Sasa Stanisic - Before the Feast

The seasons are hesitant; if snow didn’t lie where it falls now and then, you would think it was always cold spring weather in the fallow field. All the flowers are colorless, you don’t notice them. No bumble bee fancies a flower like that. Bramble shoots like hair, the blackberries too black, too dry. Holes in the ground all over the place, with nothing and everything living in them. Stones like scars, grasses like swords. And anything that doesn’t have thorns and can’t defend itself won’t live to see the end of the day.

A solitary oak tree stands in the middle of the field, roughly speaking. Not necessarily the prototype of solitary oak trees standing, roughly speaking, in the middle of fields. In spite of its situation and plenty of light it is pale, its leaves are sparse, its dry trunk stands at a crooked angle, stuck between the field’s teeth.

Anna’s lower jaw quivers as she jumps up and down on the spot a few times. She reaches cautiously over the fence, tries to break off a sprig of wild rose. The wild rose defends itself vigorously. Anna tugs at it, pulls. The field fights back. Only in mankind does Nature open its eyes and look at itself. The field is mankind in thorns’ clothing, you can’t believe a word it says.

Anna starts her timer and begins running.

Anna has known the field a long time. We’ve known it longer.

. . there was so early and persistent a Frost in Fürstenfelde that all Nature froze, and the Harvest fail’d, and the People were sore anhungered, likewise was there a strange Phenomenon, in that one Day in the Depths of Winter, Apples were seen to lie in great Number under the Oak Tree . .

Suppose the oak tree were a sight worth seeing? Suppose tourists came to gawp? A bus full of little black-haired men in little beige jackets. They get into position in front of the fence. Someone takes a photo. He crouches down so that the others will look taller. He makes a speech. Anna doesn’t understand a word of it. Anna knows he is telling nothing but the truth.

No tourists come. Young men come on the way back from White’s in Woldegk, early in the morning they leave a drunk to sleep it off, comatose under the oak tree, while they drive on, it’s kind of a tradition of ours.

Anna is breathing with difficulty. She slows down.

The field has killed. It wants to show Anna what.

Anna doesn’t want to know.

EVIDENCE OF THE FINDING OF TWO UNUSUAL SETS of antlers at localities near Fürstenfelde in the Uckermark, first mentioned in letters from Count Poppo von Blankenburg to Herr Bruno Bredenkamp on 17th and 19th March 1849 .

The skull and horns of the first set of antlers were found in the sand at the bottom of the Great Lake. Dissatisfied with the catch brought in by his fishermen, the Count had been about to lend a hand himself, to show those idle fellows how to do it. His net was caught in the tines of the antlers, whereupon he pulled hard and, not without difficulty, brought the antlers up on land in all their considerable glory. On investigating the antlers, the noble Count scratched himself on a sharp edge of the right-hand horn, and the scratch bled, staining Herr von Blankenburg’s linen shirt, not a little to his annoyance.

The Count could not explain the find to himself. Back at his hunting lodge, he wrote to his friend, saying: antlers of that kind are not native to this place! He knew that, he added, as a huntsman himself. He therefore thought, he wrote, that this set of antlers must be a very ancient specimen, thousands of years old, dating from the time of the dense forests and the Great Moor, when bears, crocodiles and God only knows what other creatures still roamed the Mark of Brandenburg. He was now wondering, he added, whether those antlers might not make him a few thalers; they were strangely well preserved. He would happily keep them for himself, but Lisbeth did not like to have dead eyes staring at her.

In his second letter, Herr von Blankenburg describes, with considerable excitement, as his handwriting and choice of words bear witness, the second extraordinary find. He was employing several despondent and useless day laborers to grub up the vegetation in the fallow field run wild on Geher’s Farm, when one of them came upon a remarkably large bone in the ground. That was no bone, the Count realized, but another piece of horn lying there pale in the earth, like something from another world. The laborers, superstitious riff-raff that they were, refused to touch the horn. So the Count undertook the work of salvaging it himself, and a good deal of trouble it gave him, since the earlier injury to his hand had swollen and was very painful. With much difficulty he brought to the light of day the second set of antlers, which was even larger and finer than the first. He wrote to his friend that he would not have liked to encounter a living stag crowned with such antlers had he been unprepared for it.

Four days after making this second find, Poppo von Blankenburg died of the consequences of gangrene in the ball of his hand. His widow had the antlers, which she described as horns of the Devil, removed from the house immediately, and Herr Bruno Bredenkamp accepted the charge of them in Dresden on 2 May 1849, and later generously bequeathed them to us.

FRAU KRANZ HAS FOUND THE RIGHT COLOR FOR everything that grows, stands and dies here. Classics are the church, the old town wall, the ferry boathouse and the lakes. Painted from every imaginable viewpoint. And there are gradations of what Fontane described as the “waste of green” in the Brandenburg Mark, for Nature as a whole is green: meadows, gardens, cultivated fields growing everything from poppies to sugar beet, all sorted by shades of color. Last of all the Kiecker, the ancient forest.

Everyone in the village who is old enough to know names at all knows the name of Frau Kranz. She’s already painted so many of them and so much of them. People and buildings in Fürstenfelde, natural scenery near Fürstenfelde, human beings and houses and machinery in Fürstenfelde, in Nature and in time. And she portrays the passing of time: East German industry and today’s industrial ruins in Brandenburg. East German agriculture and today’s Brandenburg windmills. Unchanging: East German avenues with an East German road surface. Cobblestones and paving stones that make every picture look as if it dates from the nineteenth century.

Frau Kranz has opened more and more doors for the journalist, doors with more and more canvases behind them. On the second floor — or was it the seventh? — a room full of faces. The journalist stands in the doorway and stays put; eyes examine him affectionately, enquiringly, sadly; he sees wrinkles, lips, temples, throats; shirt collars, scars. The only possible question to ask is, “Who?” The journalist opens a window.

“Have you,” he asks, “painted me too?” He really doesn’t seem to be sure.

“Come along, come along,” says Frau Kranz.

None of these portraits are of people sitting for their portrait. They are all busy doing something. Working in the fields, working at handicrafts, working on the black market. Bathing, ironing, visiting Grandpa in the old folks’ home.

The one and only neo-Nazi painted by Frau Kranz is asleep. That’s the trick of it. In spite of his bald patch, an outsider wouldn’t immediately assume that this was a Nazi. But he is. You can read it on the back: Neo-Nazi Asleep is the title of the picture. The people of Fürstenfelde would know it was a neo-Nazi asleep anyway, because it’s a picture of Rico. We have one and a half Nazis here: Rico and his girlfriend Luise. Luise is a half-Nazi because she goes along with all that shit only for love of Rico.

“I never stopped to think what it looks like when neo-Nazis fall asleep,” says the journalist, stroking the air above Rico’s cheek.