A Book of Memories (41 page)

After this encounter, because of our shared secret, I was not only more deeply drawn to the boy but also afraid of him, almost hating him; still, we often took that trail to the clearing, a trip that to me also meant a kind of flirting with death, because I could never stop thinking of what Hilde had once whispered to me, as if she knew exactly what she was saying and why, how precisely she touched a most delicate nerve with her warning: "Whoever strays from the trail into the marsh is a dead man."

But we kept going back just the same, though of course we needed an acceptable excuse to disappear periodically into the sedge; since Dr. Köhler had his snail farm in this clearing, we had a chance to look around, watch the snails, and chat with the servants or with the scholarly doctor himself about the life cycle of snails, thus finding the perfect cover for our favorite pastime; the snails became our accomplices, and no doubt it was from the mire of these early lies that my ghosts arose, the ones I was frightened enough to describe to my father.

I realized that to write my narrative I first had to straighten out my own life, to break open and reveal every layer of my self-deceit.

But time, minutes and hours, resolved nothing; my body became my worst enemy: so many conflicting desires lived their separate lives in it that my head was unable to follow them, or to keep them under control by tempering them with reason; I could not establish within myself a suitable balance of sense and sensuality that would find its proper expression in clear, lucid words, the only possible system of communication for me; but this was not to be; consequently, the thought of doing away with my body stayed with me like a faithful friend all my waking hours; and yet the reason this never became more than a tempting thought was that my longings, imaginings, desires, literary ambitions, and the tension of little secret gratifications gave me such an abundance of pleasure, the pleasure of my own body, that to deprive myself of them would have seemed plain foolish; claiming that suffering was also pleasure, I allowed myself to take risks, to go too far, and that was the reason I had to keep imagining my own death, which would relieve the strain
—indeed, I got so used to enjoying my suffering that I could no longer tell when I was genuinely happy; for example, on the morning of my departure, when my fiancée and I were lying in each other's arms on the rug and my glance strayed to the black leather case in which I'd carefully packed all the material I had collected for this story, even there and then, at the very moment the fluids of our bliss were flowing together inside her beautiful body, the first thought that occurred to me was that right now, this instant, I should drop dead, croak now, no better time than now to cease, to evaporate, and then I'd leave nothing behind except a few self-consciously mannered pieces of prose, a few glib sketches and stories that were published in various literary journals and would very quickly sink into oblivion, and the open, patent-leather case, which, in the form of raw and to others indecipherable notes, contained the real secrets of my life, that is all—except perhaps for my seed in her body uniting with her egg at that very moment.

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 loose 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.