H. Adler - The Wall

But here the border rose up on its own and had no notion of the debacle afoot in the valleys; the living and their scars were not brought into the exalted silence of the forest but, instead, those stolen away were sent across the border in sealed trains with officials riding on them, armed and in uniform. Nothing of them remained here. The path along the border of lost dreamers that one can think of as having wandered off into the tall forest, it didn’t get us into trouble. We saw no one who secretly slipped across the border to bring news or carry away goods. No one wanted to flee; none took the opportunity to do so. If it weren’t so bad, fear would not have forced those threatened to steal away on secret paths. Sometimes I stopped and listened to hear if anyone might crawl out of the underbrush in order to block our way and demand to see our papers. I had a valid pass that stated that I had been released. Out of sheer faith, I had been granted it when I applied at the office for returnees on the second day. They looked at my face and gave me the red card, which said I was a part of them. Some returned home across the border under duress, penniless and pale, while others were forced out in twos. A border unable to be healed, superfluous amid the worlds of the harsh patriarchs — isolated, ignored, and undisputed. I sought nothing from the other country, and from this one I’d already been cut loose. “When at last we are gone, then it will be different. No longer will we belong, not us, not to the mountain forest with its border!” Anna didn’t hear me. I looked at the path that fell away from the crest, promising, shady, and narrow, winding down to the valley of the other country, though from that country no one approached the border. Was it meant to be closed? Who needed this path? Who ever used it? Now we had reached another peak, its top a stony flat ledge covered with impenetrable sticky young trees, with a couple of taller ones rising above it. No view of the countryside offered itself.

“I can’t see where we are,” said Anna.

“Are you afraid? Soon we’ll come to a place where one can run away.”

“Without any bags?”

“If you don’t want to stay, then you don’t worry about the bags. It’s best to escape inconspicuously. If you’re stopped, you can say that you are just out for a hike, a carefree wanderer out for his own pleasure.”

“Do you want to leave? Where to?”

“I don’t know if I want to. And to which country? Where it all happened? There’s a wall between me and it.”

“Then why do you talk about moving on?”

“I just do. I’m toying with the idea. I’m searching for me. The feeling of being lost in a bottomless alienation. There’s no home for me here anymore; it only leads to anchorless thoughts. Look, here’s another little path. It looks quite pleasant.”

“Will you try it, just for a bit? Not in earnest, just for fun. Just a couple of steps, so that you feel in your fingertips what it feels like to escape.”

“Please, be serious!”

“I am, really. I only thought it could help you.”

“It doesn’t help me. It’s also enough that I can imagine precisely what it means to enter the unknown. The forest is the same there as it is here. I know it, because I’ve wandered around over there a good bit myself. Down there lies Lohberg or Egersberg. I can show you on the map. First, you walk down. When you reach the first buildings, it will release such a shiver of joy inside your tensed-up soul, for you will be saved, your escape complete and a success, nothing more can happen to you. I will be recognized as a political refugee and will be able to begin a new life. I will speak to the first wary farm boy I encounter. No, he won’t be afraid of me, for I mean him no harm and want nothing from him. He only needs to point the way ahead, the next best path toward Lam. There I will certainly be taken in, perhaps not happily, but I can talk with the people. In Lam there is also the last station of the little train that will take me out of the mountains.”

“So you want to leave? Just tell me somewhere in the world where you’d like to stay!”

“Stay? Here! I don’t mean exactly right here, not in sight of the border. But nearby. In a little forest cabin or a warden’s hut, in a forester’s house. There I’d like to stay, where I cannot be, where I cannot remain, where I do not belong. Can’t you see that, since I know I don’t belong, I can’t stay? I have to leave, and I’ll land somewhere — somewhere that hardly pleases me, or only a bit. There I’ll stay, because I can. Where that will be, a country that awaits me, I can’t say today, but that doesn’t matter. It just can’t be here — not here, not on either side of this border.”

I said it all calmly, yet Anna stood there listening carefully. But I wanted to move on and give Anna the chance to see that she might learn the peace that the path grants to the wanderer when he follows a stretch of woods through the mountains and doesn’t see a single soul on either side of him. Anna should see how the tree line grows ever shorter, how the soft lobes of the leaves shift ever lower, as before us in the distance a train crosses the valley flats and disappears, appearing again from its depths to climb abruptly, the spruces towering up around it, and the chug of the train gently swaying off to the left and up, seeming to disappear. There the forest wall rose up, mighty and tall, reaching for the dark-blue stretch of sky and touching it with its tall peaks. Carefully I urged Anna along, hardly saying a word. She needed to sense what enchanted me here, the green feel of an inevitable end that we could never escape, except to know that it is not an end but rather something soluble through which we could carefully stride without knowing what happened. This type of wandering suspended us in a silver rush, expectancy taking hold of us, it being good when the path is arduous, such that we have to pay attention to its peaks and valleys, the view of the endless open distances also requiring one to observe the near-at-hand, constantly thinking about the next step in order that it be made safely. In this way, we moved right along, neither too fast nor too slow, a wavelike, disjointed syncopation stepping into the glowing high afternoon.

I felt grateful, grateful was what I felt behind the woman striding ahead of me, who wanted to be united with a man again in order to seek a new life, though I was even more grateful for the undeserved moment of grace that this place had granted me in such pure fashion, such that in these enchanted hours I could rise above my plight. It was wonderful to be able to show Anna this forgiving secret place after such difficult days. For so long I had been denied the chance to share its freedom with another person, the border almost hidden and not traversable. It would have been good to say something, but speech seemed imponderable, and no one said anything, nor was I able to. Much as I was moved to say something from deep inside, nothing came out when I tried to put it into words. Everything remained clogged up inside, tightening upon itself, stagnating and unable to be shared with another. Yet here was a place that dissolved the source of comprehensible speech. The grave that first turned consciousness into something unsayable, confusing and burying it, had opened up before me again. I sensed that Anna followed suit and sensed something, herself blossoming in the distance of the mountains. Only children can speak correctly and be understood, I thought, and that’s why one loved them and feared them. We, however, Anna and I, were forced into childhood through the benediction of the border, its echoes reverberating through it.

Now the path wound back and forth more often, our goal for the day near, the mountain path rising ever higher, always steeper, sharper, more sparsely overgrown. Not many crests were as craggy as this within the mountain forest, such that the trees that crowned it were not as dense as the others. The first thing the hiker encountered was the hard, naked cliffs with their jagged thrusts. From the path that we had chosen they were the first things we could see, a wall that rose up above the forest wall. The steep path grew smaller, embedded among the rocks, the border not following along and remaining behind. Above the Kegelberg, it bent like a horn and shot its bare crags high above the neighboring land. And, farther down, the hiking lodge stands across the way — indeed, closer to the border.