by Klaus Modick
Christmas Eve was lovingly orchestrated for the child. From the table, we could see out into the cluster of spruces. I had trimmed the middle tree, the largest of the three, and it seemed to take joy from this, if I may so interpret the fact that its branches reached directly toward me. Claudia was visibly impressed that Christmas trees grow in the forest and therefore need not be thrown into the trash on New Year’s. Right away she wanted to know why this specific tree—and here she pointed toward the decorated spruce—and not another—here she gestured toward a bare oak—could be the Christmas tree.
“Because it is green even in the winter,” said Peter, naturally provoking Claudia’s next question—namely, why it remained green even in the winter.
“No,” Franz said. “You must ask Uncle Lukas that question. He knows all about it.”
And I actually began to lecture the child, talking nonsense. Although I tried to avoid technical terms as much as possible, I noticed how little by little Claudia’s interest waned, how a great disappointment came over her face, as I talked about the way the chlorophyll split the sunlight like a transparent pane of glass that is colored green, absorbing the red and blue light waves while letting the green pass through; the way the solar energy absorbed in this manner is not transformed into heat but, rather, brings about a simple chemical reaction, whereby water, mineral salts, and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere combine and thereby form living matter as well as sugar, which enables the cells to build up stable membranes and create food reserves. But as the terms for the tree—common spruce or Picea abies—spilled out, verbatim, from my lips, I broke off uneasily. The child was still looking at me, but the irrepressible curiosity in her eyes had given way to a disbelief that seemed almost angry.
“No,” Claudia said resolutely when I fell silent. “No, Uncle Lukas. You are lying.”
“Please, Claudia. You shouldn’t say such things.”
Marianne looked at me apologetically.
“Claudia is right,” I murmured. “It may all really be completely different, totally otherwise.”
Looking for help, I stared at something absent in the group of spruces, something that had once already shown me how everything is indeed completely different. The Christmas tree in the middle seemed to lean toward me in the wind, seemed to want, once again, to unlock memories, to provide signs that I could understand, that I could read in the tree and its movements, that I needed only to read out loud to the child.
“In fact, it’s like this.”
And I read the story of Attis, the son of the Phrygian Nana; Attis had castrated himself (I said merely that a wound had been inflicted) and he lay dying under a spruce tree when Cybele, mother of the gods, found him there. She prevented his death by transforming him into the tree, and made Zeus promise that the tree would remain forever green. From Attis’s blood, violets are supposed to have grown, and for the spring festival dedicated to Cybele, a fir or a spruce was felled, wrapped in cloths, decorated with violets, and then carried into the Phrygian sanctuary. On the third day (but I read this silently to myself, because I believed that it might be unsettling to Claudia), the day of blood, the priests, all eunuchs, inflicted wounds on themselves. The ecstasy of the cult reached such a pitch that the men castrated themselves.
“Ah, yes.” Franz laughed. “Our great book of myths and sagas. Now it all comes back to me again. We got that from Father one Christmas. Yes, it’s great that you remember it. My impression was that all you think about these days is your terminology.”
“I think about that, too, my dear brother.”
Claudia was now very happy. We exchanged gifts, small ones, though even here the web of relationships from recent months did not let me down, for I received a picture book with the title Ancient Trees in Middle Europe. Claudia wanted to know why one received gifts only on Christmas, but before Marianne and Peter could respond with a gently educational rebuke, the spruces had gotten hold of me again.
“There is another old story about that. Once in the Harz, some young girls were dancing around a spruce in which a goblin had hidden. They wanted to cut off his escape route with their dance and demanded that he give them gifts for his freedom.”
“How do you know all this?” Claudia asked.
Even Franz was amazed that I still knew all these stories.
“These are stories,” I said happily, “that the Christmas tree has told me.”
Claudia was astonished. We laughed.
“You are a regular fairy-tale uncle,” Peter said wonderingly. “I would not have believed you were an old man of science at all.”
“The older one becomes, the better one can remember.”
“Well,” said Franz, “I don’t know about that.”
WHILE CLAUDIA AND HER ELDER BROTHER used the frozen lake to try out the skates they had been given for Christmas, Franz and I took once again our old route through the Henntings’ pastures in the direction of Spohle. No snow had fallen yet, but it was in the air. A pale sun hung motionlessly over the frozen-solid expanses, on which now, in the early afternoon, isolated patches of mist still lay or were already re-forming. Franz, who at the end of this summer term would become an emeritus professor himself, held nothing back about how very disconcerting his recent years at the university had been. In the late 1960s, he had, though not without inner resistance, adopted aspects of a reconceived psychology; as he began to grasp that even this science might be embedded in social relationships and interests, he asked not only about its proper subject matter but also, increasingly, about its political functions. And now, scarcely a dozen years later, a new irrationalism had broken out at the university, an irrationalism that could be considered romantic and green in color, and from which psychology was by no means spared. For example, Nietzsche was now in all seriousness viewed as a significant psychologist, despite his influence on the political history of which our family had had such bitter experience.
“In one of my last seminars with students, some of whom I esteemed very highly”—and here Franz spoke as though he were still stunned, shaking his head—“in a discussion about theories of memory, the claim was actually made that the functions and structures of memory, its mechanisms, could be much more fully clarified by reading certain novels than through psychology or psychoanalytic theory. Imagine that, Lukas. Imagine that someone in the field of botany stood up and opined that one could acquire better observations and more information about the flora of Ammerland if, instead of using a microscope, one consulted an effusive nature poem about violets in springtime or I know not what. Nothing against literature. But everything in its proper time. Everything in its proper place.”
“That’s something Father could have said,” I remarked, in order to evade Franz. With a sleepwalker’s certainty he had plucked a string that months ago began to vibrate ever more strongly within me. Did he suspect something about my circumstances? Did he wish to provoke me?
“Well,” Franz said, pushing the topic aside, “it’s all the same to me. All that is behind me now. And you? Are you making progress with your critique?”
“Do you see that group of birches over there?” I pointed ahead toward them.
“Yes, of course. What of it?”
“It is very lovely. Can one say more? I have stopped asking myself why it is there, why in general anything is there. The answer is always only because. And this line of questioning distracts me.”
Franz gave me a suspicious sidelong glance.
“Distracts you? From what?”
“It is impossible to state that,” I said.
Franz laid his hand gently on my shoulder. He was really concerned about me, because we had always, in all other circumstances, avoided touching each other.
“Lukas, old boy, are you sure you’re feeling well? Will you be all right here, all alone? You are no longer the youngest. Come back with us. You ought to be among people again.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m absolutely fine. Occasionally, I do get te
rribly tired. But if I were around more people, I might feel that way even more often. Here I’m able to get my work done. My critique of terminology grows and thrives, though it blooms in ways that I could not have anticipated. It is almost running riot, if you will.”
Franz tried to give our conversation an ironic twist.
“Is that the reason why you have grown this beard?”
“Exactly. My beard is the moss of old age. You should grow one, as well. It keeps one warm.”
This made me chuckle. Franz looked at me again, concerned, unsettled, but held his peace. We tramped wordlessly through the deeply frozen grass, until Spohle emerged ahead of us from the thick, dense mist.
“Let’s turn back,” Franz suggested. “It’s getting dark.”
“How about a small beer and schnapps at the tavern?”
“Father could have said that.”
We laughed.
“Cools in the summer, warms in the winter,” said the innkeeper, as he served us a corn liquor and beer.
“‘But it is moist. And moisture, boys, moisture creeps in!’”
Here I quoted Father. Franz nearly choked with laughter.
“Okay, then, cheers!”
We drank and inspected each other.
“And what,” Franz suddenly asked, “do you do with your time when you’re not working on your manuscript?”
“I dream.”
“I see. And of what?”
“Difficult to say.”
“Come on, tell me. This is finally something that falls within my domain of expertise.”
“I don’t want to have my dreams interpreted. For me, dreams and waking are melting into one another more and more. I no longer know where my dreams begin and where they end. In fact, I don’t even want to know.”
“Lukas, is everything really okay with you?”
“Things have never been better. But if it will reassure you, I will gladly tell you about one of my dreams. I had it yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or even earlier. Maybe I won’t dream it until tomorrow. What difference does it make? It’s all the same, equally valid. That’s just the way it is.
“I’m standing at the edge of a huge cornfield, which is bordered by an endlessly wide veldt. There is a rustling in the cornfield. I’m startled. I see a man step out of the field, moving out into the veldt. I know him, even know his name. I call out to him. But he doesn’t react, his movements being quite stiff and jerky. I approach him, shake him by the arm, look into his wide-open saucerlike eyes. They are like the eyes of someone who has been hypnotized, or who is in a severe state of shock. I call out his name again. Again he does not react. He just moves stubbornly onward, like a robot.
“He carries a rucksack and has something of the soldier about him. Suddenly a thought occurs to me. I command him, as one commands a soldier in a drill. ‘Forward! Stand still! Hit the deck! Up!’ He does all this obediently, but still in a trance, still with the abrupt movements of an automaton. Suddenly he awakens, points with his hand into the veldt in panicked shock. I look in that direction, from which three tanks are closing on us. ‘Hit the deck! Take cover! Quiet!’ I shout. They don’t notice us. But he has already pulled out a hand grenade and he throws it in front of the tanks, because of which they take notice of us, turn toward us, pursue us. Now I, too, throw a hand grenade, which hangs from my belt, and as both grenades explode in quick succession, we run for our lives to the cornfield.
“The tanks open fire, but we reach, unhurt, the protective green of the field. As we bolt into the cover, we are only one person. The stranger has entered into me. I hasten breathlessly through the swaying green, where a few places are already smoldering, already burning; I seek protection and safety. And as I hurry through the green, flames shooting up from everywhere, suddenly I can fly. I float over the sea of corn and watch, singing a hymn about the beauty of the fields. As I try to swat at a mosquito whining around my head, I wake up.”
Franz ordered a second round and we drank to each other. He kept quiet a few minutes, nodded to himself as though he understood, and then began, as though speaking to himself, to draw associations.
“Veldt: bleakness, emptiness, death. Cornfield, green: life. Robot, soldier: the domain of the orderly, science; tank: danger …”
“Franz, I don’t want any interpretations. No analyses.”
“That is not an analysis. If you were not the person I know, I would say that you in your strict disciplinarity have become ever more distanced from life, from greenness; that you are marching right toward an emptiness; that you are not listening to yourself; that you are even conjuring danger, putting yourself at risk. But you can still turn back, although your situation is already extremely urgent. And you realize this, start to live again. But why should you be afraid? Indeed, you as a botanist have been, for your whole life, closer to the green than any of us. Perhaps—”
“Franz! Leave me be. Let it be simply thus, as it is.”
He remained silent, but I noticed his growing uneasiness. He was concerned about me. I really liked him, and in this moment he was perhaps dearer to me than ever—and yet I wished that he would just leave me alone.
“But will you have another round with your little brother, or not?”
We laughed, drank up, and made our way home. Arm in arm, we took the road back, for we would have stumbled in the dark fields. The tapping of our feet on the frozen street, the stiff bricks. We walked at the same pace, he and I. In the same silence.
THEY HAVE LEFT AGAIN. I remain. It was a stopping point between stations. Someone has checked my ticket, but he could not make out my destination. My journey continues. It is a slow fall. Sometimes, though, it is a rising upward.
SKIES SUCH AS THIS just have to be blue, with fleecy white clouds. Above everything, in the far west, five radiant fingers reach out, sedately, from the egg-yolk yellow sun. If you look into the sun long enough, you begin to see her broad smile. Or, standing upside down, you would be able to discern her grief at having to die every night. Pleasantly, at my age one no longer feels the need to stand on one’s head or walk on one’s hands. So it is the eternally smiling kindness of the full, the single truth, that remains.
In the distance behind, to the east, are peaks and steep mountainous areas visibly covered in gray snow. I’m almost ashamed to admit that up to now I have never noticed them. It is possible that I, at Claudia’s age, also knew about this mountain range and saw it, but I’ve lost the ability to spread myself out across the earth, to take everything into myself. Lately, though, there are more and more moments in which I put my feet in the moss or look into the sun with half-closed eyes, and then, a breeze blowing somewhere far off, the earth gives way beneath me, becomes small—becomes, again, a star. In this winter sky, which wears the colors of summer, the stars are falling.
If it were nighttime, the stars might have six points, the moon appearing as a sickle with the same yellow color that the sun had. But as it is, the five wide beams reach out—beams that are excluded from the visible territory of the sun—such that everything can be observed in a never-before-seen light. The house stands exactly in the middle, but it occupies only a very small part of the whole. The roof and its environs project such a confidently continuous red that one does not see the moss encroaching on them. Even the wooden walls have that same strong brown color that they had when they were first built; they show no trace of weathering. The door is simply a huge black cavity, and the windows are blue like the sky. The balcony in the attic, my wintertime greenhouse, my heating cell, captures, in a way that seems more real than the real thing, the full, unclouded color of the sun. Thick gray smoke pours out of the chimney, becomes subtilized as it is drawn up into the blue sky, and, by the time it reaches the distant mountains, appears as only a thin curvy line, a pencil mark on the horizon.
Apart from the treatment of the sky and the house, an orgy of green and brown undulates over and through the greatest part of the surface. Out of this apparent flux, where t
he rigid uprightness of the leafless trees towers into the sky and the wide-reaching arms of the evergreens meet the blank whiteness, an innocent knowledge of detail jumps out at me. This knowledge comes not from studying, but, rather, from a great sense of wonder—from the wonder that anything, anything at all, exists. And that it is beautiful. The frost-stiffened forest, through whose trees one can see so far during this time of year, appears to me not dead, but, rather, sleeping. And in the forest’s dreams reigns a life force that desires to burst through, an agitated kind of life whose expression in the lines, strokes, and surfaces has become solidified without being dead. Near the lower border, which is completely dominated by the darkest shade of green, a man lies stretched out. His long beard, in color and movement the same as the wood smoke that flows from the chimney, forces its way up like a root through the green ground—and on out of the picture.
“That’s you, Uncle Lukas,” Claudia had said when she gave me her crayon picture as she was leaving.
“And where, exactly, am I?”
“In the moss. All the moss. Don’t you see that?”
Oh, yes, I do see. I see it ever more clearly. This picture hangs over my writing desk, right next to the window. If I alternately observe the picture and then look out the window, it seems to me as if the picture were a window in its own right. It offers a view of reality, an insight into nature, from whose powerful vastness, which is at the same time an extraordinarily intimate proximity, the glass window separates me, functioning as a cloudy filter between me and the forest. The truth of this child’s drawing lies in its memorylessness. Yet the naïveté is complicated, and the absence of memories discloses an immense power of recollection. Claudia’s thoughtful, almost refined way of approaching me is evident here—her delightful air of haughty charm and uncompromising grace, the way she was incorruptible when I lectured her about chlorophyll at Christmas. The child knows what is of and in nature, and can still grasp it as a whole, including mountains that we no longer see. The child can say something about death as the price of life—and show this by drawing me in the moss.
