by Peter Nadas
Now if some unauthorized stranger were to rummage through my things and go over my papers ... well, this stranger, this secret agent who'd appear after my death to make out a report about me based on the papers found among my effects had often cropped up in my dreams; although he was faceless and of indeterminate age, I found his immaculate shirtfront, stiff collar, polka-dotted necktie adorned with a glittering diamond pin, and especially his rather shiny frock coat all the more characteristic and significant; with long, bony fingers he rummaged expertly through my papers, occasionally lifting a page close to his eyes, giving me the impression that he was nearsighted, though I didn't see him wearing eyeglasses; he perused a sentence here and there, and I noted with satisfaction that he derived completely different meanings from the ones I had hoped my sentences would imply; no wonder I had managed to fool even someone like him; after all, I made sure that my fleeting ideas, fragmentary thoughts, and hasty descriptions were jotted down so that my papers remained well within the bounds of middle-class propriety, counting also on the possibility that dear old Frau Hübner, taking advantage of my absence and driven by simple curiosity, would likewise look through the pages piled on my desk; thus I became an unauthorized stranger to my own life, because seeing myself as a criminal, a miserable misfit, I still wanted to remain a perfect gentleman in the eyes of the world, I myself became that shiny frock coat, the starched shirtfront, and the tie pin, the irreproachably inane form of bourgeois respectability; secretly, and proud of my own slyness, I figured that if I used a private code when recording my accumulated experiences, then, since I possessed the key, I'd always be able to open the lock of the code; but as might be expected, the lock turned out to be foolproof, and by the time I finally came around to opening it, my hands, trembling with anxiety, simply could not find the keyhole.
That is how some things remained a mystery forever, my own secret alone; no, I'm not too sorry about it, after all, whatever doesn't exist, what no one has declared a public and consensual secret, should be of no interest to people; and so the reason I took with me to Heiligendamm those two little booklets by Dr. Köhler about the Helix pomata, the common edible snail, remained a puzzling mystery, as did the question of any possible connection between these snails, the above-described insignificant street scene, and that splendid antique mural.
The snails Köhler describes so dryly and dispassionately in his books were consumed by the dozen each morning by guests at the spa; raw, ground to a pulp, the snails together with their shells were lightly seasoned and sprinkled with lemon juice; eating them like that was as much part of the cure as were those breathing exercises at sunset; these snails—classified by the doctor according to their shape, build, habitat, and characteristic traits, and grouped into species and subspecies—are amazingly solitary and at the same time very lively little creatures in whom the slightest contact with other snails produces profound terror; it takes them hours—which in their terms may mean days, weeks, even months—to ascertain with their feelers, and later, on a higher level of certainty, with their mouths and their undulating undersides, that they are indeed suited to one another, and there is no need, because of some compelling and disqualifying reason, to crawl on, disappointed, in search of another potential mate; in principle, any snail can couple with any other—in this sense they are nature's most favored creatures, being the only ones to preserve and act out nature's primeval unisexuality, being androgynous, like plants, their bodies possessing qualities that we humans can only vaguely recall, which perhaps explains their exceptional fineness and timidity; each one is complete in itself, and therefore two complete wholes must find each other, which must be an incomparably more difficult task than simple gratification; and when they do unite, in complete mutuality, simultaneously receiving and fulfilling each other—Köhler's description is at this point most detailed, his prose most impassioned—they cling to each other with such force, and no wonder, this is the strength of the ancient gods! that the only way they can be separated, experimenters tell us, is by literally tearing them apart; but like the characters in the mural, the snails would not have appeared in my narrative; studying their physiology was also part of my preliminary research, material that nourished the work but would not be found in the finished product; secret ingredients like this can be found in abundance in any work of art worthy of the name; or perhaps they would have appeared but only in some incidental, seemingly unimportant image, as some symbolic device, say, sliding past on a large fern leaf at the edge of the forest, or on fragrantly decaying leaves on the forest floor; there might have been a pair of them, and we'd noticed them just as they touched each other with their seeing tentacles.
Yes: every step I took, whether toward vile death or in my longing for the happiness afforded by vileness, carried me to this forest.
It was not a dense forest, but when finding one of its trails and letting it take you randomly among the trees, you quickly realized why popular lore referred to this woods as a wilderness; no one ever came here to mark the trees with white chalk or chop them down, clean them carefully of their branches and cart them away; nobody gathered brushwood here, picked wild berries or mushrooms at the edge of its snail-inhabited clearings; it seemed as if for ages, for unconscionably long ages, nothing had happened to or in these woods except what we might call the natural history of flora and fauna, which of course is no small thing: trees come into leaf, mature, live, and, after slowly passing centuries, die away; under their foliage, germinating, sprouting, and growing at the mercy of sunbeams the leafy boughs let through, there is an undergrowth of shrubs, bushes, ferns, creepers, runners, and climbers, grass, nettles, a thousand different weeds, garishly colorful and sickly transparent flowers, all taking their turn according to the changing seasons, until the thickening foliage completely deprives them of light and they perish, yielding their places to moss, lichen, and fungi that prefer cool dimness and, thriving on decay, sustain the life of the ground's spongy surface; there is silence here, and the silence is also ancient, and thick, because undisturbed by the wind; the air is so redolent that within a few minutes you'd be overcome with a feeling rather like a pleasantly soothing swoon; and it is always warmer here than out in the real world, a hazy warmth that makes one's skin moist and slick, like the body of a snail; the trails here are not real paths, trod and beaten down by human steps, but the life of the forest shapes these passages, whimsically, gracefully, unpredictably, as gaps in the continuous story of the ground's surface, pauses that only our resolute human intelligence would dare name, for it has learned to disregard other, perhaps much more important occurrences, and is accustomed simply to cut through the thick of things and, in its own doltish way, make use of nature's silence.
You'd find here gullies in which pebbles and stones roll and clink together; stretches of level ground where driving rains have spread crumbled clumps of dirt; long runners of soft moss, or patches where the layers of fallen leaves are so thick that their decaying mass cloys even the wild mushrooms; you could walk here, though not quite unimpeded, because the natural passageway may unexpectedly be blocked by a bush rising out of a warm spot in a pool of sunlight, or by a thick trunk of a fallen tree, or a huge, pointed, smooth lava rock, ingeniously called a "findling," conjuring in our imagination something between a found object and a foundling; according to local legend, giants of the northern seas strewed these rocks about the flat coastland where, after the battles had subsided, these peaceful forests arose.
Deep-green dimness.
Occasional scraping sounds, a thud, a crack.
One cannot tell how time passes here, but so long as you can hear the twigs snapping under your feet and you feel that it's your silence that is being disturbed by each snap, that means you're not quite here yet.
So long as you wish to get somewhere, to a place that is yours—though you don't know what that place is like—so long as you refuse to be led by the paths opening up before you, you are not quite here yet.
Behind the l
oose curtain of the thicket a tree seems to move, as if someone who'd been standing behind it now stirred, just as you keep stirring from behind something and then being covered again by the thicket.
Until it all looks beautiful to you.
Everyone can see you—anyone, to be more precise—and yet you are still covered; no, I couldn't succeed in describing the forest; I would have liked to have talked about the feel of the forest.
So long as you carry with you the turns and bends, forks and obstacles of the trails you've left behind, you can find your way back to where you started from, and in your fear you look at the plants as you would at human faces, taking them as signposts, assigning them shape, character, and histories of their own, hoping that in return for that they'd lead you back—so long as you do that, you are not quite here yet.
And you are not quite here yet even when you realize you are not alone with them.
I would have liked to have talked about the creatures of the forest as Köhler did of his snails; I would have borrowed his style.
When you are no longer aware of yourself or, more precisely, when you know time has passed but not how much or how little, and you don't really care .. .
And you stand there without knowing you are standing; you look at something but don't know what; and for some reason your arms are spread as if you were yourself a tree.
No, this story could never have been written successfully.
For you can feel what the tree in all probability cannot feel.
And you have heard all the rustling and scraping sounds but did not realize you were hearing them.
When you know that you are here, but not when you got here, because you have lost all the clues.
But so long as you keep listening for and trying to remember lost clues, you are not quite here yet, because you believe you are being watched.
And then it flits by, between two trees, and quickly vanishes, a flash of blue in a field of green.
You start off, unaware of having started off, but you cannot find it.
So long as you make a distinction between trees and colors, so long as you look to the names of things for guidance, you are still not quite here.
So long as you think you only imagined seeing the flitting creature as a blue flash in a field of green, and you follow it, cautiously, and no longer care about the path, about branches slapping you in the face, you don't hear the crunch of your footsteps, don't notice you've fallen, you get up and run after it, nettles sting you, thorns prick and scratch you, but all you want is to catch it, yes, the one that keeps disappearing but always reappears, to make sure you see it, though it occurs to you that you shouldn't yield to the temptation.
So long as you still want to make a decision, so long as you are thinking about it, you won't be able to catch anything; they'll keep eluding you, they can smell your sour odor from afar.
Now it's there, standing in a small depression, and if you don't move, then, among the silently stirring leaves, you can make out its eyes as they flash into yours, though this is no longer the same being but another, maybe a third one, someone, anyone, because you let time pass in the mutual gleam of your eyes while you notice that the creature is naked, and so are you.
So long as you wish to reach its nakedness and bend the branches to have a better look, so long as you want its nakedness to touch yours and thus make it your own, and for this purpose you are ready to move from your spot even though you have found the creature you've been after, then you are still not quite here.
It's gone.
And so long as you keep searching for them, yes, the ones you managed to alarm with your clumsiness and sour smell, so long as you hope to meet them again and all the while keep grumbling that you should have been more clever and more cautious, you are still not quite here, and nobody will be able to reach you.
But chance comes to your rescue, because you have come far enough inside to be a little bit here.
You turn around, and what you had seen in front of you before is now behind you; on the soft green mossy stream bank, the creature is lolling on its stomach; you let your eyes run over its back, rise on the curve of its round buttocks, and then roll down on its shapely legs; it nestles its head in its arms, looking out from there, and this gives you such joy that not only your mouth breaks into a grin but even your toes begin to smile and your knees laugh; and by then you don't feel like moving, because you've found your place here: that laugh is your place on this earth; and then you notice that the eyes are not looking into yours, that there is a third creature in the picture, there in that small depression in the ground, the one you thought had vanished completely, and they are looking at each other; they are the ones, you think to yourself, who could teach you what you need to know.
They are looking at you the way you'd like to be looking at them.
But you are still not you, you still let your thoughts stand in for you; until you learn not to do that, you are not quite here yet.
Your snooping startles them, they spring up and melt into the thicket.
Just as their gaze makes you take cover.
And then for a long time you see no one.
So long as you want to find them only for yourself, the forest remains silent.
But this is already a different kind of silence; this silence has eaten itself into your skin, and the laughter must reach your bones.
When even your smell becomes different.
Grass Grew over the Scorched Spot
The tiniest move could have broken this peacefulness, so I didn't even feel like opening my eyes; I was hanging on to something that had become final between us then, in the shared warmth of our bodies, and I didn't want her to see my eyes, to see how frightened I was of what was to come—it was good like this, let fear be mine!—of my body I felt only the parts her body could make me feel: under the rucked-up silk dress the moist surface of her skin touching mine—that was my thigh; at the level of her neck my own breath mingling with the whiffs of stifling odor rising from her armpits; I felt the hard edge of a hip that may have been mine, its hardness the hardness of my bone; I felt my shoulder and back because of the weight of her arm as she very slowly lifted it away, but even then my shoulder and back still felt the arm, for somehow even the receding weight left an impression in the flesh and bones; and when she also raised her head a bit to take a better look at the bite mark on my neck, I was glad to be able to watch through barely raised eyelashes, not exposing my eyes; all she could see was the quiver of the lids, the flutter of the lashes; she couldn't imagine how scared I was, and we hadn't even begun, but I could see her in almost perfect clarity, looking at my neck, yes, I could fool her so easily; she looked at it long, even touched the spot with her stiff finger; her lips parted, edged closer, and kissed it where it still hurt a little.
As if she were kissing Szidónia's mouth on my neck.
We lay like this for a long time, her face on my shoulder and my face on her shoulder, silent and motionless—at least that is how I remember it today.
Perhaps our eyes were closed, too.
But even if I did open my eyes I could see only the patterns of the rumpled bedspread and her hair, the tickly ringlets on my mouth.
And if her eyes were open, all she could see were the green afternoon shadows stirring silently on the vacant expanse of the ceiling.
I may have dozed off for a short time; maybe she did, too.
And then, so softly that my ear felt more the thrusts of her breath than the sound of her voice, she seemed to say that we should get started.
Yes, we should, I said, or meant to say, though neither of us moved.
There was nothing to stop us now, and who would have thought that the greatest obstacle we had to overcome would turn out to be ourselves?
Around this time of the afternoon Szidónia usually disappeared, visiting neighbors, going on a date, or just taking time off for herself, and so long as she didn't tell Maja's parents about the afternoon adventures of their da
ughter, she could be sure her own little illicit absences would not be discovered; and they not only covered up for each other but also shared their intimate experiences and adventures, like girl friends, disregarding the seven-year difference in their ages; once, inadvertently, I overheard them, barely able to catch my breath at my unexpected good fortune: with her hair undone, Szidónia was swinging back and forth in the garden hammock, confiding something to Maja, who, fully engrossed in the story, sat on the grass, giving the hammock an absentminded push now and then.
