H. Adler - The Wall

Happily, our new friends were ready to sing us some songs from their rough and yet attractive trove of folklore. They tried to translate the words and to explain the context. Since I was pleased to take it up and join in, I won their hearts and they wanted to do anything they could for me. Thus clothes and laundry were washed, folded, and ironed, for which we were hardly allowed to give thanks. Also, I was taught on request the old language of these parts, which few spoke, but which our hosts had preserved well. The gray, weathered church was explained to us both inside and out, and we were shown the local sights where the history of the Welsh was decided in 1286. Unfortunately, the meaning of the events of the Middle Ages weren’t entirely clear to us, though I understood a bit, since I was eager to know as much as I could, much more than Johanna, who was happier about my being interested than she was taken with the stories. She thought it was good for me to be healthily distracted, as if such a prolonged engagement of the mind with a distant strange people, if even in a cursory way, could help a person save himself from his own past. That, however, didn’t happen, for I still remained plenty troubled, the experiences of earlier days melting into one another. Everything that I confronted in the present filled me with joy, but my inner life remained closed down to it; it was all a kind of brilliance, as if brought by a May snow, but then soon melting, running off, and gone. Johanna was much stronger, and I had to let her lead the way and let myself follow. It made sense that she knew the area better, since she had visited Betty often. And so I let Johanna lead me through the countryside, which I wanted to explore, despite the winter gray and the constant rain.

It was cold, but there was no frost, it having melted hours before. My gaze pressed through the soft mist, and everything looked as if it lived in a silent, distant dimension. We had only three days left; Johanna didn’t want to be away from her work for more than a week, while I was also anxious to get on with life and didn’t want to risk a longer stay, either. They were insular days, ourselves adrift, our worries subdued, as if stored behind a wall, whenever we wandered through the soft drizzle that soundlessly fell from low clouds. From Vaynor, from halfway up a somewhat steep hillside, we set aim for the valley and the old church and saw Morlais Hill across from us, though not for long, for soon we had reached the riverbed where the Taf-Fechan Brook flowed fast. On stony and sometimes muddy paths we followed it along in the direction of the current, no one to be seen anywhere, only free-range sheep standing together in little herds or on their own, grazing, looking at us curiously, and fleeing with little jumps whenever we tried to approach them or unintentionally got too close.

The dreamy background was familiar to me, for it was suffused with deep runnels much like the mountainous land back there. There stood mighty trees, their leaves gone, though they didn’t look naked, since their branches crisscrossed again and again and were covered in thick layers of ivy. Various things grew about — wild meadow shoots, evergreen copses. Thus we took in a good part of the valley, but as we drew away from moss-covered grounds near the brook and toward the road, which for a little ways ran high above the Taf-Fechan, we came under the protective barrier of the high hedges. A feeling of home enveloped us, so that I dared speak only in a whisper there. Above, the landscape was bleaker; it was only right that the nearby summits we could see were called the Black Mountains, or the Fforest Fawr in Welsh. The earth fell in black folds, the black rocks stretching out; even when one gazed off into the distance, all the contours and flat spaces seemed to consist of black. The hillsides rose up treeless, whereby the modest hills carried the powerful feel of a rambling range of inaccessible sharp peaks. All that could be seen were some houses or farms and trees springing up alongside the running water; otherwise, the land rose and fell bare and empty of vegetation, only thinly covered with a layer of sparse grass. Only when your gaze turned away from the distance and looked nearer to home more closely, much more intently, was there revealed a many-layered, labyrinthine network of carpeted green, grasses, durable steady growth, and moss that looked shorn. The grazing animals had nibbled almost everything to the ground, be it the numerous sheep or also cattle, as well as calm horses striding along, lovely and awkward little ponies with thick hides and long hairy legs, their hooves draped with funny bearded tufts. They were green and black and gray and silver, together and in turns, a strange harmony that was both odd and pleasing to me. I would have gotten used to them in a few days and knew: what was here and what happened here was altogether different from what I had had back there. No longer did the mountain woods belong to me, nor that time from years ago; nor was there anywhere that was home, me realizing that I couldn’t call a single speck of earth my home. I was expelled and banished, my curse a self-deception, there being no curse at all. It had to do with the acceptance of the expulsion from the paradise of my childhood and youth, my departure from there only the inevitable consequence of a force long ago set in motion. It was fine to still miss the mountain woods, as well as the landscape stretching out from them, but it was also over and done with, for now Johanna was at my side.

We walked for at least an hour in silence. What we had beheld in recent days, about the people that we knew, about the happy and the grim commotions we had endured — we had talked about that enough already. Now mighty adventures had to be set in motion, down into the depths, without direction, both backward and forward at once. But we also had to hold off these adventures; we needed to wait and blindly feel our way ahead in order that we be granted a way through, inscrutable, and yet attainable.

A reverberating whistle sounded. Not only did the old Roman roads wind through the valley, a slow, puffing train had also settled here that ran from the nearby coal-mining district to the south and right through the Black Mountains and the gardenlike meads and along Llangorse Lake and right through the middle of rich pastureland and on to the bishop’s seat of Brecon. We spent a few hours there yesterday, in a lovely pub, where, as the only foreigners, we had our midday meal, the people looking at us curiously with eyes wide with surprise. Now a train from the north puffed along, a sleepy locomotive in the lead and pulling just two cars right on by us, clanging like a bunch of slicing knives, though soon it just hummed, then once again louder with a rumbling sound when the train crossed a high bridge over a ravine. Then it was quiet once again, everything fading away and enchanted, only a plaintive whistle that faded away in a wistful tone, searching for any place and footing that might be available, even if we hardly knew it and had nothing in common. We are no longer what we were, we are no longer what we were, ran the constantly receding rhythm of the train, continuing to run inside me for a while.

Soon we came to a little station, it containing an enclosed peacefulness that reminded me of a mountain hut. So remote and unattended that it felt as if it promised sanctuary, it serving the local line of the national railway, diffidently dreaming away, only a couple of times the rare arrival stopping. Pontsticill in big letters was what it said on the helplessly useless building, where not a person was to be seen within its walls or nearby. In fact, there really wasn’t anything surrounding it, the station simply plunked down in the middle of nowhere, as if it were the midpoint between other destinations. The train that had rumbled past us had never, I believed, stopped at this forsaken place. The tracks had disappeared.