The Journey (16 page)

With effort and some tender care the beds of the most beautiful gardens
could be transformed. If the Leitenberg Beautification Association could recommend anything, it would recommend that its field of concern not be focused on the castle gardens, in order to restore certain views and other enclosed spots, but instead here. Indeed the members would have to sacrifice their weekends in order to shovel, sift, smooth, and roll the earth, clear clean paths and set up beds with rose trellises and decorative bushes, build a hard-packed through road and place benches everywhere that proudly would carry labels that say:

The money for this work could come from public donations. Young girls would have to stand on street corners each Sunday, offering paper flowers for sale and calling out:

The local authorities, as well as the military authorities, could provide a subsidy so that such initiatives could begin without delay. Architects, building firms, and gardeners would hurry to provide advice and skill, plans would be entered into vigorous competitions, tools and steamrollers placed at one’s service for free, and Captain Küpenreiter from the Scharnhorst barracks could make sure that there would be enough soldiers and tools to take care of it all.

But nothing comes of it all. Meanness, avarice, misunderstanding, and the inertia of the heart resist such well-meant undertakings; people are fed up with such efforts and turn away. Indeed your efforts at such beginnings are even seen as a madness that in the end will cost you. Such useless dreams can only occur to people who have nothing better to do, that’s what is thought, and therefore it’s good that no one ever gives you the chance to express your wishes. It’s a waste of time to bother yourselves with rubbish, a miserable sensibility that shows a lack of will to accomplish anything. That’s why it’s appropriate that you are strictly controlled as long as your suggestive natures still exist. Only because you are miserable
are you sad about the stinking rubble that is the mirror of your own unquestionable hideousness, what you yourselves are and what you still don’t wish to recognize, though it’s the despair within yourselves that makes you long for the help of the Beautification Association.

No one hears what you have to say, for it is wisely arranged that no one is allowed to speak to you. In much the same way that people in houses keep away from you, so you are kept away and it becomes true that you are not allowed any longer in houses, according to our wishes, and that you may no longer inhabit them. You are rubbish, but the kind that is not allowed between table and bed, between chair and cupboard. Rubbish mixes with rubbish, and sin with sin, all of it a disgusting gruel that is only good for the vermin that help it to rot even further. People said good-bye to you and wrung their hands over you, but they didn’t wave; on the contrary, they raised their hands to ward you off. Souls washed themselves in the waters of guilt as you were uninvited and the doors were closed in front of you, commands barked behind them as they snapped shut, for they were ordered not to look at you. Meanwhile, concerned mothers went even further than any command as they carefully closed the windows and drew the curtains so that the little children wouldn’t see you or the sight of you cause them harm. “Mommy, who are all those dirty men there?” No, such a question the mothers hated, for then they had to lie—“They’re poor men!”—and that would not be enough and they’d have to say “They’re no-good devils!”—though that didn’t work either.

And yet you don’t give up. You are given a few minutes. You are told that you should take care of your needs. You can open up your pants and piss on the rubble. If there is nothing else available, you are allowed to go down into the ditch so that you can pull your pants down. You are your own graveyards. You should be buried under the weight of your own despised possessions. It’s not meant out of hatred, but rather pity. Yet you still long to get away from the rubbish; you still long to be elsewhere, which only demonstrates how disingenuous all those ideas are about beautification floating around inside your head. Stuck in the weeds and squatting down, you look around and sniff for anything that might be of use. You want to have what no one has any longer, but you cannot take it. Indeed, the warning says:

P
UBLIC
W
ASTE
D
ISPOSAL

as well as:

A
LL
F
ORMS OF
R
UBBISH
L
EFT
B
EHIND BY
P
RIVATE
C
ITIZENS
A
RE
S
TRICTLY
F
ORBIDDEN

And yet removing anything from the dump is also not allowed, because it all belongs to the authorities and therefore is still not free of owners. Thus there is nothing left in the world that doesn’t belong to someone; all goods are divided up and cause pain to those who have nothing and don’t want to have anything. It’s to them that the warning on the sign against entering is directed. So it is only thanks to the corporal’s good nature that you’re allowed to squat out here in order to ease your aching intestines. What you’re allowed to do here is indeed permitted, but it is against the general decree and is only allowed because the authorities are comfortable in the security of their own rights, though they are not generous enough to take the care to put an end to such a command.

Moreover, the town fathers don’t believe that anyone would want or take anything from here. With the stinginess of an owner who doesn’t give anything away freely, they calculate what something is worth, especially since a higher office, namely the Ministry of Commerce, has already staked a claim to the free acquisition of all that was useless, since whatever one didn’t use the state can always use. Long memos were sent to the local authorities: You must save, save, and save some more! Thriftiness spells riches to the victor! Whoever values the worthless is certain of riches! Save old glass! Save old copper, iron, and sheet metal! Save whatever one can bend or weave! Save old bones! Save paper! Save, save everything! The state doesn’t sneeze at what its citizens no longer love, and thus the rulers stand humbled before the ruled, forwarding a shining example of self-denial. That’s why next to the trusty rubbish cans in the courtyard of every building in Leitenberg there stand special containers into which everyone tosses whatever glass, metal, rags, bones, and paper they no longer have any use for. Everyone tosses it all away for the sake of the state; everyone tosses away what is worthless and sees the state transform it into something of worth once again. The dross of life itself is redeemed and repatriated through a renewed sense of its own worth, since all of it
served a shared purpose, retrieved from mud and muck only to be dusted off and restored to a bright luster.

The same thing happened to the consignment shops as had happened to The Golden Grape. They were taken over and told they were no longer needed. You are out of business, because officials from the Ministry of Commerce will now handle your business, as well as take control of the stockrooms of all dissolved firms. Only a few secondhand dealers were still able to apply their expertise. Even though they were just servants and underlings, they still stood a rung higher on the social ladder since they were now civil servants. This allowed them to wear the glorious emblem reserved for those who are paid servants of the state.

A large part of the work was not the concern of the former rag dealers. The people’s pride wouldn’t stand for that. Instead, the responsibility for gathering and saving was reserved for those who were better suited and brought more spirit to the work than the cool, calculated nature of salespeople. New people were tapped who slowly, from hour to hour and year to year, attained their full potential in service to the state, climbing from the fallen on the lowest rungs of the ladder to the holy desk of the front office at the top. The Ministry of Commerce approached the Ministry of Education to help spread the feeling of general well-being, and so schoolchildren with their clever heads and tender, diligent, restless hands were enlisted to gather monthly from the houses of Leitenberg all the useless items thrown away. Whenever the children found nothing or almost nothing in a courtyard, they knocked on the door and reminded those inside, “We’re from the War Brigade for Recycling. Don’t you have any bones?” Then the people would bring the children some gnawed bone or another, the young hands snapping it up like young dogs and running away without so much as a thank-you or good-bye.

The consequence of this relentless recycling is that less and less is tossed into the dump. What is brought there is a somewhat uniform kind of rubbish that doesn’t look nasty at all. For the most part it consists of ashes mixed with scrapings, potato skins, and cabbage leaves, as well as broken pottery, pieces of wood, and nearly unrecognizable refuse. Yet whoever dared to poke around a new blossoming heap of rubbish could find rusting iron pots and kettles with holes in them or underneath a rotting shoe worn right through, a faded hat, a coat with no arms, and numerous
other treasures that the wild beasts who wandered the hunting fields of what had been publicly abandoned would gladly gather up, provided that the booty was not so ruined that nobody knows how to restore its dignity or save it from further decay in order to alleviate the poverty of the ghosts of Ruhenthal. Now and then a hand lifts something up to eye and nose, and whenever it is something that could be easily hidden—a small can, a nail, a little piece of leather—it disappears into a pocket. Yet if it is something larger, you can’t take it, because the soldiers would notice immediately and shout.

“Are you completely nuts? Throw that crap away right now!”

Then the precious rag is tossed back, its fate sealed forever by wherever the wind will take it.

“Fools like you who steal from rubbish heaps ought to be taken care of for good!”

The words are barked out, but they do no harm. Only actions still matter, no longer words, for they make nothing happen. The power of the word has disappeared or is hidden away, language having lost all meaning. Indeed, what is said is not that different than in earlier times, but it no longer carries any weight. Gravity rests in actions that can be completed right away. Fate waits for nothing. Hardly is something ordered, a wave being all that it takes, and it’s done immediately. Life without sacrifice is no longer possible, while at the same time caution is thrown to the wind. It can no longer even be picked out of the wasteland of rubbish. It exists only in each single step taken by the chain of ghosts. Left right, left right. The symmetry of the steps is not something arranged, but rather only the result of fixed habit.

The soldiers have no problem with this, but in fact look on pleased, because it corresponds to their own sense of habit. They have good boots and walk left, right. They thrust their legs forward, and it feels good to do so, the arms following, a four-footed creature that has been so well drilled that it can stand up and stomp the earth on just its hind feet, though it cannot conceal its origins, having maintained the swing of its front legs. The ghosts, however, are not as capable as the striding animals, but nonetheless they keep trying and sway left, right. Their ragged, torn footwear creates no pounding, but rather a quieter, more uncertain sound, a scraping, left, right, perhaps a stiff-legged dance that moves along the streets in
wretched fashion. Some of the ghosts don’t want to settle into “left, right,” but instead want to slide across the earth, rocking back and forth as they scrape along, slinking, shoving themselves forward, wanting to roll, some even wanting to hop along silently, though the other ghosts spoil this game because they want to seem real to the Leitenbergers, so that at least some of them can say, “I saw it myself. It’s really true. We witnessed it ourselves.”

And so the ghosts continue trying without success. What they attempt to do cannot be accomplished, namely to get the Leitenbergers to think of them as real. If the ghosts were to think of themselves as real, that wouldn’t amount to anything, because the townsfolk would still not consider them real. Even if this difficulty were overcome, it still wouldn’t mean anything, because the Leitenbergers would still not believe their own eyes. Such people would only mutually agree that there must be something wrong with their eyes. This would only remove any last doubt that in Leitenberg one cannot see what one does not believe.

Because of their number, the existence of the ghosts was not plausible. Left and right, those are not ghosts. Left and right are only sides. Left and right, those are the streets of Leitenberg. Everything is left or right. Everything is based on left and right. Nothing is left and nothing is right if it in fact does not exist, and therefore there are no ghosts on the right or the left, they can only exist in general, and because ghosts have been abolished they no longer exist, no, not anywhere. The ghosts are not clever enough to realize this, because they really want to seem human as they shuffle along left, right. And so they carve their path forward, pressing upon the surface of the stony pavement, even if it’s with the soft flesh of the knees, left, right, onward, onward, though unlucky are those who cannot keep up because they have blisters on their soles and their shoes hurt, some of them having to hobble along and thus disturb the remaining ghosts, right, left.

The small streets climb uphill. The rows of four across almost fill the street, a sidewalk on the left, a sidewalk on the right, each seeming so close and yet so far away. No ghost can step upon them, because the long curbstones have banished anything impure, anything that would harm the health of the souls of the pious owners. How confidently the few people stand on the two-colored mosaic of the sidewalk and have no idea how
small the distance is that separates them from the swaying ghosts, themselves simple people who do not like to stray too far from their lairs in order not to lose touch with their familiar smells. Only reluctantly do these loafers step forth out of their shelters when it concerns their jobs or their needs, and then they quickly turn back. They all push open their doors easily with one hand, take a whiff of their own houses and sniff each curious stain.