H. Adler - The Wall

“We’ve startled them,” said Anna.

“You’re wrong. They’re not startled. That’s just what finches do sometimes. They’re spoiled boys who, because of their somewhat elaborate ways, don’t take anything too much to heart.”

From the west a light wind blew, rustling the beech trees and the more tender birches that stood out brightly amid the rest of the garden. The earth rose up soft beneath us, our heavy shoes making no noise upon it. We floated along, hurrying. But as the tongue of ridge narrowed ever more and finally fell away steeply, we had left the garden. A couple of steps farther stood a pole with many signs in the middle of an empty clearing that pointed to a number of different directions. We had reached the country’s border. Two paths offered us a choice — one running along the border which had followed the crest to here, another which fell away from the border and ran a bit lower, and which was not as arduous and was better protected from the wind, though it stretched out in almost the same direction as the one that ran along the crest. I recommended to Anna that we take the easier one. She thanked me for being so considerate, yet I should have been the one to choose, not she, since the day belonged to me. I pointed ahead of me and set out on the path that ran along the border. Anna followed in silence. After a brief climb, we managed to scale the Zwercheck without halting. There then followed an easy stretch along the narrow seam and down the hillside, after a short while winding through the ample forest, first right, then left along the border markers. White and new and carefully spaced out, these marked one of the oldest borders on earth.

For this border has existed for a thousand years or more, no war large or small having changed it, no one having called it into doubt or seriously questioned it or needing it to be marked by anything other than the mighty heights of the mountains. There had hardly been any battles on the border, the dense and massive snowy outcrops of the ancient forest having defended it from all the wars. Even the feuds that neighboring lands continued with one another gave way to the inhospitable mountains and pushed on across the passes, taking place in the surrounding lower hills or seeking out other areas where there was more room to maneuver. The villages and isolated farms on both sides of the border held peaceful people hidden by forest and weather. Yet still a son, or even a stalwart warhorse, would have to go off to war, for it wasn’t possible to do so in this blessed district, and so they would go, the army marching elsewhere. No battlefield was pointed out to the visitor, nor any destroyed fortress. Even Bayregg, the fallen castle that guarded the entrance to Angeltal, situated with its old streets built of salt which narrowed as they neared the mountains that had hardly been touched by war. The border kept it away. Over generations, the surveyors always happily came to the mountains and worked together on figuring out just where the border ran. They first did it in the 1760s and, as a memorial to their visit, dates and names were chiseled into stones. They lasted a long time, graying and becoming covered with spots and disappearing into the thickets only when people forgot about them. I saw them once myself, here and also farther south. I was fond of them, and they strengthened my faith in the peaceful survival of people in these neighboring countries. These stones faithfully did their duty for a hundred and seventy years, and served the needs of the forest people no less than those of the distant regents. But then, finally, someone recalled the advances that had been made in the world and sent the surveyors out again, and even they found themselves in agreement. They just knew everything much more precisely, which was the mark of progress. Nonetheless, even after such a long time the art of measuring had not advanced that much, because the men moved a stone only here and there, when they didn’t end up leaving it in its old spot, moving it a step or two into one country, then elsewhere into the other. Rarely was it three steps or even four. None of it did any harm to the border and the countries, and it could be hoped that it would suffice for the next hundred years.

Yet this time things were different. After only a few years, the border fell. There was no battle over it — or at least it was one that took place far away from here in a magnificent hall, where, bent over maps, red pencils held in greedy hands, the supreme leaders had gathered. They didn’t look at the mountain forest; they hardly knew anything about it, never having even seen the border. There they sat in the cold, bright splendor, envious, blasphemous, and afraid, pencils quivering in their fingers. Then they swept away the border, not considering the price to beloved peace, which the border had never destroyed. And as the border ceased to exist, so they pledged themselves to war, which those who were afraid wished to avert and those who were defiant wanted to unleash. The battle didn’t happen in the mountain forest, for the murderers kept their distance, the fields of ruin lying far from here, they not having the heart to attack the forest, sparing, as well, the villages far and wide that also did not suffer as cities on either side were smashed to pieces. From each country people were rounded up and sent away, denied any sense of security. And anyone the leaders — who paid no heed to any old border — no longer wanted around, because they were not worthy of living in their borderless tortured empire, were shunted here and there until they were knocked over the head and were dead within the hour.

When the war was in its last days, there being nothing but moaning and spasms and decay to the east and to the west of the dark-green mountain forest, powerful formations of the fast-moving tanks of the victors pressed through the mountains, though not over the ragged peak, or through the dense forest or through the narrow thickets and the inextricable wood; instead, upon a few wide roads they moved through the passes here and there without paying any attention to the border. With just a glance at the map, they knew that they had crossed the conquered border, after which they leaped into the heartland, in order to finish off the beaten opponent, who hardly amounted to anything and was soon whisked away in dirty bunches to prison, every last one of them.

Now the old border meant something again. Undisturbed and secure, it cut off suffering from the newly separated countries that sensed it and wondered what to do. The border markers on this path do not look as if they have ever been ripped from the ground. Did the old ones just crumble away and disappear? It is astounding, yet they have survived and have just been freshly painted, given a new white coat of lime. I was surprised that the reestablished border was not guarded, no guards to be seen anywhere. Did the border mean so little? It was clearly not secured, as if the war had never happened, the mountain forest shared peacefully by the two countries as always. Yet whoever lived on this side, be it in the nearby valleys or farther off in large and small towns, he no longer had a homeland when raised to speak the language that was spoken beyond this border. The border here in the forest, besides providing smugglers with protection, no longer protected anything the way borders should but instead only threatened. He who yesterday had a home, who wanted to set down roots, had lost his rights. With feeble mothers, with old gray fathers, with babies and children the women could pack their things in a hurry and be off, everything they’d worked for taken away at a single command, the love of one’s country ripped away from its home source, thrown together with others into a couple of prison camps and there sometimes mistreated, often no husbands with them. They had wanted indeed to leave home years ago and had listened either knowingly or unknowingly to the evil ones — and now they hang on somewhere in many different countries or waste away, shoveled into unmarked graves. Many women don’t know what happened to their husbands, no known address, given over to fate and abandoned. But if there were still men among those who were displaced, or if they returned home, they were given orders straightaway and were taken, sometimes with their wives and children, while they who had been sinned against had to make amends for the sins of their neighbors through the torture and misery of forced labor.