Andreas Maier - The Room

But right now, with J on his way and Julia forgotten, the sun is going down and the skies are turning red for the evening. Autumn foliage is all around, coming towards my uncle and colouring the paths and boughs alongside and above, making it feel like walking through a room filled with autumn. He has entered the forest now, leaving the automobile behind him in August-Viktoria-Strasse. To the left, a meadow with scattered fruit trees which no one has harvested yet, they gleam red and want to tell him something, and he seems to understand it too. Things always talked to him, the woodland creatures and the plants, as if he belonged more to them than he did to us, the human beings. The apples, what did they talk to him about? How did their language sound? Did they talk to him about the time, about the year, about how the summer was, how the sun shone down on each apple in the most personal of ways, as if it existed for that apple alone? Later, he will be able to talk about the wonderful apples in Forsthaus Winterstein, making them superlative, the reddest that have ever hung in this meadow, the best and ripest and sweetest, even though perhaps he doesn’t even taste one, for he’s in a bit of a hurry and wants to get to the Forsthaus. But first, a walk through the forest. To his right, on a branch, sits a red-breasted robin. It sits there and looks at him and doesn’t fly away. It just stares at him, and he at the robin. They seem to know each other. As if it wasn’t just that the robin was a natural part of the forest and this day for my uncle, but that my uncle was an unquestionable part of the forest for the robin too. Maybe it can hear him. Maybe my uncle said something in the robin’s language. Not that he has learned the language or anything like that — he just knows it. Perhaps he just utters a slight sound, and the robin knows exactly what he’s saying, what he wants, where he’s standing and how he’s feeling at that moment. It starts to sing as he walks past, and the further away he moves, the further away the birdsong sounds, and my uncle knows that a robin always sounds as though it’s far away, even when it’s nearby. And after just a few metres it really does sound as though it’s a long distance away. No bird sounds as lonely as the robin. My uncle doesn’t remark on that to himself, at least not in words, but he takes notice of it. He doesn’t even think about the robin at all, to be precise, but I need to now, in order to give my uncle a language I can understand; otherwise he wouldn’t be there at all, just dead and forgotten except for his gravestone and the two numbers on it. In reality, everything in my uncle is wordless. In reality, he speaks a completely different language, a language before words, one which is always between things, but mostly we don’t know what they are because we’re always talking and are therefore too loud for the things. Now, in the forest, my uncle is in constant conversation with everything, and to him this conversation is a kind of Being-at-Home. Everyone understands him there, and he understands the forest, there’s no pretence, nothing is kept secret, and everything is allowed to be the way it is. Nothing is hidden there, for once, not even where he is concerned. And so he walks past the oaks and beeches, up the hillside, his hands in his coat pockets, not smoking. He never smoked in the forest. It never occurred to him to smoke there, not even once. The cross-country ski trails come into view on the right hand side, and he strides out of the forest, knowing that the two hares are about to come by. My uncle stands there on the skiing meadow (back then, it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone to build a golf course there), and after less than thirty seconds the two hares really do come rushing past, looking at him, getting closer, eyeing him in a very critical manner, as is their nature, then hopping up the slope of the meadow. He stares after them for a long while, the sloped meadow cuts a long swathe through the forest, then the ground fog draws in, just a light veil, and shades of darkness begin to fall. Only the foliage seems to have managed to imprison the light, shining brightly. All along the edge of the forest, a multitude of colours blaze. The evening falls over the forest trail, and soon so will the night. My uncle walks up to Else-Ruh (Else, like his grandmother), then heads further on to Augusten-Ruhe (Auguste, like his mother), and now J is in the Frauenwald and walks another circuit there, maybe he might see a deer, maybe a marten, or on the edge of the forest, next to the houses there, a short-tailed weasel. My uncle always saw something in the forest where others see nothing. Yet he never saw things among people, it was always everyone else that did.

And as the forest slowly seals itself off into dusk and darkness, my uncle exits it again, a small, lone forest wanderer, or that’s how I picture him amongst the huge trees, almost lost in the scene, a person alone at the edge of the forest, alone under the skies, alone with himself, and yet perhaps in this very moment connected by and with everything and parted and separated from things like never before. And the automobile is waiting down below; he heads there and drives off, over the Johannisberg and over to the forest sports ground, where the first team is training. Most of them come here by car now.

My uncle drives higher and higher up into the forest and is then released from it, under open skies now, driving across the countryside with the Taunus before him, darker and darker, the Autobahn alongside, the cars all with their lights on, rushing through the scene like tiny glow-worms. If J had been born just a few years earlier, he would have been able to come here as a child to marvel at the construction of the Autobahn. It would have been the biggest building site he had ever seen in his life, and certainly the longest. He could have seen an entire army of machinery making its way through the Wetterau, slowly lumbering through the landscape and leaving a multi-lane Reich Autobahn in its wake, along which people have been able to drive ever since, always straight ahead and internationally connected from Sicily to Oslo, maybe even to Helsinki. Today it’s called the Federal Autobahn. Back then, the Wetterauers stood at the edge of it and thought, Now we are at the centre of the world, and everyone celebrated, and the newspapers celebrated too. A new world. Wherever they built these Autobahns, everyone always suddenly thought they were at the centre of the world, just because the whole world was driving past them. Yet when it came down to it, the whole world was driving past everyone else too. But in every district, each new slip road was celebrated as though the world had finally taken notice of this particular corner of the world, as if, like Sleeping Beauty, it had finally been awoken from its deep slumber. And anyone who had a car drove past Bad Nauheim on the Autobahn on the very first day, to try it out just the once, and then came off it again a few kilometers further on at Friedberg, able to say from that day forward that they too had driven along the Autobahn. In essence, the Wetterau is just an Autobahn with a service station attached. Now my uncle sees the construction site for the service station, towards the back of the scene, where the glow worms are hurtling up and down as if they’ve suddenly gone mad and all they want is to strive forwards as quickly as they can and arrive somewhere. In much the same way as my uncle sees the packages at the central postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as always having come from the big wide world, like Barcelona perhaps, or Appenzell, here he sees the cars as having come especially for him, from Amsterdam or perhaps Milan or even from Rome, where the Pope lives, the descendent of Christ, for whose birth the bells of St. Stephen’s in Vienna ring when my uncle sits in front of the radio to listen to them. Inside every glow worm was an entire world. And so J feels safe and calm and like he belongs and is connected to the whole world, the world he is able to be part of, and that is all because of Route 5 of the Federal Autobahn.