Visitation

As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other.

—Marie in
Woyzeck,
by Georg Büchner

If I came to you,

O woods of my youth, could you

Promise me peace once again?

—Friedrich Hölderlin

When the house is finished, Death enters.

—Arabic proverb

APPROXIMATELY TWENTY-FOUR THOUSAND
years ago, a glacier advanced until it reached a large outcropping of rock that now is nothing more than a gentle hill above where the house stands. The enormous pressure exerted by the ice snapped and crushed the frozen trunks of the oaks, alders and pines that grew there, sections of rock broke away, splintered and were ground to bits, and lions, cheetahs and saber-toothed cats fled to more southerly climes. But the ice did not advance beyond this rocky crag. Gradually silence set in, and the ice began its labor, a labor of sleep. While over a period of millennia it stretched out or shifted its enormous cold body only a centimeter at a time, it gradually was polishing the rocky surface beneath until it was round and smooth. During warmer years, decades and centuries, the water on the surface of the block of ice melted a little, and in places where the sand beneath the ice was easy to wash away, the water slipped beneath the huge, heavy ice body. And so at the very spot where this rocky elevation had hindered the ice’s forward motion, the ice slid beneath itself in the form of water and thus began to retreat, flowing downhill. In colder years the ice was simply there, it lay where it was, a heavy weight. And where in warmer years it had carved channels in the ground as it melted, during the colder years, decades and centuries it pressed its ice into these channels with all its force to seal them up again.

When approximately eighteen thousand years ago the glacier’s tongues began to melt—soon followed, as the earth continued to grow warmer, by all its southernmost limbs—it left only a few deposits behind in the depths of their channels, islands of ice, orphaned ice; later they were called dead ice.

Cut off from the body it had once belonged to and trapped in these channels, this ice melted only much later. Approximately thirteen thousand years before the start of the Common Era, it turned back into water, seeped into the earth, evaporated in the air and then rained back down again, circulating in the form of water between heaven and earth. When it could not penetrate any deeper because the ground was already saturated, it collected on top of the blue clay and rose up, its surface cutting through the dark earth, and now it became visible again within its channel as a clear lake. The sand that the water itself had ground from the rock when it was still ice now slid into this lake and sank to the bottom, and so at several points underwater mountains were formed, while in other spots the water remained as deep as the channel itself had originally been. For a time this lake would hold up its mirror to the sky amid the Brandenburg hills, it would lie smooth between the oaks, alders and pines that were growing once more, and much later, after human beings appeared, it was given a name by them: Märkisches Meer, the Sea of the Mark Brandenburg; but one day it would vanish again, since, like every lake, it too was only temporary—like every hollow shape, this channel existed only to be filled in completely some day. Even in the Sahara there was water once. Only in modern times did something come about there that is described in the language of science as desertification.

NO ONE IN THE VILLAGE
knows where he comes from. Perhaps he was always here. He helps the farmers propagate their fruit trees in the spring, inoculating the wild stock with active buds around Midsummer’s Day and dormant ones when the sap rises for the second time, he grafts new scions onto the trees chosen for propagation using whip or cleft grafts depending on the thickness of the stock, he prepares the required mixture of wax, turpentine and resin, then bandages each wound with raffia or paper, everyone in the village knows that the trees propagated by him display the most regular crowns as they continue to grow. During the summer the farmers hire him as a reaper and to build the shocks. And when the time comes to drain the dark earth of the parcels of land along the lake, his advice is eagerly sought, for he knows how to weave green spruce twigs into braids and place them in the boreholes to the proper depth to draw out the water. He helps the villagers repair their harrows and plows, lends a hand cutting wood in the winter and then saws up the trunks. He himself owns no land, not even a patch of forest, he lives alone in an abandoned hunting lodge at the edge of the woods, he’s always lived there, everyone in the village knows him, and yet he is only ever referred to by both young people and old as The Gardener, as though he had no other name.

WHEN A WOMAN GETS
married, she must not sew her own dress. The dress may not even be made in the house where she lives. It must be sewn elsewhere, and during the sewing a needle must not be broken. The fabric for a wedding dress may not be ripped, it must be cut with scissors. If an error is made while the fabric is being cut, this piece of fabric may no longer be used, instead a new piece of the same material must be purchased. The shoes for the wedding may not be a gift from the bridegroom, the bride must purchase them herself, and she must do so using the pennies she has saved over the course of many months. The wedding may not take place during the hottest time of year, that is, the dog days of summer, nor may it be held during the inconstant month of April; the weeks in which the banns are published may not overlap with the week of martyrdom before Easter, and the wedding itself must take place on the night of a full moon or at least a waxing moon; the best month for a wedding is May. Several weeks before the date of the wedding, the banns are announced and a notice posted in the display case outside the church. The bride’s girlfriends twine flowers into garlands with which they encircle the display case. If the girl is popular in the village, there will be three or more garlands. One week before the wedding day, the slaughtering and baking begins, but the bride must not under any circumstances glimpse a fire flickering in the cook stove. The day before the wedding, the children of the village come in the afternoon and make a racket, they throw crockery in front of the gate of the house so that it breaks, but never glass, and are served cake by the bride’s mother. On the eve of the wedding, the adults bring their gifts, they recite poems and partake of the pre-wedding feast. On the eve of a wedding, the lamps may not flicker, that brings bad luck. The next morning the bride sweeps up the shards from before the gate and throws them into a pit the bridegroom has dug. After this, the bride is adorned by her friends for the wedding ceremony, she wears a myrtle wreath and veil. When the bride and groom come out of the house, two girls are holding up a garland of flowers that they lower so that the bride and groom can step over it. At once they must be driven to the church. The horses wear two ribbons on the outer edges of their bridles, red for love and green for hope. The whips display the same ribbons. The bridal carriage is adorned with a festoon of boxwood or sometimes juniper. The bridal carriage is the last in the procession, it follows the carriages of the guests and must not stop or turn around. The bridal procession must avoid, if at all possible, driving past a cemetery. The bride and groom must look straight ahead during the ride. If it rains, this is all right, but it must not snow during the ride. For every flake of snow / Another tale of woe. Further the bride must not drop her handkerchief at the altar or there will be many tears in the marriage. On the way home, the carriage of the bride and groom precedes all the others, it must travel quickly or else the marriage itself will not move forward as it should. When the bride and groom cross the threshold of the bride’s home, they must step over something made of iron, such as an axe or a horseshoe. During the wedding feast, the bride and groom sit in a corner, the bridal corner, which they must not leave. The chairs of the bride and groom are adorned with tendrils of ivy. After the meal, a boy sneaks under the table and pulls off one of the bride’s shoes, which is then auctioned off and in the end must be won at auction by the groom. The proceeds go to the women who cooked the meal. At twelve midnight, the bride’s veil is torn to pieces while songs are sung, and each guest receives a piece of the veil as a memento. After the wedding, the young couple moves into their new lodgings. Good friends have placed a little package containing bread, salt and a bit of money on the stove so that they will never be lacking sustenance and money. The package must remain lying there undisturbed for one year. The two words that are most important for a wedding are: may and must, and may, and must, and may, and must. The first task the young wife must perform in the new lodgings is fetching water.

The village mayor has four daughters: Grete, Hedwig, Emma and Klara. On Sundays, when he drives his daughters through the village in his carriage, he puts white stockings on the horses. The father of the mayor was mayor before him, and the father’s father was mayor, and the father of his father’s father and so on, all the way back to the year 1650. The king himself appointed as mayor the father of the father of the father of the mayor’s father, and this is why when the mayor drives through the village on Sundays in a carriage filled with daughters, he puts white stockings on the horses. Grete, Hedwig, Emma and Klara sit in the carriage that their father is driving himself, the horses going along at an easy trot, and when the earth is still damp, they don’t even get as far as the butcher shop before the horses’ white stockings are flecked with mud. Sunday after Sunday when services are finished the father drives his four daughters from Kirchweg, which runs beside the church, down to Hauptstrasse, which passes the butcher shop, the school and the brickyard, and after the brickyard he turns off the main road, taking a left on Uferweg, which runs along the shore, following it north all the way to the property halfway up the Schäferberg that everyone in the village refers to as Klara’s Wood because it is her inheritance. Here the girl’s father turns the carriage around, and while he is turning, the girls quickly jump down in summer to pick a few raspberries on the right-hand side of the road, but Wurrach, as the father of the four daughters is known in the village, cracks his whip as soon as he’s gotten the carriage turned around, just as he is in the habit of doing on workdays when he races through the village with his empty carriage, summoning his laborers and dairymaids to work, and as soon as the father, old Wurrach, has cracked his whip, the four sisters leap back to their seats in the carriage, and now they are on their way home again, past the brickyard, school and butcher shop to the other end of the village, down to the Klotthof farm that their father inherited from his father, and his father from his father before him, and his father from his father before him and so on and so forth, the Klotthof farm that the king gave Wurrach’s forebear as a fiefdom around 1650, along with several fields.

If a maiden wishes to know if she will marry soon, she must knock on the wall of the chicken coop during the night of New Year’s Eve. If the first creature to emerge is a hen, she’s out of luck, but if the rooster responds first, her wish will be granted. On New Year’s Eve she can force her future husband to appear to her. If the girl wishes to marry a boatman, she must sit down on a wheelbarrow, and the one she longs for will soon appear. To wed a mason, she must take a seat upon a chopping block. If she then takes up a mortar box and a mason’s trowel, he will soon arrive. If she wants a farmer, she must hold a scythe and a spade. The mother of a marriageable daughter is eager to lure suitors to her home. She can do so by intentionally allowing the cobwebs to remain hanging in the sitting room. If the cobwebs are destroyed, any suitor will be taken away.

The mother of the four girls died giving birth to Klara. The mayor has no son. There are smallholders and cottagers in the village, two cottiers and a few farmers, but only a single village mayor.

Grete does not marry, because the oldest son of the farmer Sandke with whom she was betrothed, the only one of the six Sandke sons who received agricultural training, because he was to inherit the Sandke farm, learned just before the wedding, both to his own astonishment and that of his father, that the landowner did not choose him to inherit the property. Because of this, the wedding is deferred, and after a brother-in-law of the landowner does in fact take over the farm the following September, Grete’s betrothed boards a steamer in Bremerhaven and for 280 marks journeys by way of Antwerp, Southampton, the Strait of Gibraltar, Genoa, Port Said, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, Aden, Colombo and Adelaide to Melbourne, Australia, where after six weeks at sea he arrives on November 16, 1892, with 8 marks to his name and a gold pocket watch that he pawns for 20 marks. From Melbourne he reports these things in a letter to his fiancée, and thereafter Grete never hears from him again, and the fields belonging to Sandke’s farm that border the Wurrach property are now lost forever to the mayor’s family.

Hedwig gets involved with a workman who threshes the grain on the Klotthof farm in the summer. When her father is informed of this by a neighbor, he bursts into the barn in the middle of the day, wrests the flail from the worker’s hand and drives him from the farm with the words: I’ll take my axe, I’ll strike you dead!, he chases after him as far as the edge of the woods, and everyone in the village hears his voice, which has become huge from years of giving orders, it’s gotten stretched out of shape and thus resembles the voice of a drunkard: I’ll take my axe, I’ll strike you dead! When he comes back to the farm, he locks Hedwig in the smokehouse up in the loft, where she loses her child, which at the time is not yet anything more than a little bloody clump.

Emma, the third oldest daughter of the mayor, would surely have made a good mayor herself if she’d been born a man. She assists her father at every turn, makes decisions in his absence about the villagers’ payments, hires farmhands and maids, oversees the felling of trees and the maintenance of fields and livestock. The question of Emma’s marrying someday has never been mentioned by anyone at all, neither in the family nor the village.

And now Klara, the mayor’s youngest daughter, stands to inherit the bit of woods on the hill called Schäferberg. The lower edge of the woods borders the lake, and its upper edge, the meadow with the raspberry vines that belongs to the estate; on the right it extends to the property line of Old Warnack’s land, and on the left borders the meadow of a smallholder who for years has been in conflict with Klara’s father over illegal pasturing, as Wurrach claims this meadow as his own. Given these circumstances, Klara’s Wood is seen by her father as an island that they cannot expect to combine with other properties through marriage.

When the fisherman comes ashore on her bank, Klara doesn’t know what to say. The fisher lad doesn’t say anything either, he just tosses her the rope, which she catches and ties around an alder tree. It’s just coincidental that she happens to be in her woods today. After Hedwig’s unfortunate incident, the father stopped taking his daughters for rides in the carriage. Today Klara is alone here and on foot, she picked raspberries up on the meadow and then made her way down the hill among the bushes and trees that belong to her: oaks, alders and pines, to see the water glittering, since from the Klotthof farm you can’t see the lake, even in winter when the trees have lost their leaves.

The unknown fisherman holds out his hand, and she helps him climb out of the rocking boat and then lets his hand go again. Only when he holds out his hand to her a second time does she understand that he wants her to lead him further. Halfway up the slope where the earth is no longer quite so dark and the grass is drier, there will surely be a place for her and the fisherman, whose hair is so wet that the water is dripping to his shoulders and running down his arms all the way to where his fingers are intertwined with hers. Only now, when she is looking for a good spot to sit down with him, does it strike her how many people there are all around her in this bit of woods, and everywhere there might be an attractive spot to rest, someone is already sitting or standing, some are reclining in the shade, asleep, others are having their evening meal, and yet others are leaning against a tree, smoking and blowing rings in the air. It’s no doubt because all these people are so quiet that she didn’t notice them before. In a sunny spot under the big oak tree the kind of grass she likes is growing, tall, dry grass, tuft after tuft of it, and when she kneels down there and draws the fisherman down beside her, the others finally begin to move, they put their sandwiches, apples and hard-boiled eggs back in their baskets, fold up their blankets and calmly rise to their feet, while the ones who are leaning against the tree trunks now toss their cigarettes on the ground and crush the stubs beneath the soles of their shoes. One at a time, all of them turn to walk back up the slope, leaving behind this place without addressing a single word or even a wave to Klara and her fisherman. The fisherman lays his head in the lap of the mayor’s youngest and as yet unmarried daughter, and she begins to dry his wet shock of hair with her skirt. On the far side of the oak tree directly behind her, two last silent visitors to this bit of woods whom she had overlooked now rise to their feet and leave as well.

Red is birth, / green is life, / white is death.

I know a little creaturely, / its features are quite mannerly. / Good manners has the creaturely./ It wears its bones atop its flesh.

In our cellar lies a man / who has a hundred petticoats on.

Something crosses the floor, / it doesn’t tip, it doesn’t tap.

Toss it up on the roof white / and it comes down yellow.

In our garden stands a white mare / whose tail reaches high into the air.

A queen was drinking tea. / Three hinds were swimming / across the lake. / What was the queen’s name?

I’m a poor soldier and must stand watch, / I have no legs but have to march, / I have no arms but have to fight / and tell all the people what is right.

Nothing but holes. / And still it holds.

At first the sisters don’t notice anything except that Klara is now sometimes particularly courteous when she wishes them good morning and inquires as to their well-being, as though they were strangers, or as though she hadn’t seen them in a long time. On other days she might look away when her sisters wish her good morning. The second thing that strikes her sisters as well as the people in the village is that Klara often leaves the farm with the bucket of scraps intended for the hogs instead of emptying it out in the sty. With the bucket in her hand, she walks through the village, passing the butcher shop and school, and after the brickyard turns left onto Uferweg. Old Warnack, whose grounds border Klara’s Wood on the right-hand side, reports to Wurrach that Klara always first empties her bucket there somewhere in the bushes and then sits down in the grass, leaning her back against the oak tree and propping her feet on the upside-down bucket, and talks with the air or else is simply silent. After her father forbids her to leave the farm, she begins to hide within the farm itself. She squats down behind the bushes and trees in the garden, or under boards that are leaning up against a wall somewhere, she also climbs into barrels and chests. Everywhere on the farm and on the property, the sisters and farmhands have to be prepared to come across Klara. She can often be heard wailing or arguing in some hiding place or other, but if you pull her out, she is always quiet and friendly. Once Grete opens the closet door to take out a broom, and Klara is standing there in the cramped space smiling at her calmly as though she had been waiting in the dark for her sister all the while. Another time she puts her hand into her bowl during lunch and in front of everyone smears the hot porridge all around her mouth as though she were intentionally resisting finding the entrance, but all this time she is smiling and appears content. For a moment everything is very still at the table of the village mayor. During this period there is scarcely a farmhand or maid willing to enter into the service of the powerful Wurrach, for it is no trivial matter to arm oneself against possible attack by someone who has veered from the world of appropriate behavior. Her sisters place all the sharp knives in a drawer with a lock, the farmhands lay their axes high up on top of the compartment built into the entry gate, which a woman cannot reach without a stepstool, and in Klara’s room her father removes the window latches and the inside door handle, during the night he himself locks the door from the outside. During the night, Klara, the last daughter of the village mayor, sometimes turns her chamber pot upside down and uses it as a drum.