The Pine Islands

by Marion Poschmann

  Essentially, it was a regular forest. Certainly, the forest was dense and overgrown, the ground was uneven and riddled with knobbly roots. Gilbert swung his bag to the beat of a march. Certainly, someone could have got lost here, certainly one could quickly become disorientated because everything looked the same, tree trunks covered in moss, branches and leafage, a forest like any other, perhaps a drop more humid, a tad darker, a little eerier than the forests Gilbert was accustomed to. But not being able to find one’s way out of a forest in a civilised, densely populated country, one that you explore by foot – that required a very special kind of ineptitude.

  Gilbert, propelled by a peculiar anger, wouldn’t lower his tempo, until the path became smaller and smaller and finally completely tailed off between two toppled tree trunks. He sat down on the rotten wood and asked Yosa, who was panting for breath, to give him the handbook.

  The handbook showed a site plan with shelters, natural monuments and vantage points. According to this plan they had ended up in a somewhat badly explored part of the forest, and the next shelter was quite a long way away. Apparently, they had already reached their destination. Gilbert felt no desire to have Yosa explain the Japanese text, and so he relied on the drawings. He turned back a page.

  Hanging errors. A too-thin rope that can’t sustain your weight and then breaks. Too short a drop. Unstable base for the rope. Incorrect knots. Ridiculous stickmen with a noose around their necks sat puzzled on the floor next to a stair-rail or a heating pipe or a just-broken branch. A handbook for complete morons, a handbook for people who really hadn’t succeeded in life.

  He became more and more impatient, he wanted to know what was going to happen now. Yosa apologised. The gym bag was too heavy. Couldn’t go as fast as him. Didn’t have Gilbert’s excellent physique. Had to pay attention to where they were going. Follow the instructions. Find the right place.

  Behind the rotten trunks the invisible authority had once more affixed its symbolic restraints. Cords and colourful plastic tape fluttered in all directions, as if the legally traversable forest had now come irrevocably to an end.

  Yosa looked all around him, then he went to it. He fished out a roll of yellow hazard tape and tied it around the end of the rotten tree trunk. He struggled, drew it together, looped and tied it, Gilbert watched him sceptic-ally. Yosa could at least tie a standard knot, or was he just winding the tape loosely around a couple of times? It was far from him to interfere; young people have to learn by making mistakes. Once Yosa had set off, he checked the tape with a quick tug; it held.

  They broke through the impervious undergrowth, stumbled over roots, fell into holes filled with leaves. Time and time again Yosa had to lift a piece of tape blocking their way, as if someone had frenziedly criss-crossed the whole area in wild zigzags of tape. Yosa on his part gradually uncoiled the yellow tape he had brought and led it with special care over and around obstacles.

  This is so, he explained to Gilbert, you can find the way back. Without a guiding line you would get hopelessly lost, roam through the forest for days until you collapsed from exhaustion. Undecided people safeguard their route with this method of marking. Those resigned to their fate use it to mark the place where their remains can be found. The most determined forgo the rope. The yellow tape was for him, Gilbert, he would be able to go hand over hand along the tape and find his way back out of the forest. The handbook recommended yellow because it remained visible the longest when night fell.

  He asked Gilbert to carry his gym bag so he could lay out the tape better. Gilbert took the bag in one hand, and the leather satchel in the other, found the even distribution of weight pleasant, found the idea of the plastic tape sensible when compared with the breadcrumbs and pebbles employed in the pertinent German literature, found himself prepared to concede that the Japanese man had internalised the idea of Ariadne’s thread, ancient ingenuity, even if it meant littering the forest with a myriad of waste plastic left behind through the irresponsible indifference of teenage deadbeats, a forest that now seemed unusually beautiful and dignified, very quiet, slightly misty and of this exceedingly beguiling green that the centuries-old volcanic rock yielded.

  Gilbert became engrossed in the diverse green tones while stumbling over branches and bracken with both bags. Supermarket green. The subtle green of a lettuce, the glossy green of a polished apple, bitter spinach green, tender fennel green. Zingy toothpaste green, conservative samani green. The swaying leaves before his eyes, he wanted to exercise a more refined distinction process, revel in the nuances, appoint distinct tones from the memory of the water colours in his school paint box, bilious green, malachite green, yellowish green, French green, while the wind mingled and parted the trees, making the colours fleeting and indefinable.

  Yosa pointed out a pair of shoes filled with leaves, waiting neatly paired together on a moss cushion. A cut rope was swinging from the tree above.

  Once a year day-workers comb through the forest and collect the bodies, Yosa explained, and Gilbert couldn’t tell whether he had got this information from his handbook or whether he had already known it. And why couldn’t the day-workers take the discarded rubbish with them too?

  Gilbert looked up and remained, even when he tripped, enthralled in the contemplation of the trees. He found himself enclosed within the colour of the unspectacular, the normal, the proper. In Japan, the flora brought him a strange sense of relief. One was always surrounded by unproblematic azalea green, positive moss green, humble bamboo green – and the mystical dark green of the pines. They stand massive and bursting with bright needles, and he ducked into their shadow, into their cicada green, their sea green, their airstream black. The bulky, sky-blotting canopy shifted before his eyes while he crossed the rough forest floor, cut-outs of dark needles, cut-outs in which something lavish mops the white sky, unrecognisable in its detail, ungraspable in its uniqueness, no firm image. He walked over the uneven ground, he walked beneath the evergreen pines, their verve, their darkness and richness of detail, he walked in the splendour of their gazillion needles, and the closer he tried to look at them, all the more the tree withdrew, disappeared in his attempt to find a language for it. Gilbert felt inclined to devote himself to the pines at length, with the fragments of pines and pines in their entirety, with the possibility or impossibility of their existence. He was looking forward to travelling to the pine islands.

  He drew Yosa’s attention to the pines, but Yosa shook his head. The Japanese red pine, Akamatsu, with which this forest was mostly populated, is considered female, Yosa explained, while the Japanese black pine, Omatsu, which is chiefly found on the coast and so grows on the islands, is perceived as being male. This was a popular subject of classical literature, two ancient pines, man and woman, growing far from one another, united in spirit. It effortlessly illustrates the various levels of dreamlike reality.

  So, it’s a forest of female red pines. A forest as if specially made for people with mummy issues, dark, devouring. The ideal forest for suicidal people who secretly wish to once more fuse with the all-powerful, devastating, dismissive object of their earliest childhood. The suicidal person turns away from the material plane occupied by the body to the spiritual plane merely in order to force the maternally conceived object to understand, to wrest from the object the affection and attention denied them their whole life. The suicidal person gives themselves up, they sacrifice themselves, but it is a treacherous sacrifice, solely for the purpose of softening the object’s indifference, a sacrifice only in appearance then, whose aim is loving devotion through a form of severe evasion. Yosa was mistaken, however, if he believed he would achieve his goal with such a course of action. Maybe his relatives would shed a tear, light an incense stick, inform their wider relations, but to achieve anything more than this shallow effect would be too much of an effort. Because ultimately this wasn’t a suicide from one’s own free will, from a serene mindset, ultimately it wasn’t an independent decision, but a pitiful attempt at manipulation. Juvenil
e behaviour that made one ridiculous in death. One only had to look at the disgusting, half-decayed figures that unfortunately abounded in this forest. If one’s intention was that at least death would give a lost life dignity in retrospect, then this method beneath the red pines was in any case doomed to fail. Gilbert thought his own project of abandonment was preferable. Black pines on a cliff, solitary, autarchic, and sprayed by salty surf. He kept his opinion to himself, but he couldn’t condone this young Japanese man exposing himself in such a manner.

  They found a fully dressed skeleton in the moss, they found dried bouquets of flowers on a tree stump, whose bearers had apparently followed one of the tapes, they found single pages of the handbook bearing the map that had become wavy from the moisture, they found a lady’s handbag containing a solemn suicide letter written on a wooden tablet, they found more ropes dangling from the trees, their cut nooses lying on the ground. Gilbert presumed that he was carrying a similar rope through the forest in the gym bag, perhaps even two.

  They had made incredibly slow progress. When the safety tape had been completely unrolled the sun was already going down. Dusk came early in Japan, one got up early, ate lunch before twelve, ate dinner in the afternoon, and when it got dark around seven, the day was declared over. Gilbert decided to do precisely that.

  He sat down in the leaves and praised Yosa for the perfect planning and execution of their excursion. Yosa reluctantly sat down next to him and claimed back his bag. Gilbert passed the bag over, he couldn’t feel what it contained. Yosa rummaged inside and brought out two flasks of green tea. One for Gilbert, one for him. Gilbert renewed and intensified his praise, Yosa shook his head repeatedly. The tea, cold and sticky, wasn’t quite sweetened to the point where the tea could no longer be tasted. A sugary liquid whose tea-like qualities prevailed, slightly bitter, slightly grassy, a mild tea green in tone that could no longer be discerned by the time Gilbert had emptied half the flask. The colours all disappeared, the forest suddenly changed from green into grey tones, then it was completely dark.

  Gilbert, Yosa suggested, might now set off on the return trip. The excursion had ended here, the provisions spent, and if he left now, keeping to the tape, he’d still make the bus to Kōfu. Yosa knelt before him and bowed his forehead several times to the ground.

  No, Gilbert said. He stood up in order to make his voice more powerful, and it suited him that Yosa stayed cowering on the ground because it only strengthened his position.

  He couldn’t get his head around Yosa not having the power of judgement. Barely any decency, hardly any sense of pride and no taste whatsoever. The place was untenable, it was a dump, it didn’t allow one to really experience nature, above all it was too full, an often-frequented forest completely overcrowded with suicides, a mass grave, Yosa had to think better of himself than that. The handbook was no good, it only pointed to general places that anyone could know, it misled people because it withheld the real places.

  He couldn’t make out Yosa’s reaction in the dark. He kept speaking in the same vein for a few more minutes until the forest floor began to whimper.

  We’re going back, Gilbert ordered, we’re going back and taking the bus to Kōfu. And he expressed his hope that Yosa would be able to find them accommodation there.

  Yosa passed him the gym bag in silence and felt for the loose end of the safety tape. He asked Gilbert to stay close to his heels, he felt along the tape and carefully began to roll it back up. After a few metres Gilbert had already been left behind. The forest shielded the luminous night, it was so dark that he could barely proceed on the uneven ground, especially with their bags. Yosa took the rope out of his bag and tied the two of them together. Gilbert felt the knot in front of his stomach. Was Yosa really capable of tying a noose? Had he made do with a simple overhand knot? The gym bag at his elbow, Gilbert fingered the knot’s contours, and came to the conclusion that Yosa had tied an obi knot, like the one people use for judo belts, and must have put the noose around his own waist. Why hadn’t the young man thought to bring a torch, candles, matches, anything. Why? Because we’ve come to know the boundaries of his abilities, his short-sighted planning, his inefficient actions. For a while they proceeded in centimetres. Yosa meticulously rolled up the once-yellow tape, bit by bit, so that it didn’t break. Gilbert let himself be pulled along by the waist, he leant back and made it heavier so that Yosa would indirectly get a sense of the weight of the bags. Then they came to a point when multiple tapes crossed one another.

  Their own tape had unfortunately become twisted and tangled with the others, Yosa had led the tape so clumsily through the bottleneck that they could no longer tell which one was the tape that had led them here. Could they distinguish a variation in the breadth, thickness, material? Could one decipher the colour yellow through an acute enough sense of touch? Gilbert hadn’t taken the forest seriously up to this point. He hadn’t taken the guiding line seriously, not even the noose. Now it looked like they would have to wait out the sunrise in this particular corner of the forest where an especially large amount of plastic had built up.

  Night in the forest. It was still early evening, the night would be long. There was a cracking sound, a rustling, something moved incessantly, the forest shifted nervously all around them. Gilbert held on tightly to the leaves, to the moss, he smoothed down the ground, threw small hard twigs to the side, leant back his head on the gym bag and put the leather bag on his lap. That’s how he would stick it out till morning. He couldn’t see exactly how Yosa was lying. He had most likely got silently down on his knees and was now bathing in his limitless failings. The rope hung slackly between them, still binding them to one another. In case he got the better of Gilbert while he slept, the youngster couldn’t just disappear.

  But Yosa made no move to do anything. The forest swished and gasped, and Yosa shuffled closer to Gilbert. Trembling, he awaited the ghosts.

  Every suicide, he blurted out, would become a vengeful spirit and seek out the living to drag them into death. It was bad news to spend the night in a forest seething with wrathful spirits. He could hear them whispering already, he could hear their voices everywhere, they sounded like dry autumn leaves and spoke at him endlessly.

  Gilbert agreed with him. That’s the way it is when you’re dead, he said maliciously. Total darkness, and non-stop claptrap.

  Then he reconsidered and changed the subject. He wanted to make Yosa think about something else, but he also wanted to talk about something that would interest him too. Traditional beard styles in Japan. What did Yosa know about that?

  Yosa didn’t make a sound. He was seemingly trying not to even breathe. Could it be that he didn’t have the faintest idea about absolutely anything? To give him some encouragement, Gilbert gave a talk on the subject of the impeccable shaving tradition of the samurai. In the Roman Empire too, he continued, a smooth face was a mark of a sophisticated civilisation, whereas the uncouth forces outside the empire’s borders, aptly referred to as barbarians by the Romans, boasted strong beard growth and flowing manes. The irony being that the barbarians on their part regarded their wild hair as a symbol of power, so that ultimately one reaches a stalemate in an assessment of the phenomenon. To this day the Roman Pope has always presented himself as clean shaven, while the Russian Orthodox Patriarch of course wears a godlike full beard as a sign of his gravitas, which in turn fosters the thought that the Roman Catholic Church in its combin-ation of the Roman and the Catholic poses within itself a contradiction, since God’s representative on earth apparently didn’t trust himself with the divine look, but rather studiously cultivated the facial component of the Adam costume. An occasion for pedantic theoretical discussions and a consequential application of Kantorowicz’s ‘the King’s two bodies’ theory, according to which the ruler by the grace of God fell into two corporeal categor-ies, the body natural of his private person and the divine body politic ex officio. The insignia of the papacy, the shepherd’s crook, the Ring of the Fisherman, etc., testified to a wholly
immaterial power whose realisation the physical papal body didn’t have even the slightest stake in, so that whatever kind of beard growth was under discussion it had to rightly be construed as an intolerable presumption and arrogance, namely as a confusion of the divine and the earthly. Where the Orthodox Church stood in all this, Gilbert wanted to work out more precisely; it was in any case, he explained to Yosa, of the highest interest for his project.

  In Japan, on the other hand, the dichotomy of clean and dirty predominated. The samurai, as an agent of the state, and therefore also a representative of high culture, had to be of the utmost purity, whereas for the wandering wise man who had turned their back on the world, that is, the city and its mannered pleasures, it was not only permitted but downright fitting for them to cultivate the philosophical beard that a life connected with nature, a life by the simplest means in the solitude of the mountains, a life of wandering equipped only with the bare necessities demanded.

  With this night in the forest, Gilbert solemnly declared, their pilgrimage had begun fairly authentic-ally – and in accordance with this fact he himself would of course now also keep his beard. Yosa, with his antagonistic goatee had of course already taken a step in that direction, he, Gilbert, would accompany him in every respect.

  Gilbert adjusted the gym bag, lay down in a more comfortable position and, momentarily overcome by his own solemnity, closed his eyes. Then he once more heard the crackle of the forest, he heard the rustling getting louder and coming closer. He heard the young Japanese man sobbing uncontrollably.