Every Night the Trees Disappear

by Alan Greenberg

  “Hope,” Herzog put it, with a hint of disdain.

  When Herzog first mentioned his vision to the Production Manager, Saxer snarled that “hope” was something he could do without. He maintained that shooting this extra scene would add many thousands of dollars to the slender budget and create a mass of logistical headaches. The factory was already burned down, everyone was crazy, and the prophet had fled, so who gives a shit about some monks and those guys in the rowboat, he argued.

  Herzog prevailed upon the obstinate man he referred to as a “desperate genius.” He offered concessions and dreams of adventure. The Production Manager relented.

  A couple of nights after the Vilshofen fire, Herzog placed a call to a fisherman named Fitzgerald in the Irish seaside village of Ballinskelligs to ask him if the unquiet seas were navigable enough for a crossing to Skellig Rock. The old fisher said no, but maybe in a week or so. Then again, he added, you never know; sometimes a boat can’t find its way through the twenty-foot swells surrounding Great Skellig for weeks or even months on end, while other times the water’s just like glass.

  Four days later, on the morning of April 28, 1976, as the radio reported that Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia, had won by a landslide in the Pennsylvania primary, Herzog left for Skellig Rock. The script girl and I were with him, and before leaving Munich, they picked up the herdsman, Sam, by a nearby canal.

  I was back in my childhood as the boxlike van sped low over the highway. I remembered three trees behind my Garden City, New York, home: a peach tree, an apple tree, and a magical tree. The magical tree was unusual because it could grow every sort of fruit imaginable. It made a good first base in Greenberg Stadium, and I used to sit beneath that tree a lot. Then, pondering all of this, I realized something. I turned to Herzog, told him about the three trees, and remarked that only now, for the first time, it seemed that the magical tree might not have been magical at all. But I wasn’t sure.

  Herzog nodded thoughtfully as the van passed the last Bavarian pastures. In one of the pastures I counted twenty-four sheep, all facing the same direction, in the same stiff pose. They gazed southward, on a diagonal, motionless, like statues. Herzog offered a memory of his own.

  “It was St. Nicholas Day, and St. Nicholas came, and I took cover under the davenport because I was afraid. Normally St. Nicholas would look into his book for all of your sins and say you have to do this or that better next year, and maybe he would even hit you. He is accompanied by a devil figure who rattles with chains and makes a hellish noise. When I shouted out from under the davenport, a man abruptly stopped in the doorway. He leaned through the door, and he had on some kind of brown suit, some kind of coveralls. He stuck his head in the room, and instantly I knew that this man was God. For many years, that’s what I believed: he was God, and there was no need to talk about it. But years later I did talk about it, and I was told that the man was from the town’s electricity plant and had come to the house to check our power.”

  Although I drove most of the way, I didn’t register too much of what happened between Cologne and the ferry port in Ostend, Belgium, because I was pretty drunk. The ferry voyage was long and boring, and the team members mainly ate sausage and kept drinking.

  “Give mih som brannnnndy,” Herzog would say, polishing his Gaelic. “Hoh abote a stote, a Guinness stote—”

  Late at night, the boat docked at Dover. I stepped out of the van onto British soil and threw up. Herzog drove along some winding roads, then pulled the van over to the roadside. Everyone prepared for sleep as I went for a walk in the darkness. I stopped a few hundred feet up the road and, staring across a leaden meadow at a moonlit country manor beyond, threw up again. Herzog spent the cold night in a hammock stretched between two trees, zipped inside his sleeping bag like a butterfly content with its cocoon.

  The next day, the journey proceeded across England and Wales. In a Welsh harbor town called Fishguard, another ferry was boarded. I spent the whole voyage on my back watching pale gulls hover overhead, and I was told that a lunar eclipse was taking place during the crossing.

  Upon disembarking in Ireland, I noticed that the birds had turned from white to black. Herzog switched on the radio and, listening to a succession of Gaelic songs, navigated the van through a labyrinth of anonymous roads and trails, often seeming to have the points of the compass firmly etched in his mind.

  “I’d make a very good Neanderthal man,” he reflected.

  In the Blackwater Valley, at the foot of the Knockmealdown Mountains, Herzog turned the wheel over to me. Darkness fell. Everyone but the herdsman and I went to sleep. With the van making its way over the silent, serpentine roads, we peered into the Irish night, seeing the commonest things ghostly in the quiet air. A sudden wind kicked up, and leaves swirled in a fierce spiral on the asphalt. An old farmer stopped and stood tall in his donkey cart; he felt the wind and crossed himself. Then came a loud violent clanging sound from two chestnut horses meeting across an iron gate. One stood over the gate on the pasture side; the other was on its hind legs in the road, grappling ferociously while trying to fornicate. Moments later, three young girls wearing white caps and gray capes loomed in the headlights; I assumed they were angels until realizing they were nurses. There was a monstrous pig beside a barn, two hornless deer with coats of gray, and a hound with one red ear. As I grew tired, we drew close to Ballinskelligs. The rest of the way, signs that read SOFT MARGINS were planted along the roadside shoulder.

  Herzog and I sat for awhile in the hotel lobby before retiring. He told me that throughout the production, a strange problem had been plaguing him, something called Zorn’s lemma. Some of the team members had been trying to help him with it, and experts in Bremen and Vienna had been consulted; but all Herzog came up with was a perfect mathematical explanation of the problem. He didn’t want the formula, though; he wanted words.

  “Have you heard of Zorn’s lemma?” he asked me. “It has been a big problem for me; I need to find out what it is.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I’ve heard of it.”

  Herzog asked to hear everything I knew about it, but in words. I leafed through one of my notebooks and read aloud an entry.

  “Many divergent principles propound to illuminate Zorn’s lemma. Among them are Kuratowski’s lemma, the Hausdorff principle, and Tukey’s lemma.”

  “That’s it, keep going,” urged Herzog.

  “Then there is the axiom of choice, or Zermelo’s axiom. If the finite axiom of choice is assumed, all of the divergent principles are ultimately logically equivalent.

  “Zorn’s lemma is particularly interesting to mathematicians because it is a necessary theory to set up other theories. However, it disturbs mathematicians greatly due to the infinite number of ways to prove the idea.”

  “‘Zorn’s lemma’—that’s simple enough. I like the way it sounds,” Herzog said. “Just the sound of it. That’s what interests me the most.”

  GREAT SKELLIG

  Herzog switched hotels the following morning and then, accompanied by Saxer and me, sought out the fisherman, Fitzgerald, to arrange for the crossing to Skellig Rock. Fitzgerald was working in his turnip patch when the van pulled up; he tossed a net gently over his vegetables and greeted his visitors. Herzog asked the fisherman if the seas were calm enough for an approach to the rock and got an affirmative response. When Saxer inquired about the cost, however, Fitzgerald cited a multitude of inconveniences and setbacks to his fishing business, then asked for two hundred dollars for the trip. Saxer was unable to shake him down from the prohibitive figure, so the trio left disappointed and empty-handed.

  Herzog summoned me and drove us into the brown hills toward Bolus Head, a thirteen-hundred-foot promontory offering the clearest view of Skellig Rock. Atop Bolus Head were the remains of Killerelig, an ancient anchoritic monastery, as well as a few corbeled huts, or “clochons,” and an old holy well. Herzog climbed the headland from meadow to meadow, past grazing cows and sheep, carrying a heavy wooden tripod on his sh
oulder like an axe. At the top he entered the ravaged walls of the monastery; I found Herzog there contemplating a bloody placenta, the afterbirth of a lamb. The mother could be seen staring from a nearby meadow; the newborn was somewhere else.

  Over a stone wall, Skellig Rock was visible for the first time. More than ten miles into the Atlantic, just under the horizon, the gray peak hovered in a sallow haze, far away. Surrounding Skellig Rock were two smaller crags, Little Skellig and Washerwoman’s Rock, with a third, the Isle of Many Fears, nowhere to be seen. Herzog erected a telescope and peered humbly out to sea.

  “For six years I’ve made the trip to Skellig Rock,” he muttered, “and this is as far as I’ve gotten.”

  Down in Ballinskelligs, Saxer located Fitzgerald’s younger brother, a fellow with a reputation as the ablest boatman around. This fisherman informed Saxer that if the seas remained navigable, he’d agree to the trip for forty dollars. But he warned the Production Manager that his craft was old and uncovered, with only a miniscule motor to—

  “Doesn’t matter,” harped Saxer. “If it floats, it’s a ship.”

  Two hours later, the entire production team, plus the younger Fitzgerald and his man O’Shea, crammed into the glorified skiff. On their knees they floated over uncommonly smooth waters toward the rock as Herzog, poking with awe at the impenetrable side and unclosing eye of a dead fish, stood at the helm.

  After ninety minutes had passed, the boat approached Little Skellig, a stern hulk that seemed oddly two-dimensional and was blanketed white with twenty-thousand gannets. Enormous hordes of these birds took flight to follow the strangers the rest of the way or to soar to the mainland eight miles eastward for a strand of heath. The birds rode the wind on six-foot half-black wings; contrary to local mythology, not one had the head of a dog. As they came and went, Little Skellig changed in shades of gray.

  Fitzgerald and his mate brought the boat to the landing on Skellig Rock, then watched the team rush up seven hundred uneven earthen steps. Passing mysterious granite slabs that stood on ledges along the way, everyone puffed and panted until reaching the lower of the rock’s two summits. Herzog bent his knee and walked through an isolated, sovereign doorway, then came upon the igloo-shaped clochons. I figured that each of the huts had sheltered two men as I counted the graves—there were twenty-two. Herzog headed up the long, hard slope to the precipice. Standing at the edge, which the monks had called the Stone of Pain, Herzog began hurling granite shards into the void. Out of the shadows way below, wave upon wave of birds flew out to sea. Herzog grabbed me.

  “Look at that panic,” he whispered, “and try to hear a sound.”

  Herzog said that the sunlight was bothering him, that the vision of Skellig called for ultimate Gloom. Then he left the precipice to scale the higher peak across the valley. I followed him. After we started to climb the perilous spindle, however, Herzog ordered me to go back before I killed myself.

  “Werner, this is not the way I’m going to die,” I affirmed.

  He stared at me knowingly, but Herzog was insistent, so I retreated. Herzog continued on, clinging to the bare cliff, his toes searching for inches of support. I called out to him.

  “Herzog, what do you think of the auteur theory of filmmaking?”

  “The what?” he replied while hugging the rocky cliff two thousand feet above the ocean.

  “The auteur theory—you know—”

  “The auteur theory? I don’t know what that is. What is the ‘auteur theory’?”

  “Forget it!”

  “What?”

  “Forget it!”

  Herzog disappeared around the far side of the cliff. I found a patch of grass in the shadow of a small stone bluff. I was feeling afraid, concerned for Herzog’s safety. I imagined that if the man were to fall into the sea and die that very minute, there would be utter stillness. No one would know.

  “Follow me!” Herzog shouted. “I’ve found a good route to the top.” Up and over the Stone of Pain, Herzog clambered and disappeared.

  A score of brown rabbits scrambled out from underneath the rocks as I leaped to my feet. A few minutes later, the two of us were atop the spindle, where the monks had climbed a thousand years ago to daily recite the Lord’s Prayer. Herzog gazed toward the distant shore. I pocketed rusted fragments of an ancient weather vane.

  “Come on, let’s go,” muttered Herzog, and we began the steep descent.

  Before the musicians arrived that evening in Ballinskelligs, Herzog said to me, “With a certain music, I can project particular images and tell you, ‘Atlantis emerges out of the ocean,’ and that’s what you would see. And you’d see this because of the visual images first and, second, because of the specific music. Without that music, you might see a strange or beautiful landscape, but it wouldn’t seem to be Atlantis.

  “There is hardly anyone in the world who handles music in films better than I do. It’s just a fact—name me five others who handle music better. Yet for years my mother tried to have me play the flute. She tried so hard to teach me the simplest melodies, but always to no avail, and everyone proclaimed that this kid had no feeling for music. But I think I do have that feeling.”

  The musicians—Andrea von Ramm, Sterling Jones, Richard Leavitt, and their director, Thomas Binkley—soon arrived. Known throughout Europe as the Ancient Music Ensemble, the group had produced a series of incomparable recordings of music from the Middle Ages, forgotten music with unfading notes, the first notes to speak. Some of their recordings were intimately linked with Herzog’s Heart of Glass visions from their inspired origin; after the scenario had been written, music took over.

  As the large dinner was served in the hotel dining room, von Ramm, the soprano, whispered to me that she was afraid of Herzog.

  “When I first met him, all he talked about was cannibals. For four hours straight, never stopping once—cannibals, cannibals, cannibals, cannibals.”

  Next I spoke with Thomas Binkley, a careful man with deep, dark eyes who was the leader of the Ancient Music Ensemble and something of a legend in the musical world. I asked for his opinion of Herzog’s use of music in film.

  “One of the worst,” Binkley replied. “Hollywood alone handles music in film as it ought to be handled.” For the rest of the conversation, he discussed Humphrey Bogart and Mickey Mouse.

  Herzog got his Gloom the next day. An Irish squall blew in over Ballinskelligs with such force that no fisherman in the area would dare to navigate the heaving seas, especially not around Great Skellig. But this storm was what the vision called for, so Herzog rented a helicopter to get the necessary actors and team members out to the rock. The helicopter pilot told Herzog that the landings would present quite a risk, but he’d give it a try.

  As I sat in the bay window of the hotel sitting room, beyond the wavy glass I watched Herzog and Saxer direct groups of four into the chopper. Sad about having been left behind, I took a long walk down a rutted road. I saw an abandoned hut with a massive stone on its threshold, turned, and went back to the hotel. In the hallway, I paused before a print of New Jerusalem when the telephone rang. It was Saxer, calling from the lighthouse on Skellig Rock, asking for someone to somehow get another boat to the crag for a few essential shots.

  Immediately I drove over to the younger Fitzgerald’s house. I asked the fisherman for another trip to the rock, prompting Fitzgerald to reply that surely his visitor had lost his mind. So I lied. I told the fisherman that I had been in touch with the coast guard, was informed that the squall was about to pass, and that by the time Fitzgerald’s boat was ready to go, the seas would be acceptably calm. Fitzgerald gave in. Then I added an incidental item.

  I’d need a second boat.

  It would be a smaller one, vital for the film; they’d have to tow it, of course. Fitzgerald shook his head and stuck a finger in his ear. He mulled over the wage he would earn. The confounded fisher said yes, all right, he could prepare them in an hour. I begged him to get the two crafts ready earlier than that, saying
I’d be at the dock in half an hour, wearing a bright red T-shirt beneath blue skies.

  The storm had developed steadily into a gale as Fitzgerald, O’Shea, and I struggled in the harbor against thirty-foot swells, barely moving toward the convulsing Atlantic. Clad in nothing but my deceptive T-shirt, I was soaked cold to the bone in minutes. I shivered and watched as Fitzgerald battled the furious elements with his mate O’Shea, as colossal swells menaced overhead at the mouth of the harbor. Skellig Rock lurked nowhere in sight.

  It took the boats two hours to break free of the roiling harbor. When they did, they met the Atlantic with a smash. Immediately the rugged old boats floundered off course. Waves poured in the two crafts. The second boat started to go down. O’Shea leaped over the side and began to bail out. Then Fitzgerald shouted that the lead boat had lost its rudder. There it was, drifting away. A wave brought it back a half hour later.

  The seas grew angrier; Fitzgerald tested his passenger, whose joints were frozen: “It’s time to turn back!” he yelled. “What do you say, mate?”

  With my frozen arm thrust forward, I pointed my index finger toward Great Skellig, which was still nowhere to be seen. Fitzgerald lashed himself from his waist to the stern and urged the overwhelmed motor on. I realized I was suffering. It was only a matter of time.

  The boats landed at Skellig Rock five hours after leaving Ballinskelligs. My muscles frozen, I leaned over the edge of the boat and fell onto the seawall, a block of ice still in sitting position, unable to stand up. When the script girl came down from the shooting location, she reported that Saxer was surprised to hear that I’d actually come, that he really hadn’t expected anyone to dare the crossing, and that, as things turned out, the boat wasn’t necessary after all.