Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

FACTORY OWNER

  Adalbert!

  Adalbert is on the spot at once and bows.

  FACTORY OWNER

  Send for the shepherd, Hias, to come here at once, so he may gaze upon the mystery of Ruby glass. And, if need be, let us tear Muehlbeck out of his grave again so that Hias can read from his brain.

  Adalbert withdraws without a sound. We only hear the groaning of the planks.

  The factory owner, near. He opens the case and removes the holy shrine: a mug, copper red.

  FACTORY OWNER

  My God, that was the second glass! And this glory will now be extinguished and vanish from the face of the earth. What will protect me from now on against the evil forces of the free universe?

  He collapses as if stricken by a secret power.

  FOREST

  Sam creeps out of a bark hut, ass first. In front of the hut, a newly made fire; beside it, Hias sits. Sam brings over some rags to bandage Hias’s arm. Hias makes a face of severe pain. They utter their words like spoken law.

  SAM

  You’re making a face like Paulin’s.

  HIAS

  You’ve taken me for a bear.

  SAM

  The bulls have run away.

  HIAS

  I had the bear’s feeling.

  SAM

  Go down to the master, who shall send us a hunter with a rifle. He shall burn the bear. And you bring me some flour.

  Silence hovers between them.

  BARN

  Ascherl and Wudy lie on the threshing floor. Behind them, the innkeeper and his wife stand, not knowing what to do. Both speak into the void, estranged, as if an imaginary third person they have argued with were in the room.

  INNKEEPER

  They say Wudy is done for. He took me by the hair once and threw me on the ground, making my eye bleed.

  HOSTESS

  But it’s Ascherl that’s done for, because he called me a whore once, that old glutton. His evil mouth has been punished for lying.

  She slaps the face of the man lying underneath.

  INNKEEPER

  Are you crazy? Do you want to kill him off?

  HOSTESS

  A whore calls for a good slapping.

  INNKEEPER

  He wanted to prove your whore’s tricks.

  HOSTESS

  That’s why he’s done for now.

  INNKEEPER

  No, it’s Wudy who is finished.

  HOSTESS

  Just look who’s lying underneath. The one underneath is finished, which Hias predicted. Underneath is Ascherl.

  The innkeeper musters courage and picks the two up. He puts Wudy and Ascherl side by side. He tests them by lifting an arm of each and letting them drop. The arms flop down heavily.

  INNKEEPER

  For heaven’s sakes! I can’t even tell who the dead one is by looking closely.

  The innkeeper’s wife flares up at the void.

  HOSTESS

  You don’t curse a dead man in the face.

  She turns away.

  The innkeeper pinches them timidly. They lie as if dead.

  OFFICE

  On the desk near the bay window, two untidy stacks of books are piled up. We know by the thickness of the tomes that they must be encyclopedias and dictionaries.

  The factory owner has buried his head between two piles of books, and he skims down a page with his index finger.

  FACTORY OWNER

  Ru … Ru … Ru … Ru … Ru … Rubel. Nothing.

  He closes the book, puts it on the left stack, and takes a new one from the right stack. He opens it and leafs through it, just like he did before.

  FACTORY OWNER

  Ru … Ru … Ru … Ru … Ruby. Nothing here either.

  We see the book closely. It is turned upside down, but the words are right side up.

  All this time, something like restless despair emanates from the factory owner.

  FOREST

  It is a deeply primordial stretch of woods. Dark forest and high bracken on the ground; some rocks with juicy moss. Some light fog wafts damp and cold through the trunks.

  Toni drags his harp through the woods to a copse. It is mossy and overgrown, with little life-sapping firs. It is deathly quiet.

  We see Toni near, his head cocked sideways, strangely, as if he wanted to listen to something. He does not do a thing and remains in the same odd posture.

  He gets up, takes his harp and leans it a few steps away at the other end of the copse. He listens again with his face lifted sideways and does not come to any conclusion.

  We hear a bird’s voice. Hias appears from out of the tree trunks and abruptly confronts him. Neither of them seems surprised.

  HIAS

  You are Toni.

  TONI

  Then you are Hias. ‘Cause we’ve never seen each other, have we.

  Toni strokes the harp strings softly, the strings rippling slightly.

  TONI

  The factory owner’s got himself a new glass stove set up.

  HIAS

  The furnace builders won’t come.

  TONI

  Then I’ll go play to the glassblowers.

  HIAS

  You’ll be playing to a madman, I can see it.

  Both are quiet, they listen to a bird sing. Hias makes a slight movement with his head.

  HIAS

  We have the same way to go.

  They take off together. They make heavy steps along the wooded slope.

  BARN

  The hostess has brought a black dog with her to the threshing floor for reassurance. She alerts him to Ascherl and Wudy, who still lie on the ground side by side as before. Both have some hay on their clothes and in their hair.

  HOSTESS

  X! X! Sic ‘em! X! X! X!

  The dog crawls and yelps.

  HOSTESS

  At them! Sic ‘em!

  The dog looks at her. The hostess takes a pitchfork and threatens the dog. He growls. She beats him across the spine with the pitchfork’s handle.

  HOSTESS

  Bite! At them! Sic—sic ‘em! X! X!

  She goes on threatening. The dog snarls, barks, and in his dilemma bites Wudy on the arm. Wudy screams.

  HOSTESS

  Ah, now we know.

  She grabs Wudy under the arms and makes him stand up. He makes a sheepish face, unable to figure out what’s going on.

  The dog wants to bite Wudy’s calves. The hostess beats him with the pitchfork.

  HOSTESS

  What Hias sees happens.

  Wudy stares forward without any comprehension whatsoever. Wudy withdraws.

  The dog lies down on the threshing floor and licks himself.

  MANSION

  In the hall, near the broad curving staircase that leads to an antechamber; a praying chair stands beside the entrance, richly carved in wood. On the wall is a beautiful crucifix. The stove is made of smooth stones. Opposite the end of the stairs, a two-winged door opens out onto the garden.

  The glass-factory owner kneels on the praying chair, full of devotion, as if absorbed in prayer.

  FACTORY OWNER

  Glass has an easily breakable soul.

  It is unstained.

  The Crack is the Besetting Sin.

  After the Sin, there is no sound.

  VOICE OF ADALBERT

  Amen

  The factory owner rises. We now realize that, behind him, Adalbert has also been kneeling down. He rises, too. The factory owner turns to Adalbert slowly. His inspirations come sluggishly forth from his tongue.

  FACTORY OWNER

  Will the future see the necessary fall of the factories just as we see the ruined fortress as a sign of inevitable change?

  Adalbert ogles the void for awhile.

  ADALBERT

  People say Hias had seen that nettles are springing out of the glass factories. The lilac bushes will consume themselves for lack of human company, they say.

  FACTORY OWNER

  The
Ruby must save us. Let Muehlbeck’s house be torn down, and search for the mystery in each and every cranny. The soil whereupon his house stands has to be dug three feet deep. For Muehlbeck could have buried the secret. Bring me the green davenport from Paris, the one he gave to his mother, Anamirl.

  Adalbert bows in a wooden fashion and leaves through the door.

  The factory owner, near. He ponders.

  FACTORY OWNER

  The untidiness of the stars makes my head ache.

  THE DIMINISHING SNAKE

  Sitting on a sofa back home in Munich, Herzog studied a letter that had been sent to him in my care. The letter was from a physician in England, a man capable of reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in eleven seconds. He wrote to affirm his eagerness to lend a hand to any film project Herzog needed him for, although he was at a loss to imagine what purpose might be served by his peculiar skills.

  Herzog was pleased, and, reaching over to shake my hand, he declared, “Good. We shall do it.”

  Also with conviction I replied, “What do we do first?”

  “Wait,” Herzog said. “Something like this is a matter of time.”

  Herzog drove back to film in Lower Bavaria the next day with the script girl and the two set designers. Outside the village of Memmingen, an old woman was riding her bicycle on the roadside. She was pedaling at such a feverishly fast rate that Herzog imagined her partaking in the mythical “Tour de Memmingen” cycling competition around the town’s borders. He turned to his passengers and said, “If she is the only person in this race, then she will be first. But, also, she’ll be last.”

  The idea began to gnaw at Herzog. “Why couldn’t she be second,” he wondered, “or maybe third?”

  As the others peered out and laughed to see the woman churn and sweat, Herzog followed his line of thought. “Maybe if she could pedal at an infinite rate of speed, that would release her from the race,” he figured. “She then would go so fast that she’d pass all the checkpoints at the same time—she would be east, west, north, and south simultaneously. The racecourse vanishes. Space would disappear and her road would become irrelevant. Fate wouldn’t really be a question anymore.” At that point, an old Bavarian song came to mind, and he started to sing:

  Last night Frau Wirtin dreamed a dream

  Her old man ran around the apple tree;

  As hard as he’d try, he’d never succeed

  To fuck his own ass, it seemed.

  Now Herzog commented, “That song is a profound consideration of Space and Time, and some other things, and that is why I sang it. I am certain that mathematicians analyze this type of problem in their research and seminars.

  “There is something else that confuses me,” he confessed. “It’s the idea, the picture, of a snake that chooses to eat itself. You must first assume that for this to be a possibility, the snake cannot die. So picture in your mind the clear image of a snake swallowing itself up from the rear, forming a diminishing circle. What then happens to the snake? What happens when the jaws approach and begin to swallow the neck—what happens? Can the surface alone vanish—can there be a form that exists only on the inside? Or will it disappear into Nothing? But if it cannot physically die, can it be Nothing?

  “And if two snakes try to eat each other up in a circle, what would happen then? What is the result in the end—I mean, what would it look like? The outside world would be shrinking more and more toward Zero—what does that look like? The picture is what’s important. What if one is faster and finishes the other snake—would it then begin to eat itself being eaten? And what does that look like? What does that mean? How does it end? Do the snakes ultimately turn themselves inside out? What would that be?

  “I am interested in two things: what is the apparent form of this, and, then, does all of this have an end?”

  The passengers in his van found his notions to be highly amusing. “They laugh at me,” he said. “They think it’s absurd. But I don’t.”

  ORDER AND DISORDER

  Four things happened to me during my return journey to the Castle Walchsing. First, getting into my car in Munich, I noticed a manila envelope lying on the pavement. Scrawled across its face was the word SEASHORE, while inside GREY LAG was inscribed in pencil on an ordinary sheet of typing paper, followed by a thin line that went looping, then swelled, reaching upward. I crumbled the envelope and sheet of paper into a ball and tossed it into a rubbish bin hooked to the NO PARKING sign on the curb.

  Then there was Kruger. Kruger was going to Walchsing to play the part of one of four workmen dispatched to get Mother Anamirl’s green davenport. As the car streaked over the winding roads, he grew increasingly nervous, mumbling nonsense to himself and to people and objects outside for the rest of the way. The one time Kruger spoke directly to me, he said something about wanting to visit the United States and see “the great mountains of Brooklyn.” Herzog found this fellow to be one of his easier subjects for hypnosis, with his spells abnormally deep and long lasting.

  The third incident was in the city of Vilsbiburg, when Kruger and I stopped for gas. As the fuel was being pumped into the tank, I saw a funeral taking place outside a nearby church. The procession was reentering the church from the burial ground, as the clergyman stopped on top of the steps and ad-libbed a few lines.

  “Let us not weep,” he intoned. “She is gone beyond sleep. A life of hope. A life with no end.”

  My fourth and final memory that occurred to me en route back to Walchsing came minutes later when, speeding on a short straightaway, the car came upon a tiny hamlet. A woman standing at the second floor window of her house flapped and hung a huge black bedsheet outside as the car went flying by. Having seen this portent, I slowed down.

  Most of the morning’s tasks had been done at the castle by the time we arrived. Kruger’s first small scene had been postponed until the following day. Herzog greeted us upstairs.

  “I’m going to cover your heads with ashes,” he said.

  Then he led Kruger to the costume room, where the other three workmen were waiting.

  However convincingly spellbound they had been at the hypnosis sessions, the workmen were somewhat skeptical that the process would succeed as well under shooting conditions. In the costume room, Herzog conducted a short exercise to allay their doubts. Amid all sorts of distraction and commotion—with the team hustling to and fro to set up and take down their equipment in a chamber cluttered with props, costumes, furniture, lights, and noisy propane heaters—Herzog hypnotized the four men. He told them they were sitting in an empty room, a place so barren and quiet that it was like being in a vacuum. Then he asked them to open their eyes and describe what they saw. One by one, the first three workmen looked around the room, high and low, and said they saw nothing. When Herzog turned to Kruger, though, his answer differed.

  Kruger: I see something.

  Herzog: What do you see, Herr Kruger?

  Kruger: I see … a wooden floor.

  Herzog: What is on this floor?

  Kruger: Nothing.

  Before breaking for lunch, Herzog decided to arrange the set for the next scene. The scene would take place in the office of the factory owner who, after searching insanely for the secret of the Ruby glass, had turned the place into a shambles. The impression of chaos was in order, so Herzog summoned me. In minutes the room was a wreck. Papers spilled in heaps from closets and doorways, books tumbled down from every shelf and sill, ledger sheets draped portraits on the wall, and broken glass and twisted quills cuddled across the floor. In the foreground, two massive history texts stood upright, neat and correct, amid the havoc.

  “My signature,” I told Herzog.

  Herzog surveyed the office thoughtfully. “These books and things that you’ve thrown all about,” he reflected, “I could leave them as they are and do every scene with the place just like this, and no one would ever know the difference. Disorder is something that can hardly be recognized in a film. Disorder can be part of life and can b
e useful. There can be chaos in things themselves, however, but never in their relationship to other things.”

  While Herzog spoke, something slipped out of one of the volumes he was taking from a shelf. When he stooped to retrieve it, what he discovered was quite strange. In his hand was an old sepia-toned photograph of a dead man lying on a bier bedecked with flowers. Faint reddish splotches stained the picture here and there, and the man was not identifiable. Then Herzog turned the photo over. He realized he was holding a postcard, a blank one.

  THE WEASEL OF FEILGAU

  During the day’s lunch break in Walchsing, I was introduced to a miniature man in a suit of gray named Clemens Scheitz, who was playing the role of the factory owner’s aged servant, Adalbert. Scheitz, who claimed to be seventy-seven years old, had previously acted for Herzog in Every Man for Himself and God Against All. He played the municipal case recorder and was seen from time to time assiduously scribbling down the official diagnosis of Kaspar Hauser’s soul. Eyeing Scheitz for the first time, I saw that he was bent over from a burden on his back, this burden imaginary and lopsided.