The Wall (23 page)

I took out my watch. It was an old piece that steadily kept the time, its lovely second hand sweeping across the clock face. It was almost nine o’clock. Actually not that late, but who cared? Only to the pallbearers, the steadfast pair, did it matter, because they wanted to deliver me on time. I didn’t care that the cremation was at eleven. Why do people love to schedule these events in such precise fashion? Death approaches; there cannot be much time left, but even the best doctors can be off by several hours or even days. Then one is cremated and buried, and right on time. Everything done to the minute. Things get in the way, but one overcomes them. Someone glances at a watch and decides that it’s time. The guests and the personnel are happy the time has come, it having been kept, for it’s never good to be
late. Death must be allowed to roam free, surprising us in the middle of life, for that is its right. Only murders are often pedantically scheduled, they needing to be carried out at particular times, even when the right of the state takes on such a task and the poor victim is executed. But I was a mistake, for I was not meant to be scheduled for a sanctioned or an unlawful murder, the men having said nothing about it. Nor is one supposed to be killed in a crematorium, for there death is devoured, not life. And what did any of this damn nonsense have to do with me? There was no reason to be walking through the city with Brian and Derek, my dumb good nature alone having let me leave my apartment with them. I decided that as soon as possible I would turn around and take note of certain markers so that later I could find my way back home without Johanna’s help. But it was a needless precaution, for we were passing through a long-familiar neighborhood. And I then recalled that there was in fact a crematorium not far from us.

We were already on Middleton Avenue and, past the railway bridge that we were now crossing, we had to turn left onto Temple Road. There stood the flower shops with their wreaths and even lush potted plants, all of it reminding me, as it captured my attention, that I should really buy something nice for my memorial. I plucked some coins from my pocket and pointed toward a flower shop. Johanna figured out what I wanted, but Brian and Derek both felt that there should be no interruption so close to the end, both of them indicating that the crematorium was just ahead.

“Couldn’t my wife go?” I asked, deciding to break the long silence.

Brian indicated that she could do as she wished, but there was nothing for me in the shop, nor could we wait for my wife.

“Why such a hurry?” I protested.

Derek, who was much more understanding, reminded me that flowers and wreaths were already on full display for me in the hall, though perhaps I had forgotten. Brian, meanwhile, had had enough of this nonsense and looked at me with contempt.

“Bloody hell, the dead should never be allowed to wander around! I knew it. Just be nice and you end up paying a price!”

Johanna motioned to the men to cease; she was afraid that such talk would upset me. I had by now lost interest in the flowers and approached the spacious display of a stonemason with a vast selection of gravestones,
magnificent crypts, and modest urns. Some of the memorials were carved with loving thoughts, others were smooth and cold, but otherwise they were finished, all of it so peacefully smooth and innocent, the sugar-white marble embossed with accursed grief, carrying the weight of mortality, the column broken, the garland and ribbon, Psyche mourning with her hair in disarray, her contorted body naked. How good it is that the inclement weather at the cemetery here doesn’t wear away at her, for at the stonemason’s she is protected along with the little angels that tenderly look up, their index finger at their lips. I stood before the little angels, probably angering the men, though there was nothing they could do to stop me.

“I like it here. I’d like to have a stone of my own.”

The chief angrily tried to pull me away.

“If you touch me, I’ll scream! Let me be! I just want a stone of my own. It’s great to have such a big selection.”

Johanna was happy to see me put up such strong resistance, but she still didn’t venture to openly come to my aid. I had to urge her on.

“Just send the men away! They just keep waiting!”

“I can’t do that. We’ve reached the border. You have to take the last steps.”

I felt betrayed as never before and began to weep. It was easy for the men to drag me away from the stonemason’s to the crematorium. The high wall stood there, stretching out endlessly, behind it tall thick trees, an open forest, me pining to be let loose in it. But I had to keep moving; between two false walls the wide somber portal opened. As I looked in, I could see groups of people I knew gathered together and sunk in silence. They didn’t acknowledge me, though they nodded to my wife, several of them quietly raising a hand in greeting. Meanwhile, Brian and Derek remained always close by, either right next to me or just behind, thus devoting neither the watchfulness nor the attention befitting the dead. They only pointed emphatically toward the portal, which I answered with a mercurial smile. Then they stood up proudly, with heads lifted high in order to present a good example to me and the gathering, and walked toward the door without turning around to me. Thus, whether out of stupidity or ultimately from an awakened sense of judiciousness, they had freed me; I did not have to follow them. I actually hesitated for a moment and did not move from my spot,
but then I lost myself again, the will that had manifested itself that morning suddenly retreating, for I no longer felt it to be real.

No matter how hard I looked and looked, it was no longer possible to see anyone; a weakness of the eyes or some fog hid everything from me. Thus I knew of no other way out except to follow Brian and Derek, meek as a lamb. Did I no longer have a wish to go it alone in the world? I wavered, but no, it was simply unbearable; loneliness was far worse than everything being ruined. I lurched forward, it being hard to move, my legs having fallen asleep. I could hardly lift them from the ground, and I pounded on my thighs in order to loosen them up. It did little good; I had to use my hands to move one foot in front of the other. It went awful slowly. In order to salvage something from my mishap, I decided in despair to ask the pallbearers to help, even if I felt ashamed and was a little afraid of them making fun of me. As I turned around to look for them, the fog had grown so thick around me that I realized there was no battling it, nor did it make any sense to call out. And yet I did call, though without any words, for they just didn’t come. I tried to be as loud as I could, to be heard amid such desolation, but my voice was weak, only a peep emerging, and soon just a hoarse scratching, a thin whimper that didn’t even sound human. Nor was there a door to be found anywhere, for I could see nothing and had lost my sense of direction. I tried to control my fears, and told myself that I could still get where I had to go, even if I didn’t know in which direction I was headed—all I had to do was go on. But I was wrong. No matter how I flailed about while drowning, I never found the portal.

Fortunately, it became easier to walk, and I even managed to reach the wall. But I didn’t find the door. I tried a couple of steps to the right and then to the left, but always there was the wall and no entrance. Then I grew sad that there I was all alone, everything different from what I had planned at home. Johanna stood at the ready someplace else, estranged from me, perhaps even lost, and the children as well. I had no hope of finding her still on West Park Row, and Mrs. Stonewood would refuse to give any information, or maybe not know anything at all. And how was I even to find my way home? I had vainly convinced myself that I could take in everything along the way in order that it be stamped in my memory, thinking this way, then that, it all seeming like child’s play. Now I believed that I felt the wall, it
being wet and slippery, and I could grab hold of it, my fingers slipping away, though it hurt to bang into it. I decided to be patient until the weather grew brighter. It was a busy neighborhood; surely someone would soon come along who could tell me in which direction I should toddle off. I was mistaken, for I remained alone. It wasn’t cold, so I sat down like a beggar and waited—for what I didn’t know.

As I rested I began to feel better, even comfortable, though I was surprised at how gloomy the light had become, the sky hanging low and flat. Had the trees behind the wall suddenly grown, or had someone closed the curtains, not caring how much that bothered me? Maybe I had been resting long enough, such that I had forgotten that daylight had passed. I could glance at my watch—that would tell me something—but it was stuffed too deep in my pocket, such that I was unable to reach it, my hands digging around for it. Then I thought I heard someone opening the door quietly, though I could have been wrong. Nonetheless, it was a familiar sound that convinced me that there must be a way out, if not for me, at least for others.

“Shall we finally get a move on?” asked Anna. “Otherwise, we’ll never make it there today.”

I rubbed my eyes, jumped up, and called out quickly, which is what I do whenever I want to hide the fact that I had been almost completely out of it.

“Yes, of course. How nice that you came to get me.”

“Why wouldn’t I? You said after breakfast that you needed a bit of quiet, and then you kept me waiting downstairs.”

I asked her forgiveness and pulled myself together, shifting the knapsack. She had already closed it. I was grateful to her for making the sacrifice and heading off to the lovely mountains just so that I could see them once again. How often I had told her about these mountains in the past months, for ages and ages. She felt that I should go, for it would change me and do me good, make me happier than anything else would, it being something I would have been happy to do even if it were not a question of my health. I could think of a thousand reasons to delay this journey, for the memory was too strong, my fear of the encounter overtaking me. How could I dare enter Franziska’s realm, where everything was an expression of her soul, whereas I was nothing more than an unbidden intruder in a world that didn’t belong to me? Forest, everywhere forest, the furtive feel that threatened to push me
away or to engulf me. This was not permitted; I didn’t dare risk it. For the journey threatened to do me in the moment the train traveled up through the valley of Angeltal. She saw that I was never going to decide, and said, “Any day now, I don’t have forever,” yet for almost a week she planned to travel with me in the mountains before I left this land forever. She had done it only for me. Now it was the third morning, and today we had to risk making the great trip that I had so wanted. She urged me on and grabbed another little scarf from her room. Then we stormed down the wooden steps, the innkeepers waving, wishing us well, and were on our way.

The day was clear, the grass shimmering with morning dew and the ample fields with flowers, soft mist rising from the ground, the cool air breathing in the warmth that arched above. I had never felt so good since I had come back. Soon we were climbing higher up toward the Girglhof. Then, however, came the forest, calling to us, inviting us freely to enter it, calm, dense, powerful, growing up from the hard ground, the earth black and green, often damp and marshy, then hard and stony, milky spots of gray, also covered in green and with dark roots, heavy and feeling like home. With solemn earnestness the spruce trees rose upward, their aureoles almost entwined with one another, soft light pouring down from above, making the ground and the shadows darker yet, all of it comforting and secure, there beneath the folds of a many-layered canopy, alive and continuously moving. The ground was varied, a soft carpet of moss covering the broad flats, skeins of lanky forest grasses gathering where the trees parted from one another, coppery brown needles covering the forest floor far and near, now and then knobs of roots pushing up out of them, tender long shoots of sallow plants here and there sprouting up, sorrel also lifting its glassy filaments above the ground. The path was lined with rows of blueberry bushes, which often trailed off into the forest, and similar, somewhat darker, but not as high, the healthy shoots of lingonberry bushes spread wide.

We climbed silently. I didn’t look much at her who had made the hike possible. I only left it to her to lead the way, she having taken charge and seeming satisfied. More and more I wanted to disappear into the forest, to feel it all around me and everywhere, in each tree, memories and hopes at every point, a guest in a home that had survived so much and will survive so much more, that allowed me to enter and took me in and yet didn’t
even know me, untouched by all my suffering, yet also wrested away from forever, the close-knit fabric on the edge of the anguished country that was no longer my country, not at all here inside the mountain forest, where the hillside offers no one any refuge and soon the valleys must dream of being emptied of humans.

I was never at home in these mountains but always a stranger, yet more deeply enclosed than in any old city, or anywhere in the country or the world. Never had a landscape been so alive to me in its sounds, stimulated more tastes or more smells. I loved it when the long beams of sunlight poured down, when the branches were warmed and the underbrush crackled. I loved it in the rain, when the water dripped heavily from the raspberry bushes, when layers of fog rose and fell, or the wind blew cool in summer or nearly toppled the trees in autumn, when the powerful blasts of thunderstorms threw sultry fear into the tall rumpled crowns of the trees. I loved the mountain forest in any weather, hardly known paths having carried me into it for many hours, where an always renewed sense of fullness, whose blessing was secured by the view, left me alone with myself, a man in the world of trees, a man not among men, a man with a chosen and friendly companion, a man next to Franziska’s loveliness, she who felt herself the guardian of a secret realm amid the protection of the surrounding area, myself a man in the hidden reaches of the dense covering that granted me more freedom than the open fields, because I remained unto myself, rather than one continually searching, and therefore unobserved, never locked out, never held back by fences, not warned to stay away and forbidden to enter. And if I chose to walk through my territory and relish it, it would stand strong and thick, me treading every loved piece of it with grateful feet. But when a stretch of meadow or a forest, an outcrop or an elevation briefly granted a view, sometimes from only small nooks and not for very far, often narrowly hemmed in by thickets, and only sometimes stretching off into the distance, or down into the valley, across to a wall of trees, upward to the cloud-covered peaks of Angeltal, across the river to the next string of alps, to Prenet, Brückel, and Panzer, or farther to the dells, from which Eisenbach and Regenbach get their water, and the swelling surge of forest behind it that doesn’t end, with Kuppen just beyond, which was often barely visible, and the Hahnenriegel towering above all, then Pamperberg and Fallbaum,
each higher than the other, Laksberg with its broad cliffs and Falkenberg thrusting steeply upward, a mountain world that suddenly was there when I wandered along this side of the ridge, it then becoming solemnly quiet, desire and longing falling away, turning in upon themselves. The joyous feel of solid ground.