H. Adler - The Journey

Thick and sticky is the ghost train that stands in the road. Locusts surround them that can’t be chased off. What good does it do to try to shoo away an irritated swarm? No good at all, and so be patient and wait for the locusts to disperse on their own. That can take forever, especially when the clocks refuse to tell the time and time no longer wants to exist. There is no order for the hour, everything has come to a stop, despite there being no cease-fire for the weapons that are thrown with increasing fury against the unknown in combat. And so you must wait, wait, until the locusts destroy themselves. Perhaps then time will exist once more and the town clock will once again have mercy and move its exhausted hand so that the hour will announce itself, and as it strikes will say with a clocklike voice, a quarter past, half past .

But when will the hour finish striking? No one knows, not even if time exists for you again, because no one has any insight into anything. In vain you strive to achieve real insights. But nowhere can you find them. Which is why The Leitenberg Daily has to form them for you. The printing presses no longer work, the gears are rusted, the rollers no longer turn, the ink is dried up, rows of type have been turned over by Mutsch the cat, the letters lost. The filthy paper is scratched to bits and stinks. The editor’s office is occupied by unknown animals that have nested there and armed themselves with brushes and scissors in order to let no one in. The publisher’s office has turned into an odious dump. Someone has forgotten to chase away the young lady who sits at the window where the classified ads are delivered, which is why she still sits in her chair, though she’s gone completely mad and says that she is following policy and is strictly authorized to accept only obituaries. The millimeter-high printed line that has been shrunk eight times costs an amount that has been raised eight times over as well. Every now and then the young lady shouts and demands the money needed for a new obituary, yet no one comes. Perhaps the cost is too high for those who remain behind, or the citizens are too proud amid their grief to announce it publicly. The Leitenbergers gnaw away at grief, perhaps because they don’t want grief to gnaw away at them, or rather, maybe it’s just because they have nothing left to eat. Mutsch the cat and her troupe have polished off everything.

Only the local reporter Balthazar Schwind still works. He is tireless. He is capable. He draws his pointed dagger and writes. He first came into his own at the start of current events. He rides a wobbly bike that traverses every impediment with ease and easily maneuvers with every ghost train and locust swarm. On the fly he reaches the middle of the market plaza. He quickly scrambles up the steps that lead to the gilded aura of Saint Rochus that crowns the column erected as a memorial to the plague. The reporter has already endured numerous battles, and his sharp eye and even sharper camera don’t miss a thing. Herr Schwind has survived the end of time, and for him it still exists, and he still records it as one of its new creators. Which is why Schwind will also survive this battle in which he will be the only one to lift himself out of the rubble that he will cling to and glorify for all of eternity. He lifts his convex lens toward the sins and photographs the downfall of time. Herr Schwind sits at the apex of the end of history and is happy. Any reporter would be happy to be there and be able to see it all happen. Something beats in the reporter’s breast, and that’s the heart that beats a quarter past, half past , though it never strikes the full hour.

Still the stony old witnesses stand by unharmed, left, right, not stuffed full with shrapnel, not eviscerated by a bomb. The holy cathedral, the town hall, the old guildhall with its green cupola, the baroque townhouses with their ornamental arches and attendant porticos. The reporter looks on at the disappearing order whose undisturbed framework waits and waits, revealing to him the town’s history, which he knows all too well. For him, who still has time, the past has also not disappeared. He doesn’t need the folios full of brittle documents, nor does he require the yellowed chronicles in which are depicted those years gone by when men and things still maintained a comprehensible relation and everything was joined one to another and augmented everything else. Schwind knows it all, yet in the face of imminent death it all threatens to disappear, even as a memory that cannot be preserved. No one will know how it all was born and passed on, because soon the stones placed one on another will no longer hold together, even though it won’t require a brutal conqueror to bring them down. The stones and bricks will separate from one another by themselves, and no mortar will hold them together, nothing remaining but rubble broken to bits and pulverized, and no one will be there who can save the town archives from Mutsch the cat.

Balthazar Schwind greets the antiquities across from him, lifting his right arm and smiling, and all the buildings send back earnest and cheery greetings in return, towers and tin roofs bow deeply and display a dazzling and glinting array of decorative lights. Today marks the celebration of the eight-hundredth anniversary of the founding and incorporation of the venerable town of Leitenberg. For this a special edition of The Leitenberg Daily should appear, but because of present circumstances it must be forsaken. There is not enough paper, as well as contributions, and the local reporter can’t do it all himself. In the end it becomes obvious that the town fathers and the citizens have at the last moment forgotten this memorable day. Schwind sat himself on his bike and set out to find people willing to talk. After a quick greeting he told them that he was from the daily paper in order to overcome the grim silence of the grown-ups and the timid fear of the little ones. Then he posed his questions.

“Excuse me, what do you think of the eight-hundredth anniversary? What do you think of the past, present, and future of Leitenberg?”

These questions were met with surprise, if not even disturbance. Mayor Viereckl needed to excuse himself for an important council session in which new emergency measures would be discussed, and therefore said:

“I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a loss for words. I have no idea how old the town is. I thought it was always just there and has hardly changed over the years. Similarly, I expect it to change slowly in the future, our best hope being for an end to the war, which the clear and imminent emergency measures will bring about, making even more certain the victory that we already anticipate today.”

After this forthright explanation, which Viereckl had barely comprehended on the margins of his own understanding, he collapsed into himself and wearily fended off the earnest and somewhat confused reporter with skillful parries by dropping useful bits of news, out of which Herr Schwind could only extract the words emergency decree , after which the intrepid newspaperman undertook a further investigation and climbed some steps to land at the office of the town’s archivist. The archivist greeted him with a friendly face and responded to the reporter’s every wish.

“You know your way around the archive much better than I do, because I hardly ever bother with the past these days, mainly because of the way the present presses at us. You know how I am ready to help you with any information at my disposal, though you must understand that you’ll need to find what you need for your article by yourself among the old papers. Right now I have no assistants. Because of this I also need to ask that, should you pull out a file full of documents, make sure to dust it off yourself, and after you’re done, place it back in the same spot in order that things here don’t descend into total chaos.”