Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Yes: every step I took, whether toward vile death or in my longing for the happiness afforded by vileness, carried me to this forest.

It was not a dense forest, but when finding one of its trails and letting it take you randomly among the trees, you quickly realized why popular lore referred to this woods as a wilderness; no one ever came here to mark the trees with white chalk or chop them down, clean them carefully of their branches and cart them away; nobody gathered brushwood here, picked wild berries or mushrooms at the edge of its snail-inhabited clearings; it seemed as if for ages, for unconscionably long ages, nothing had happened to or in these woods except what we might call the natural history of flora and fauna, which of course is no small thing: trees come into leaf, mature, live, and, after slowly passing centuries, die away; under their foliage, germinating, sprouting, and growing at the mercy of sunbeams the leafy boughs let through, there is an undergrowth of shrubs, bushes, ferns, creepers, runners, and climbers, grass, nettles, a thousand different weeds, garishly colorful and sickly transparent flowers, all taking their turn according to the changing seasons, until the thickening foliage completely deprives them of light and they perish, yielding their places to moss, lichen, and fungi that prefer cool dimness and, thriving on decay, sustain the life of the ground's spongy surface; there is silence here, and the silence is also ancient, and thick, because undisturbed by the wind; the air is so redolent that within a few minutes you'd be overcome with a feeling rather like a pleasantly soothing swoon; and it is always warmer here than out in the real world, a hazy warmth that makes one's skin moist and slick, like the body of a snail; the trails here are not real paths, trod and beaten down by human steps, but the life of the forest shapes these passages, whimsically, gracefully, unpredictably, as gaps in the continuous story of the ground's surface, pauses that only our resolute human intelligence would dare name, for it has learned to disregard other, perhaps much more important occurrences, and is accustomed simply to cut through the thick of things and, in its own doltish way, make use of nature's silence.

You'd find here gullies in which pebbles and stones roll and clink together; stretches of level ground where driving rains have spread crumbled clumps of dirt; long runners of soft moss, or patches where the layers of fallen leaves are so thick that their decaying mass cloys even the wild mushrooms; you could walk here, though not quite unimpeded, because the natural passageway may unexpectedly be blocked by a bush rising out of a warm spot in a pool of sunlight, or by a thick trunk of a fallen tree, or a huge, pointed, smooth lava rock, ingeniously called a "findling," conjuring in our imagination something between a found object and a foundling; according to local legend, giants of the northern seas strewed these rocks about the flat coastland where, after the battles had subsided, these peaceful forests arose.

Deep-green dimness.

Occasional scraping sounds, a thud, a crack.

One cannot tell how time passes here, but so long as you can hear the twigs snapping under your feet and you feel that it's your silence that is being disturbed by each snap, that means you're not quite here yet.

So long as you wish to get somewhere, to a place that is yours — though you don't know what that place is like — so long as you refuse to be led by the paths opening up before you, you are not quite here yet.

Behind the loose curtain of the thicket a tree seems to move, as if someone who'd been standing behind it now stirred, just as you keep stirring from behind something and then being covered again by the thicket.

Until it all looks beautiful to you.

Everyone can see you — anyone, to be more precise — and yet you are still covered; no, I couldn't succeed in describing the forest; I would have liked to have talked about the feel of the forest.

So long as you carry with you the turns and bends, forks and obstacles of the trails you've left behind, you can find your way back to where you started from, and in your fear you look at the plants as you would at human faces, taking them as signposts, assigning them shape, character, and histories of their own, hoping that in return for that they'd lead you back — so long as you do that, you are not quite here yet.

And you are not quite here yet even when you realize you are not alone with them.

I would have liked to have talked about the creatures of the forest as Köhler did of his snails; I would have borrowed his style.

When you are no longer aware of yourself or, more precisely, when you know time has passed but not how much or how little, and you don't really care..

And you stand there without knowing you are standing; you look at something but don't know what; and for some reason your arms are spread as if you were yourself a tree.

No, this story could never have been written successfully.

For you can feel what the tree in all probability cannot feel.

And you have heard all the rustling and scraping sounds but did not realize you were hearing them.

When you know that you are here, but not when you got here, because you have lost all the clues.

But so long as you keep listening for and trying to remember lost clues, you are not quite here yet, because you believe you are being watched.

And then it flits by, between two trees, and quickly vanishes, a flash of blue in a field of green.

You start off, unaware of having started off, but you cannot find it.

So long as you make a distinction between trees and colors, so long as you look to the names of things for guidance, you are still not quite here.

So long as you think you only imagined seeing the flitting creature as a blue flash in a field of green, and you follow it, cautiously, and no longer care about the path, about branches slapping you in the face, you don't hear the crunch of your footsteps, don't notice you've fallen, you get up and run after it, nettles sting you, thorns prick and scratch you, but all you want is to catch it, yes, the one that keeps disappearing but always reappears, to make sure you see it, though it occurs to you that you shouldn't yield to the temptation.

So long as you still want to make a decision, so long as you are thinking about it, you won't be able to catch anything; they'll keep eluding you, they can smell your sour odor from afar.

Now it's there, standing in a small depression, and if you don't move, then, among the silently stirring leaves, you can make out its eyes as they flash into yours, though this is no longer the same being but another, maybe a third one, someone, anyone, because you let time pass in the mutual gleam of your eyes while you notice that the creature is naked, and so are you.

So long as you wish to reach its nakedness and bend the branches to have a better look, so long as you want its nakedness to touch yours and thus make it your own, and for this purpose you are ready to move from your spot even though you have found the creature you've been after, then you are still not quite here.

It's gone.

And so long as you keep searching for them, yes, the ones you managed to alarm with your clumsiness and sour smell, so long as you hope to meet them again and all the while keep grumbling that you should have been more clever and more cautious, you are still not quite here, and nobody will be able to reach you.

But chance comes to your rescue, because you have come far enough inside to be a little bit here.

You turn around, and what you had seen in front of you before is now behind you; on the soft green mossy stream bank, the creature is lolling on its stomach; you let your eyes run over its back, rise on the curve of its round buttocks, and then roll down on its shapely legs; it nestles its head in its arms, looking out from there, and this gives you such joy that not only your mouth breaks into a grin but even your toes begin to smile and your knees laugh; and by then you don't feel like moving, because you've found your place here: that laugh is your place on this earth; and then you notice that the eyes are not looking into yours, that there is a third creature in the picture, there in that small depression in the ground, the one you thought had vanished completely, and they are looking at each other; they are the ones, you think to yourself, who could teach you what you need to know.