing, testing, six, seven, eight, nine. Good. Let’s get going with our evening program. So, we have now arrived in the village in the Onsernone valley. The village is about two hours from Locarno. You take the train and get off in Auressio. It’s a bit of a walk to the house. You take the little footpath downhill. You’ll come in May as the weather’s nice then. You’ll find the house easily enough, and the sign outside that invites you to knock on the door as the bell isn’t working anymore. You’ll encounter Gorgo at the front door and brave her stare. You’ll see the garden, all the metal plates. You’ll read them, understand them. It’s a large site, a nice piece of land: sloping, rocky, covered in dense chestnut woods. It falls away steeply towards the south. From the fence at the bottom you can hear the burble of the river Isorno. The old main road runs right through the site. Nowadays it’s a public footpath, so I have strangers walking across my plot of land, domain number one. I also own domain number two in Alp Campo to the south of the mountain pass into the Maggia valley, and domain number three in Sotto Cratolo.

  The people who come here read the plates, but they don’t read properly. They don’t know how to read; they only read to stimulate their minds, to stimulate their feelings. But you have to read to organize. And whatever’s being organized has to be written down first. That’s the only way to create order. My system is based on putting like with like: the “Miraculous” section groups the phenomena associated with the cult of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the tears of blood and stigmata of Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth together with the astonishing invulnerability of Mirin Dajo, who allowed his body to be pierced with swords, and, right next to it, the world’s greatest maritime disasters. The Nobel prizes go with the encyclopedias, Linné with the plants and animals, the butterflies with philosophy, fertilizer with a diet table, radiesthesia and radiation with gambling odds, the moon landing with UFOs, UFOs and fakirs with parapsychology
and the mysteries of mankind. The table of sunspots with the barbecue, the secrets of Tibet right behind the psychoanalysis tree and the plate about ant colonies directly above the anthill. The written word must connect with the real-life experience. An encyclopedia in the wood. Human knowledge is assembled here. It hangs in the trees. It is not complete, of course. It cannot possibly be complete. What a job that was, writing all those plates! You must always do something useful in life. Collect something if you’re out and about, pick up an apple, a chestnut, a tin can. Everything has a use. You mustn’t throw anything away, not even a scrap of paper. You can do accurate work even with pencil stubs. Tin cans can be turned into signs, if you flatten them out. There is always work to be done: weeds to be got rid of, rusty signs to be repaired, chestnuts to be peeled. They swell right up and take on the taste of whatever you put them in. In syrup they turn really sweet. And in a broth they become savory. They have a high nutritional value. It is important to know the nutritional value. Especially when you don’t have any teeth left. I can’t eat almonds anymore. I’m a good cook. For lunch all I need is a pint of milk and a bread roll. There’s nothing one really needs. One doesn’t need anything really. At most a woman. She should be interested, keen to learn, young. Someone who knows nothing yet. Someone I could teach about everything. Ideally a young girl between eighteen and twenty-five who I could marry or adopt, an orphan or a young heiress.

  You won’t break things, unlike the children who sometimes visit, who don’t answer when you speak to them. Not even when you ask what language they speak. I speak German, French, Italian, Dutch, and English. But the people who come here only want to collect chestnuts and make fun of me. They haven’t got a clue. Take no notice of them. He’s a weirdo, they say, a nutcase, a lunatic. Just because I sometimes play the gramophone at night. The fact is, the acoustics are best in the open air and at nighttime. It doesn’t disturb the birds as they’re asleep. Sometimes I like to sing. As long as no one hears. I used to sleepwalk as a child. But then I grew out of it. Enrico Caruso was the greatest tenor of all time. I’ve got a lot of records by him, and a hundred and fifty records in total: operas, operettas, classical music, dance hits, the most famous of the Viennese waltzes. It’s all there. You love music.