No more delicious sight than these intact little mushroom tribes on my right, which had clearly just thrust their way before sunrise out of the earth, and were still damp from it. If I ever had to offer an image of what “virginal” looks like, I would point to the underside of the cap of a baby ringed bolete (the kind that most quickly falls prey to devouring
worms), and from there would as carefully as possible peel off the stem casing or dress: never has the world seen a color as pale and bright as in the flesh that would come into view, never such purity as that of the tiny and evenly patternedâin the quintessential hexagonâmushroom fleshland. Come ye and see: when you have removed that spongy underlayer, the naked ringed bolete, or butter mushroom, or whatever name you give it, offers a cross section of a heavenly body on which no human foot has ever stepped, void and pure, at the same time of concentrated fruitiness. You cannot preserve both of those, except perhaps if you consume the mushroom, if possible without delay.
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ut of course since that one midsummer moment, on my morning circuitous paths to my sitting place, I was on the lookout for further bolete majesties. Even one was a find. It alone could send a thrill through me (even if at the beginning I would usually back away from it in spirals); it contributed to my sense of revelation that, simultaneously with the charm and the power at my feet, bombers were flying over the treetops, from the highways audible in the distance ambulance sirens wailed, or even just a team of mountain bikers, helmet after helmet, came crashing out of the underbrush on one side.
Finding the few king boletes during that summer was something I actually owed almost every time to the mountain bikers. They carved such deep ruts through the several years' layers of leaves, especially in the steep sunken roads, that as a result mushrooms were sprung from the otherwise covered ground, like stones under heavy tires, and, if by some lucky chance they were not beheaded or crushed, lay there on top in the light of day, ready to pick up.
It could happen that in the tire tracks of the previous days I then found another, one the downhill swoop had merely bumped, which had continued growing, but instead of up toward the air, down into the humus, head down toward the earth's interior, and harshly bent back against its stem, in the crouching position of an embryo, which also hides its face. For this one I had first to burrow my way in; by itself, deformed as it was, it would never have come to light.
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nly after the autumn rains did the finds begin to multiply. Nevertheless, every single one of the king boletes was still a revelation to me. When there came a day on which there were too many for me, that did not mean that I had grown tired of them, but I could not grasp all the revelations anymore: the one giant king bolete that I found that evening growing under the edible chestnut in my yard, as if it had followed me there from the woods, almost belonged in a horror taleâand the next morning I woke up longing for another just like it, under the same tree.
But most of them turned up around the spot where I sat and wrote, beyond the pond, in a space the size of a room, for weeks on end, day after day. And each time hours were spent on looking around, hunting, poking for them, before I finally got down to my project.
But my project, what was it now? A single object like this, as earthly heavy as unearthly in my hand: how could anything I might write down in the course of the day outweigh such a living thing? Even when I felt sure a place that yielded rich finds was empty, at least until the coming year, there, or a few underground flame-yellow root tangles farther along, overnight a new majesty of the forest floor had shouldered its way to the surface and had appeared on the scene or the stage, so monumentally that precisely for that reason it was easy to overlook, next to other, much more eye-catching mushrooms.
In such a moment there came from my lips, without premeditation, and not only once: “My friend.” And first I would dig away the leaf mold from around it, until the oval stem was exposed down to its very base and perhaps even tipped over all by itself, freeing itself from its net of roots; then I would sniff it, taking in the essence of the forest, and only then, much later, would I harvest the king bolete, whereupon I silently displayed it to my gathered ancestors from the Jaunfeld, who had been looking over my shoulder the entire time in a way that I never felt when I was writingâexcept when it was my mother.
It could happen that one of these finds made when I arrived in the morning was merely child-sized, so to speak, and also correspondingly pale, and I let it grow and take on color until quitting time (though in between I went back again and again to check on it). And only later, when the mushroom seekers appearedâof them more in a momentâwhom no king bolete, however infant-sized, escaped, even if I had hidden
it under moss and branches, did I pick each one immediatelyâthey were not to have it!
Yet in my desire to forestall the troops of mushroom seekers, as time went by I overdid my own seeking. In my backwoods realm, and that meant within sight of my sitting stump, my pencils, and my writing portfolio, I grubbed up every inch of layered leaves, and soon I was doing it every day, down to the rotted mold and even deeper, into the black, long since compacted, then light and sandy, original soil.
I divided my search area into a grid of parcels or claims, and on one of them, I stumbled one day, in a former grub hole, on such a tribe of king boletes, actually resembling whitish pupae, but with firm flesh, almost all of them lying horizontally, facing in one and the same direction, like mummies in the hold of those ancient Egyptian ships of the dead, buried in desert sand for their crossing to another life and immortality.
I ended up with coal-black fingers that could not be scrubbed clean, and my nails broke off from almost an entire autumn of digging for mushrooms around my writing materials, and when, from time to time, I went for the evening to the restaurant of the prophet of Porchefontaine, almost the only person with whom I had any regular contact during the current year, he waved me over to the corner table “for hunters and woodsmen.”
Even though, after such king bolete expeditions, carried out in one location, I sometimes did not sit down to write until afternoon, dangerously late, it seemed to me, in fact I hardly ever experienced that as a disadvantage after all. Agitated both by the exertion of searching and by the enthusiasm of discovery, I found peace when I finally got down to writing. I recovered my breath while doing work that seemed incidental, also a part or the essence of my free time; I recovered with its help, came up for air. Weak was not the same as lacking strength.
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n my autumnal walks home from the woods, for the first time in my decade here one original inhabitant of the bay or another addressed a word to me, because of the mushrooms in my hat.
At first that happened only in passing, in the shouts of fishermen, to the effect that it was “forbidden” to “transport” such things “in a hat!,” or in the resounding astonishment of an old woman, who, as she said, had hunted the eyes out of her head every fall, but never yet with success.
Then one time an equally elderly loner began, at the sight of the mushrooms, to tell stories, without directing them particularly at me: that the nameless body of water had been created by an American bomb, which was intended for the air base of Villacoublay, in those days occupied by the Germans, but went off course like ten thousand others; that the woods in his youth had been even more of a jungle; and the loneliness was enormous, “rougher” than before; retired people did play
boules
together, but never had anyone invited him over; at home he was keeping a cepe, at least as large as all of mine together there, for Sunday dinner, “not in the refrigerator, in the cellar!” and this one, unlike my chestnut king boletes, was from an oak tree, with just a bit of a bloom on the cap, otherwise colorless, “that's the only kind I gather”; at the time of the German occupation, the woods here had been full of cannon, off-limits; and he had never yet found a good mushroom in a bomb crater; the water did not drain out.
And whenever I came home with a particularly good find, a model, an example, a model example, I felt a desire to invite someone, an enemy (but did I still have one left?), to a reconciliation meal, or my noisy neighbors. It was not right to cook and eat by oneself this manna, not fallen from heaven but risen from the earth, unpredictable, untamable, even in this day and age unplantable. And yet that is what I did every time, consumed it all, my eyes closed.
What happened in the process: as I cut up the mushrooms, almost every evening, sautéed, perhaps salted, perhaps drizzled them with olive oil or something else, the kitchen, neglected for a long time, became a place for me again, and thus the house was altogether inhabited anew. Come ye and taste.
And afterward I sat in the very back of the yard and wanted to wake all my neighbors with my Arab kitchen-radio music.
And the dreams afterward at night, no matter how unfathomable they remained, became light in exemplary fashion for this eater.
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t was after the autumn rains that in the forests of the bay the mushroom-seeking guilds appeared. The region in the hills of the Seine was not overrun by them; there were only a couple, but they searched all the more thoroughly. They seldom allowed themselves to be seen, and in
the beginning almost all I encountered was their tracks. These came from the burrowers; from day to day the light gray leafy ground was punctuated by more mold-dark places, where the deepest layer had been brought to the surface.
Sometimes this resulted in actual seeker-marksâcircles, spirals, wavy lines, zigzags, rectangles and triangles, labyrinths, and I imagined a series of photographs, “Symbols of the Search.” But mostly it was scenes of violence, as if a wild animal had suddenly pounced on its prey, except that not a hair of this particular prey was left, save a black, deep hole in the earth.
Later I encountered this or that mushroom seeker in person, or actually only the sounds of him reached me at my open-air seat by the Nameless Pond. Each time it was heavy steps coming suddenly out of the tree-stillness, behind my back on the bank, and then stillness again, followed by more pounding and crashing through the underbrush. Otherwise I never heard a sound from a mushroom seeker, no whistling, certainly no humming, not even breathing. At most a dog accompanying him would begin to bark, and would also do so at tooth-baring range, which forced me to get up and continue writing in a standing position.
It could occur that I would turn toward a master or apprentice seeker, but not once was I greeted by him or even favored with a glance; he always kept his gaze, as if cross-eyed, fixed on the ground, sideways. If I saw such a person at all, he was often standing just as a silhouette behind some bushes, motionless and soundless, in a manner otherwise familiar from exhibitionists.
Yet even those who showed themselves clearly had no face, and likewise no discernible age. I never succeeded in looking one in the eye. They camouflaged their hunting, pretended, for instance with a long pole whose tip ended in a metal point, to be gathering edible chestnuts, and when they came upon a king bolete, it was seized in a flashâthe bare space afterward looking clawed up and scratched outâand on they went, as if nothing had happened. They were always strangers, people from elsewhere, at times even with hidden sonar devices and mechanical mushroom vacuums, which, operated for moments at high speed, were promptly stashed away again.
That the mushroom seekers roamed the forest in twos or threes was actually more the exception; as a rule they were loners, and from one
fall day to the next pretty much the same ones. And nevertheless even the single ones had something of the air of gang members; at any rate they reminded me altogether of a band of card sharks roving the wooded hills. I perceived these seekers as sinister fellows, or shabby sniffers, or at least as crooked birds, their shoes worn down in an entirely different way from those of so-called hoboes, and with their uncanny scraping at my back, for the first time I felt relieved at the sight of the light and bright, and oh so contemporary runners in the clearing beyond the bayou.
In my imagination the gangs of mushroom seekers were after the king boletesâall other edible mushrooms were casually annihilated with a disdainful kick or scraping of the tips of their shoesâwith the help of those long poles, as if made for jabbing into the hole of the mythical beast. And in between they also tossed their knives at a find, as one would a hunting knife. They tore up, like new bomb-droppers, the entire forest floor, these seeker-sharks. Since they appeared, I had taken on the habit, before I settled in my writing place, of arranging all my finds from that spot not just next to me, but rather in a circle, clearly on display, which indeed had the effect of forcing them to beat a hasty retreat. At the same time I was prepared for an attack.
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ut was I any different in my mushroom seeking? Hadn't I time and again lost any sense of distance as a result of my seeker's gaze? Had become seeking-blind, as one can become snow-blind? At any rate the moment arrived once a day when my seeking turned into a form of obsession, close to a mania. In the end I, too, was seeking in an ever-increasing radius, away, out of sight of my writing pages (of which one then blew into the water once). How often I had scolded myself for my seeking, wanting to shoo it away from my brow, as Horace shooed away sorrow.