Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  In the morning, Herzog set out for the location where Hias would fight an imaginary bear. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, I mentioned the photographs we’d seen the night before. Herzog contemplated the handsome cameraman’s pictures and shook his head.

  “His photos were all right,” he began. “Technically they aren’t bad, but he has no aesthetic commitment. He’s much too good-looking a man to have an aesthetic stance. Only ugly runts like us create the beautiful things.”

  They came upon a snowy wilderness beside a frozen lake and began to unload the gear. The rest of the team arrived in a small convoy of cars, and soon everyone was marching through knee-high snow toward the far side of the lake. Wearing only tennis shoes on my feet, I waded across a stony brook and lagged behind. I caught up with them a kilometer later, in an untouched white wilderness with trickling streams and soft drifts and solitary evergreens.

  “Let’s walk out on the lake,” suggested Herzog.

  So Herzog, Hias, the psychoanalyst, and I stepped cautiously about, had a little snowball fight, then started to return to shore. In seconds I found a really good spot in the ice to fall through, and down I went.

  By the time I reached the frozen shore, my feet had turned blue. I took my soaked tennis shoes off and sat barefoot in a snowbank. The pain was raging. The costume girl left with the psychoanalyst to get a change of shoes. I rubbed my feet, smiling in embarrassed anguish, looking and feeling stupid. Hias lent me his cloak until shooting began, and the herdsman comforted me not at all with some pithy drivel about the demonic nature of filmmaking.

  When the cameramen were ready, Herzog grabbed the clapboard and signaled to the waiting Hias, who took his cloak and walked into the snow. As I positioned myself to watch the fight, I wondered what had become of the two team members who had gone for my change of shoes. The scene began. Hias crawled backward out of a tiny cave, knife in hand, now stepping backwards with an intense expression masking his face. The bear lunged at him; Hias smashed into a tree, his whole body snapping like a whip. The creatures grappled and fell into the snow. Over and over they rolled, the bear fighting hard. Hias got the bear by the neck and rubbed its face into the snow, but the bear flipped him over. Hias righted himself, gritting his teeth, his face smeared with dirt and blood, poised for the kill. Hias raised his knife and plunged it into the bear’s throat. Again. And again. Hias gasped with relief.

  The shooting done, I walked back toward the van. I found the psychoanalyst drinking beer in a café with the costume woman. The psychoanalyst invited me to sit down, informing me that the reason he never brought me the shoes was that he’d decided not to.

  “Pain is good for you,” the psychoanalyst advised.

  Driving back to the inn, Herzog talked about his dear friend Amos Vogel, the film historian and theorist from New York, as I gazed beyond the drifting bits of snow toward the faraway white-faced hills. Not having followed much of Herzog’s conversation, I turned to him and said, “It’s too bad that he died. His work was so essential—”

  Herzog was taken aback. “What?” he exclaimed with a shocked and sorrowful expression.

  I repeated what I’d said a moment before. Herzog responded, “Amos has not died—”

  “But yes, he did, months ago,” I insisted. Maybe, somehow, Herzog just hadn’t heard. “It was in July, when I was in New York; I can remember the obituary very well.”

  “But I just received a letter from his wife a few weeks ago.”

  “Wasn’t he a contributor to the Village Voice? Didn’t he write for that magazine regularly?”

  “Yes—”

  “Well, I remember it precisely: I was sitting in a friend’s living room, on the couch, and the front page of the Voice announced his death. The obituary was inside, on page sixty-one.”

  “My goodness—no, no. This cannot be.”

  “I am certain of it. I can picture it on the page.”

  “But the letter—you are wrong—”

  THE DEATH OF A DOG

  On a late April day in the river city of Vilshofen, a brickmaking factory made of brick was somehow set on fire and destroyed. The Heart of Glass team was miles away near Czechoslovakia, shooting the scene of Hias bespeaking his visions of doom from atop the Forlorn Bluff. The Production Manager, meanwhile, was in Vilshofen. There he sought out the owner of the devastated brick factory to talk business. Saxer identified himself and made the man an offer. He wanted to burn down his factory again, he said. The factory owner was interested; he demanded fifteen thousand deutsche marks. Saxer countered with a bid of seven thousand. Then he compromised at seven and a half and got it.

  Arson is an area in which prior experience is virtually useless. With the building’s second demolition just days away, Saxer set to work with a lusty leer. He rearranged the surviving elder beams inside, ripped out the window and door frames, and grabbed and repositioned the few remaining doors. He checked the gutted structure for its volatility and, not yet satisfied, filled the interior with whatever combustible stuff he could find, with books being the best kindling. Next, the brick interior was stripped of all anachronisms. When the local fire brigade insisted on supervising the blaze as a safety precaution, Saxer protested; they threatened to prohibit the fire altogether, so Saxer gave in. Consequently, a vindictive drizzle humiliated the firemen as the flames were waning later on. And then, finally, the petrol. Saxer drove to a gas station with two empty tanks and told the attendant to fill them up, one hundred ninety-nine gallons’ worth of super.

  Herzog arrived a couple of hours before the fire was to begin. With Saxer proudly leading the way, he examined the factory and found everything to be well prepared. To his annoyance, however, Herzog espied hundreds of expectant Vilshofeners gathering on the roadside ridge, awaiting the spectacle. They’d been alerted by the Vilshofen Times, which followed through on a tip from the fire brigade with headline fanfare. There were giggling women, reluctant fathers with begrudged grins and wreathing arms, dark-eyed sons, grieving daughters, drunks, half-drunks, an old man walking backwards up a hill. An atmosphere of carnival vulgarity descended swiftly, blending with the dusk. When something galloped by behind the crowd, no one noticed.

  Ninety minutes prior to shooting, the cameramen had not yet found their way to the factory. Herzog, a bit perturbed, decided to arrange the camera positions and angles by himself. It was at this point that he spotted a tiny white car driven by a bald, bespectacled man; it was stalking him. Over the windshield of this funny car was a sign reading PRESSE. Herzog did his best to ignore this and determined right away to place one of the cameras at a forty-five-degree angle on the eastern side of the fire. Then he considered putting the second camera on top of a nearby shed, but, realizing that the entire scene would last but twenty seconds or so, he chose a simpler position at the front end of the building. The stalker in the tiny white car lurked in back of the shed.

  Herzog assembled his wife, his son, van Anft, and me to go into town for a quick meal. Here I first learned that van Anft was a filmmaker himself—in addition to being a painter, published poet, and bluesman. When he and I engaged in a meager discussion about certain motion pictures, Herzog intervened, gently objecting to the comparisons and judgments being made.

  “People should look straight at a film,” he suggested. “That’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but illiterates. And film culture is not analysis; it is agitation of the mind. Movies come from the country fair and circus, not from art and academicism.”

  Martje Herzog mentioned that Amos Vogel, author of Film as a Subversive Art, had just sent a letter inviting the Herzogs to his home in New York once the filming was over with. Herzog looked at me quizzically as I chewed my stew.

  Back at the factory, less than thirty minutes remained until Saxer would signal the fire brigade to put a torch to the gas-soaked place. The cameramen still hadn’t arrived. Herzog, upset, told Saxer that the starting time for the fire might have to be delayed; the Production Manag
er got angry and vowed to start the fire when it was supposed to start, that the cameramen could go to hell as far as he was concerned.

  With fifteen minutes to go, the cameramen finally drove through the massive crowd and pulled up at the side of the building. Under the headlights of their van, they set up the cameras and tripods as Herzog pressured them, telling them that Saxer would have the infernal scene take place whether or not the cameras were filming it. Then Herzog rushed off, with the tiny insectlike press car sputtering in pursuit, to huddle with Haymo. When he returned to the cameramen just two minutes from the starting time, he found them atop the shed with the principal camera, preparing to shoot at an angle he’d decided against. There was nothing to be done about it.

  Suddenly, a minute ahead of schedule, the factory erupted with flames. The cameramen put a film magazine on the Arriflex and started shooting. Herzog took the second camera and began filming on the eastern side of the building. And the crowd, straining with a feverish gape, moved in, closer and closer.

  I looked at the inferno through the viewfinder of my Nikon. After snapping a few useless shots, I put it down. Around me stood the mesmerized throng like gothic silhouettes, their faces fading in the glow of the flames. Shadows stirred and mimed. The fire leaped and grew, its sparks mingling with the stars. My intellect ravished, I felt everything to be a thought. A beam collapsed from the roof. The atmosphere of danger and destruction engendered fright, which supposed that treachery lurked somewhere in the night. Herzog brought the second camera to the head of the factory and gave it to Jörg, who shot in through the doorway. The flames mushroomed ever more intensely and were soon as awesome as Herzog wanted them to be. The camera was moved to yet another position. Tiny explosions could be heard from the inside as Haymo, wearing headphones, his outstretched hand gripping and aiming a microphone, walked slowly into the fire. As he passed through a door, two fiery beams caved in from above, its crash emitting millions of sparks. Haymo stepped further inside. He stood there, among the flames. He stayed there awhile.

  With a light rain putting out the dying embers, the team packed their gear and got ready to return to Munich. Herzog was pleased with the fire and the filming; everything had gone quite well. I left first, taking Sam with me. After driving a while on the slick black roads, it occurred to us that we were headed in the wrong direction. So we turned back and sped homeward, passing the psychoanalyst hunched over in his crippled Citroen.

  The trip proceeded through the unending darkness as the rain started falling a little harder. Then something happened. Entering a lightless hamlet, I saw a pair of identical dark gray dogs step out of the night. They looked fixedly at the oncoming car while moving across the road. The lead dog stopped and stared defiantly into the blinding headlights as its twin hustled on. I tried to stop. The lead dog went down.

  Badly hurt, the dog staggered over to the curb and onto the sidewalk while its twin glared at me to keep me at bay. All of a sudden, when it seemed it might survive, the bleeding dog unleashed a terrifying scream and slumped down into the gutter. The wail went on and on. It was dreadful, at once strange and familiar—the sound of a human being. I stepped back and glanced uneasily at the herdsman. Together we listened as the animal cried out, “No—no—no.” The twin stood vigil, its glaring eyes reflecting light. “No,” the dog kept crying. “No—no—” Then it died.

  I saw the living dog lick blood off the face of the dead one. I thought about the dog’s dying wail. It was the sound of a human being—I could hear it.

  “There’s no difference,” I said to the silent herdsman. “No difference at all.”

  The Scenario

  INN

  Hias is sitting by himself in the inn. It is a loneliness without consolation. When the earlier patrons come in again, he wants to leave. They grab him by the shirt.

  PATRONS

  Stay here. They say it’s you who’s done this to us!

  More and more men appear. In their madness they need a victim.

  PATRONS

  You’ve wished for our bad luck. You’re to blame.

  HIAS

  I have only foreseen it.

  VOICES

  Then tear out his eyes! The Devil’s Eyes! The Evil Eye!

  GIGL

  C’mon, men, don’t make such a fuss. We’ll bind him now and deliver him to justice.

  They bind him, tie his legs and wrists together, and carry him out. They manage him with considerable effort, as Hias is very heavy. In the hallway we see people beating him up.

  Hias is thrown into the closet, where Ascherl has been carelessly disposed of.

  The door is closed.

  The candles have nearly melted down.

  Rumbling and scolding from outside.

  PRISON

  We behold a gloomy cell. Chains and neckrings on the wall, some primitive wooden beds with straw mattresses beginning to rot. No windows. The weak light descends dismally from somewhere above. Hias and the glass-factory owner are locked up together. Hias, the trapped animal, is pacing up and down. The factory owner cowers on the floor, yet he seems filled with serenity.

  Hias pounds the damp stones with his fist.

  HIAS

  I can’t see anymore! I want to go back to the woods! I want to see something again!

  FACTORY OWNER

  Yet you don’t want to see a soul. I like you. You have a heart of glass.

  FOREST

  Again the picture lights up from a point. Mount Arber seen from the Rabenstein. On the very top, a thin layer of virgin snow has settled on the gloomy woods. Somber clouds, and a biting wind. The woods are chanting with frost. We see Hias marching through the underbrush and the storm. He carries a blanket around his shoulders; he ascends lightly and swiftly, freed of a burden.

  Hias catches sight of the entrance to a cave. He creeps in; our eyes follow him. It is getting dark. We overhear the snarling of a raging bear. Stillness.

  We behold the entrance to the cave. Hastily Hias comes back out. Now a very strange scene is taking place. Hias pulls out his knife. Behind him an imaginary bear creeps out of the cave and attacks him. Hias crashes down and fights the beast in a battle of life and death. Hias looks like the Laocoön group without the serpent. Now the bear holds him in a clinch. Hias succeeds in freeing his right hand with the knife. He sticks his knife into the sides of the imaginary beast. The bear dies. Hias frees himself completely from its clutches.

  For a moment he catches his breath, and he sees that he’s not seriously injured. He gathers some twigs and lights a little fire.

  HIAS

  And now for some roasted bear.

  But Hias doesn’t do anything. He stares into the fire and warms himself. Something is fermenting inside Hias; slowly and haltingly, he finds the language.

  HIAS

  In the night someone looks across the forest and doesn’t see a single light. When he sees a juniper bush in twilight, he goes to see if it is a human being, there are so few of them left. In the woods the roosters are crowing, but the people have perished.

  Hias’s face becomes overjoyed, as he sees something very clearly and palpably.

  HIAS

  Something else occurs to me! I see it again: a coachman knocks on the ground with his whip and says, “There once was this big Straubinger town—”

  At once a Great Music swells up.

  Starting from a point on the screen, a picture unravels in a circle. The woods, the mountains seen from Hias’s viewpoint. It is, as before, the great quietude of the earliest photos.

  The sun descends below the frozen Mount Falkenstein.

  AFTERTHOUGHT: VISIONS OF

  GREAT SKELLIG

  “Ah exiles wandering over land and seas,

  And planning, plotting always that same morrow

  May set a stone upon ancestral sorrow!”

  —W.B. Yeats

  “Love cannot withstand seasickness.”

  —Lord Byron

  ZORN’S LEMMA

&
nbsp; Herzog was viewing some footage from the day’s Heart of Glass shooting. Midway through the dungeon images, he dozed off, which was not unusual when he watched dailies. When he stirred awake, he switched off the Steenbeck editing table and went home. There he found me and his good friend Werner Janoud talking photography. Janoud was interested in some images I captured during the filming; he asked many questions about them, such as what lens had been used here or there, what the settings were, the film type, the speed, and on and on. I was unable to answer any of these questions. I told Janoud I couldn’t remember taking the pictures, that the best ones were shot unmindfully in response to the image’s palpable elements, when I simply responded to something, composed it, and shot.

  “Afterthoughts,” interjected Herzog.

  “Afterthoughts,” I agreed.

  The unwritten ending to Heart of Glass was an afterthought. When he finished the scenario, with the population gone mad and Hias alone on his mountaintop, Herzog envisioned something else, an image that emerged from a forbidding, mountainous crag ten miles or so off the sullen, southwest coast of Ireland, a towering islet known as Skellig Rock. During the seventh century, some Benedictine monks had fled to the great peak for a better view of the Apocalypse, but their vigil ended when they were thrown into the rough Atlantic by a party of Vikings. The monks left behind a colony of corbeled stone huts and a monastery yet intact, and among these ruins Herzog’s last vision unfolded: The Forgotten Ones have survived and still don’t know the earth is round; a solitary figure stands on the brink of a precipice, his face wet from harsh winds; this man is the first man to Doubt; he compels three others to row over the seas with him in search of the earth’s edge, to find the Abyss; atop Skellig Rock, four melancholy monks celebrate the passage by playing and singing the saddest of melodies; the courageous survivors row away.