H. Adler - The Wall

Only the seasons changed. In winter snow covered the crypts and paths, which were shoveled free. In spring the leaves on trees and bushes turned green, grass sprouted, and moss and lichen were fended off in order that they not consume everything, while birds hopped along the paths or shyly retreated to branches. In summer the stones glowed, the vegetation sprouting high and densely wild. Most visitors came during this time of year, but the stillness was hardly disturbed. In the fall, the cemetery was at its most beautiful when the leaves changed color and slowly drifted to the ground, until it was covered in thick layers.

Because of the war, this transformation came about in a leisurely way, as, most likely, hardly anyone came here and no one paid attention to what was happening to it. First the visitors from afar stayed away, then tours and the sale of postcards disappeared, and finally it was forbidden to visit the cemetery, the iron gate at the main entrance remaining closed, and from which one couldn’t see very far inside, while care of the site was reduced and soon almost entirely forsaken, until the cemetery lay asleep as if under a spell. Only the urge to preserve memorials remained faithful to it once the conquerors no longer cared for the offspring of the dead. As soon as the hermitage was set up by those men, they announced that the cemetery belonged to it, all of it together a common grave of life and death. The fine yet important distinction one might wish to make between the two was no longer recognized. Thus life and death were slung together into one shared dying, the things gathering together as thickly inside the hermitage as the stones outside, the past heaping up, there only for the curious, arriving soulless in a future meant to be reached or anticipated. Reached, because it was not there, and one had to fight through any dispute; anticipated, because one could say today is still yesterday, so yesterday has a future, which is why it will still exist after today, if one hangs on and doesn’t lose patience.

Now I was there once again, hermitage and cemetery having taken me in. There had only been time, time in between, a ridge of time on the border between life and death. Time perpetuated me in order that I could perpetuate, always there upon its lonely height, life and death falling away below it. Perhaps my life and death also fell away in the process, but I remained always above, blinded and yet not entirely unconscious, the days propelling me forward, even at night, because the nights were part of the days. Thus it went on, and at the end, if it was an end, it was something reached and anticipated, or at least I was something reached and anticipated, or perhaps not I but the perpetuity that drew near and replaced me, a sustained transformation between the graves of the ancestors long overtaken by time, but neither father nor mother there, they having slipped away from the ridge running its razor-thin border through time, and thus they had no grave and no house, they were no longer alive and not yet dead, having died within time. However, I remained above time, all of us encountering one another within time but, nonetheless, never having met one another.

Time meant the curse that I had been and was, and above time life went on, or I went on, I having left, the places having fallen away and separated from time, cut off houses and graves; only time continued to ensue, time itself pursuing. Meanwhile, there was the desire for a future. Was it time’s desire or my own? It was the desire of my own temporality amid the lost places that had now passed. That’s why the places had ceased to exist in one place that could simply exist henceforth and for certain, reachable and anticipated. I looked out to where everything moved, a pane of glass before me, translucent and smooth, such that I could lean against it, toward the outside, since I could not wait until it was reached. To the right and left, nothing but the hermitage and the cemetery, while in between there were many walls, though no borders. Everything passing over so quickly that it was no longer clear what it was, nothing stopping it. Was that a sign that there was a future? But where was it, where? There and gone, and every border was just a notion, not something that existed — none of it was real. Soft mist covered the countryside, the sky was gray, houses passed by again, and again a cemetery.

Was there nothing but hermitages and cemeteries here in this land? It was almost winter, and yet the fields were still green amid the undulating countryside. Gradually it grew brighter, yet the sun didn’t break through the pale mist that extended far off into the distance. They didn’t look like open meadows, much more like gardens, all of them enclosed by hedges, even the pastures. However, there were hardly any words, only trees in a small patch or single ones in the middle of a lawn with limbs branching out wide and thick from the trunk below. Cattle grazed leisurely between far-off barriers — here there were sheep as well, or a single horse, no one appearing to guard the animals. It surprised me that the animals were not gathered into stalls for the onset of winter. Villages drifted by, some of them spreading out, but they were not really towns, nor were they even what I’d call villages, because all the houses that I could see had tiled roofs and looked mostly like villas.

Everything was strange and distant. Thus none of it belonged to me; it was home to others but not to me, though nonetheless it was dear to me; there was comfort alone in the strangeness of it all. What surrounded me seemed to me solemn; I was still nowhere, my destination unknown and undecided. “Let’s hope,” I said to myself, but what I heard back wasn’t comforting: “Lost, lost, everything gone. Don’t expect anything!” And was there anyone waiting expectantly for me? If only I’d reached where I was headed! Indeed, So-and-So had written, saying he would be at the station, I could count on that, it would be an honor, an old friendship would be renewed, he would also bring others along, Oswald Bergmann and his striking sister, Inge. Yes, Bergmann had since changed his name to Birch; only Inge was still called Bergmann. He had done what many others had done here, and now he was a recognized man who was greatly esteemed as an archaeologist and art historian, his books being famous and well respected. He could introduce me to influential circles as thanks for my having done some things for him years ago when he came to us in the old city over there, living with me and my parents at home in order to familiarize himself with my theories, which he found very fruitful for his own field of research and wanted to make use of.

The thought of seeing Bergmann — now Birch — again was pleasing to me; even today I will admit that there are few people whom I have felt closer to. He was always the essence of life itself. Franziska beamed whenever she saw him, for he was dazzling, a tireless source of energy, full of good humor that ranged from light kidding to exuberant jokes. Oswald’s life force seemed inexhaustible and hardly allowed for sleep, he seeming always fresh and infecting Franziska and me with his beaming alertness. If you spent an entire day and half the night talking with him, you didn’t feel tired afterward, but instead always pleased and stimulated. Once we spent a summer with him in the south, Inge also joining us, a spirited, dazzling creature, delicate and beautiful. She liked us and we liked her, and we could all talk with one another endlessly. She wrote short poems about the landscape, acerbic and sometimes brash formulations that she thought very good, more so than her nearly fantastic stories in which the relentless unfolding of the plot was forwarded through surprisingly witty occurrences, all of it expressed in tautly rendered sentences. Also pleasantly exciting were her children’s books, from which she earned enough to allow her to live modestly and give small amounts to Oswald when he needed money. However, that summer trip two years before the war began unfortunately ended not only our relationship with Inge but also with Oswald. They rarely wrote to us anymore, and then we heard that they had happily gone abroad. Soon I lost all trace of them. Then, a few months after the war ended, when I, prodded by Peter, tried to reconnect with any former contact I could remember, I also reached out to Oswald after So-and-So sent greetings from him in his second letter. I was still reluctant to do so, because Inge had never responded to Franziska’s letter years ago, but when I later told Anna about Bergmann her face lit up immediately with joy as I had never seen it before; it was the charm of his personality, which affected anyone who ever met him. Anna informed me that she had once happened to hear him give a lecture on a subject far outside her field. She had been dragged along to it, Bergmann having spoken about Neolithic marbled ceramics, but how interesting and terrific it was, much of it still memorable to this day, particularly the technique of scoring the surface, stringing bands of clay, and incised adornments. Bergmann had explained it so clearly that one could never forget it, an unusual occurrence. Anna was so full of this person that she felt compelled to see him again, and, through a fleeting acquaintance with a woman, she was able to gain entrance to a gathering to which Bergmann had been invited. Thus Anna spent an evening in his company and was even able to speak with him. “He is the sun itself; you have to write to him for sure!” That was at least what Anna felt.