The Rings of Saturn

7. Dunwich heath — Marsh Acres, Middleton — A Berlin childhood — Exile in England — Dreams, elective affinities, correspondences — Two strange stories — Through the rainforest

It had grown uncommonly sultry and dark when at midday, after resting on the beach, I climbed to Dunwich Heath, which lies forlorn above the sea. The history of how that melancholy region came to be is closely connected not only with the nature of the soil and the influence of a maritime climate but also, far more decisively, with the steady and advancing destruction, over a period of many centuries and indeed millennia, of the dense forests that extended over the entire British Isles after the last Ice Age. In Norfolk and Suffolk, it was chiefly oaks and elms that grew on the flatlands, spreading in unbroken waves across the gently undulating country right down to the coast. This phase of evolution was halted when the first settlers burnt off the forests along those drier stretches of the eastern coast where the light soil could be tilled. Just as the woods had once colonized the earth in irregular patterns, gradually growing together, so ever more extensive fields of ash and cinders now ate their way into that green-leafed world in a similarly haphazard fashion. If today one flies over the Amazon basin or over Borneo and sees the mountainous palls of smoking, hanging, seemingly motionless, over the forest canopy, which from above resembles a mere patch of moss, then perhaps one can imagine what those fires, which sometimes burned on for months, would leave in their wake. Whatever was spared by the flames in prehistoric Europe was later felled for construction and shipbuilding, and to make the charcoal which the smelting of iron required in vast quantities. By the seventeenth century, only a few insignificant remnants of the erstwhile forests survived in the islands, most of them untended and decaying. The great fires were now lit on the other side of the ocean. It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish-hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away. For the time being, our cities still shine through the night, and the fires still spread. In Italy, France and Spain, in Hungary, Poland and Lithuania, in Canada and California, summer fires consume whole forests, not to mention the great conflagration in the tropics that is never extinguished. A few years ago, on a Greek island that was wooded as recently as 1900, I observed the speed with which a blaze runs through dry vegetation. A short distance from the harbour town where I was staying, I stood by the roadside with a group of agitated men, the blackness behind us and before us, far below at the bottom of a gorge, the fire, whipped up by the wind, racing, leaping, and already climbing the steep slopes. And I shall never forget the junipers, dark against the glow, going up in flames one after the other as if they were tinder the moment the first tongues of fire licked at them, with a dull thudding sound like an explosion, and then promptly collapsing in a silent shower of sparks.

My way from Dunwich took me at first by the ruins of the Grey Friars' monastery, through a number of fields, and then to an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches and rampant gorse grew so densely that the going was very hard. I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a sudden the heath opened out in front of me. Shading from pale lilac to deepest purple, it stretched away westward, with a white track curving gently through its midst. Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed to me, in some distant past. Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image. Moreover, my sense of confusion was deepened by the fact that the signposts at the forks and crossings of the tracks gave no directions to any place or its distance; there was invariably, to my mounting irritation, no more than a mute arrow facing pointlessly this way or that. If one obeyed one's instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach. Simply walking straight ahead cross-country was out of the question on account of the heather, which was woody and knee-deep, so that I had no choice but to keep to the crooked sandy tracks and to make mental notes of even the least significant features, even the slightest shift in perspective. Several times I was forced to retrace long stretches in that bewildering terrain, which could perhaps be surveyed in its entirety only from the glass tower of that spectral Belgian villa. In the end I was overcome by a feeling of panic. The low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing about me — all this became oppressive and unnerving. I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind, or how I found a way out. But I do remember that suddenly I stood on a country lane, beneath a mighty oak, and the horizon was spinning all around as if I had jumped off a merry-go-round. Months after this experience, which I still cannot explain, I was on Dunwich Heath once more in a dream, walking the endlessly winding paths again, and again I could not find my way out of the maze which I was convinced had been created solely for me. Dead tired and ready to lie down anywhere, as dusk fell I gained a raised area where a little Chinese pavilion had been built, as in the middle of the yew maze at Somerleyton. And when I looked down from this vantage point I saw the labyrinth, the light sandy ground, the sharply delineated contours of hedges taller than a man and almost pitch-black now — a pattern simple in comparison with the tortuous trail I had behind me, but one which I knew in my dream, with absolute certainty, represented a cross-section of my brain.

Beyond the maze, shadows were drifting across the brume of the heath, and then, one by one, the stars came out from the depths of space. Night, the astonishing, the stranger to all that is human, over the mountain-tops mournful and gleaming draws on. It was as though I stood at the topmost point of the earth, where the glittering winter sky is forever unchanging; as though the heath were rigid with frost, and adders, vipers and lizards of transparent ice lay slumbering in their hollows in the sand. From my resting place in the pavilion I gazed out across the heath into the night. And I saw that, to the south, entire headlands had broken off the coast and sunk beneath the waves. The Belgian villa was already teetering over the precipice, while in the cockpit of the lookout tower a corpulent figure in captain's uniform was busying himself at a battery of searchlights, the beams of which, probing the darkness, reminded me of the War. Although in my dreams I was sitting transfixed with amazement in the Chinese pavilion, I was at the same time out in the open, within a foot of the very edge, and knew how fearful it is to cast one's eye so low. The crows and choughs that winted the midway air were scarce the size of beetles; the fishermen that walked upon the beach appeared like mice; and the murmuring surge that chafed the countless pebbles could not be heard so high. Immediately below the cliff, on a black heap of earth, were the shattered ruins of a house. Wedged in among the remains of walls, broken chests of drawers, banisters, upended bathtubs and buckled heating pipes were the strangely contorted bodies of those people who had lived there and who, only moments before, had gone to sleep in their beds. A little way off from this scene of devastation, a solitary old man with a wild mane of hair was kneeling beside his dead daughter, both of them so tiny, as if on a stage a mile off. No last sigh, no last words were to be heard, nor the last despairing plea: Lend me a looking-glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why, then she lives. No, nothing. Nothing but dead silence. Then softly, barely audibly, the sound of a funeral march. Now night is almost over and the dawn about to break. The contours of the Sizewell power plant, its Magnox block a glowering mausoleum, begin to loom upon an island far out in the pallid waters where one believes the Dogger Bank to be, where once the shoals of herring spawned and earlier still, a long, long time ago, the delta of the Rhine flowed out into the sea and where green forests grew from silting sands.

Some two hours after my fortuitous release from the labyrinth of the heath, I reached the village of Middleton, where I planned to visit the writer Michael Hamburger, who has lived there for almost twenty years. It was nearly four o'clock. Neither in the village street nor in the gardens was there a soul in sight, the houses gave an unwelcoming impression, and, with my hat in my hand and my rucksack over my shoulder, I felt like a journeyman in a century gone by, so out of place that I should not have been surprised if a band of street urchins had come skipping after me or one of Middleton's householders had stepped out upon his threshold to tell me to be on my way. After all, every foot traveller incurs the suspicion of the locals, especially nowadays, and particularly if he does not fit the image of a local rambler. Perhaps that was why the blue-eyed girl in the village shop gave me such a flabbergasted stare. The jingle of the door bell had long since faded, and I had been standing for a while in the little grocer's shop, which was piled to the ceiling with tinned foods and other imperishables, when she emerged from a back room, where the light of a television flickered, to gape at me with her mouth half open, as if I had landed from another planet. Once she had recovered somewhat, she scrutinized me with a disapproving air, her eye fixing at length on my dusty footwear, and when I wished her a good afternoon she again stared at me, utterly stunned. it has often struck me that when country people set eyes on a foreigner they are quite overawed, and, even if he has a good command of their language, they find it hard to understand him. The girl in Middleton village shop was no exception, and merely shook her head nervously when I asked for mineral water. What she at length sold me was an ice-cold can of Cherry Coke, which I drained at a draught like a cup of hemlock, leaning against the churchyard wall, before walking the last few hundred yards to Michael's house.

Michael was nine and a half when, in November 1933, with his siblings, his mother, and her parents, he came to England. His father had already left Berlin several months before, and was installed in one of those unheatable stone houses in Edinburgh, where, wrapped in woollen blankets, he pored over dictionaries and textbooks until late at night; for, despite having been professor of paediatrics at the Charité, he now, in his fifties, had to sit his medical examinations all over again in a language unfamiliar to him if he was to continue in practice as a doctor. Michael later wrote in his memoirs about the fears and anxieties of the family as they travelled toward the unknown, fears which came to a head in the customs hall in Dover as they looked on with horro as Grandfather's pair of budgerigars, which had so far survived the journey unharmed, were impounded. It was the loss of the two pet birds, Michael writes, and having to stand by powerless and see them vanish for ever behind some sort of screen, that brought us up against the whole monstrosity of changing countries under such inauspicious circumstances. The disappearance of those budgerigars at Dover customs marked the beginning of the disappearance of his Berlin childhood behind the new identity that he assumed little by little over the next decade. How little there has remained in me of my native country, the chronicler observes as he scans the few memories he still possesses, barely enough for an obituary of a lost boyhood. The mane of a Prussian lion, a Prussian nanny, caryatids bearing the globe on their shoulders, the mysterious sounds of traffic and motor horns rising from Lietzenburgerstraße to the apartment, the noise made by the central-heating pipe behind the wallpaper in the dark corner where one had to stand facing the wall by way of punishment, the nauseating smell of soapsuds in the laundry, a game of marbles in a Charlottenburg park, barley malt coffee, sugar-beet syrup, codliver oil, and the forbidden raspberry sweets from Grandmother Antonina's silver bonbonniere — were these not all merely phantasms, delusions, that had dissolved into thin air? The leather seats in grandfather's Buick, Hasensprung tramstop in the Grunewald, the Baltic coast, Heringsdorf, a sand dune surrounded by pure nothingness, the sunlight and how it fell. . Whenever a shift in our spiritual life occurs and fragments such as this surface, we believe we can remember. But in reality, of course, memory fails us. Too many buildings have fallen down, too much rubble has been heaped up, the moraines and deposits are insuperable. If I now look back to Berlin, writes Michael, all I see is a darkened background with a grey smudge in it, a slate pencil drawing, some unclear numbers and letters in a gothic script, blurred and half wiped away with a damp rag. Perhaps this blind spot is also a vestigial image of the ruins through which I wandered in 1947 when I returned to my native city for the first time to search for traces of the life I had lost. For a few days I went about like a sleepwalker, past houses of which only the façades were left standing, smoke-blackened brick walls and fields of rubble along the never-ending streets of Charlottenburg, until one afternoon I unexpectedly found myself in front of the Lietzenburgerstraße building where we had lived and which had escaped destruction — absurdly, as it seemed to me. I can still feel the cold breath of air that brushed my brow as I entered the hallway, and I recall that the cast-iron balustrade on the stairs, the stucco garlands on the walls, the spot where the perambulator had been parked, and the largely unchanged names on the metal letter boxes, appeared to me like pictures in a rebus that I simply had to puzzle out correctly in order to cancel the monstrous events that had happened since we emigrated. It was as if it were now up to me alone, as if by some trifling mental exertion I could reverse the entire course of history, as if — if I desired it only — Grandmother Antonina, who had refused to go with us to England, would still be living in Kantstraße as before; she would not have gone on that journey, of which we had been informed by a Red Cross postcard shortly after the so-called outbreak of War, but would still be concerned about the wellbeing of her goldfish, which she washed under the kitchen tap every day and placed on the window ledge when the weather was fine, for a little fresh air. All that was required was a moment of concentration, piecing together the syllables of the word concealed in the riddle, and everything would again be as it once was. But I could neither make out the word nor bring myself to mount the stairs and ring the bell of our old flat. Instead I left the building with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and walked and walked, aimlessly and without being able to grasp even the simplest thought, well past the Westkreuz or the Hallesches Tor or the Tiergarten, I can no longer say where; all I know is that at length I came upon a cleared site where the bricks retrieved from the ruins had been stacked in long, precise rows, ten by ten by ten, a thousand to every stacked cube, or rather nine hundred and ninety-nine, since the thousandth brick in every pile was stood upright on top, be it as a token of expiation or to facilitate the counting. If I now think back to that desolate place, I do not see a single human being, only bricks, millions of bricks, a rigorously perfected system of bricks reaching in serried ranks as far as the horizon, and above them the Berlin November sky from which presently the snow would come swirling down — a deathly silent image of the onset of winter, which I sometimes suspect may have originated in a hallucination, especially when I imagine that out of that endless emptiness I can hear the closing bars of the Freischütz overture, and then, without cease, for days and weeks, the scratching of a gramophone needle. My hallucinations and dreams, Michael writes elsewhere, often taken place in a setting reminiscent partly of the metropolis of Berlin and partly of rural Suffolk. For instance, I may be standing at a window on the upper floor of our house, but what I see is not the familiar marshes and the willows thrashing as they always do, but rather, from several hundred yards up, acres and acres of allotment gardens bisected by a road, straight as an arrow, down which black taxi cabs speed out of the city in the direction of the Wannsee. Or I am returning at dusk from a long journey. With my rucksack over my shoulder, I walk the last stretch towards our house, in front of which, for some unknown reason, a motley assortment of vehicles is parked, immense limousines, motorized wheelchairs with enormous hand brakes and bulbous horns at the side, and an ominous ivory-coloured ambulance with two deaconesses sitting in it. Under their watchful eyes I hesitantly cross the threshold, and as I do so I no longer know where I am. The rooms are dimly lit, the walls are bare, the furniture is gone. All manner of silver utensils lie on the parquet floor, heavy, ornate knives, spoons and forks as well as fish cutlery for countless people, to dine on a leviathan. Two men in grey linen coats are taking down a tapestry. Crates of china are brimming with wood shavings. In my dream more than an hour goes by before I am able to grasp that I am not in the Middleton house but in the rambling Bleibtreustraße flat where my mother's parents lived, the museum-like rooms of which impressed me very nearly as much, on my childhood visits, as the splendid suites in the palace of Sanssouci. And now they are all gathered here, my Berlin relatives, my German and my English friends, my in-laws, my children, the living and the dead. Unseen by them, I walk through their midst, from one room to another, through galleries, halls and passages thronged with guests until, at the far end of an imperceptibly sloping corridor, I come to the unheated drawing room that used to be known, in our house in Edinburgh, as the Cold Glory. There my father sits, on a stool that is far too low, practising the cello, while Grandmother is lying on a high table, dressed in her best. The gleaming tips of her patent-leather shoes point towards the ceiling, she has spread a grey silk handkerchief over her face, and for days, as always during her regularly recurring bouts of melancholy, she has not uttered a single word. From thd window, far off, I see a Silesian landscape. A golden cupola glints from the depth of a valley enclosed by blue forested hills. This is Myslowitz, a place somewhere in Poland, I hear my father say, and as I turn I see the white vapour that had carried his words lingering in the ice-cold air.

The afternoon was well advanced when I reached Michael's house in the meadows on the outskirts of Middleton. I was grateful of the opportunity to rest in the peaceful garden after my wanderings on the heat, which now, in the telling, assumed an air of unreality. Michael had brought out a pot of tea from which there came the occasional puff of steam as from a toy engine. Otherwise, there was not the slightest movement, not even among the grey leaves of the willows in the field beyond the garden. We talked about the deserted, soundless month of August. For weeks, said Michael, there is not a bird to seen. It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brain to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life. Does one follow in Hölderlin's footsteps, simply because one's birthday happened to fall two days after his? Is that why one is tempted time and again to cast reason aside like an old coat, to sign one's poems and letters "your humble servant Scardanelli", and to keep unwelcome guests who come to stare at one at arm's length by addressing them as Your Excellency or Majesty? Does one begin to translate elegies at the age of fifteen or sixteen because one has been exiled from one's homeland? Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin's birth? For when I heard that one of the near islands was Patmos, I greatly desired there to be lodged, and there to approach the dark grotto. And did Hölderlin not dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor? The fact that I first passed through British customs thirty-three years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol — none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its northfacing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked of the difficulty of

heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacle cases, my letters and my writing materials. In the porch that led to the garden, I felt again as if I or someone akin to me had long gone about his business there. The wicker baskets full of small twigs for kindling the fire, the polished white and pale grey stones, shells and other seashore finds mutely foregathered on the chest of drawers against the pale blue wall, the jiffy bags and packages stacked in a corner by the pantry door awaiting reuse, all seemed as if they were still-lifes created by my own hand. Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye

was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light much as the golden apples likened in Proverbs to a word fitly spoken, the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things, the kindling, the jiffy bags, the fruit preserves, the seashells and the sound of the sea within them had all outlasted me, and that Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time ago. But thoughts of this kind are dispelled as speedily as they appear. At all events, I did not pursue them in the years that have passed since then, perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one's sanity. In view of this, I was all the more astonished, when recently I read Michael's memoirs again, to come across a name familiar to me from my time in Manchester, that of Stanley Kerry, which on first reading had eluded me for some reason. Michael relates at this point in his account how, in April 1944, nine months after he joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, he was transferred from Maidstone to Blackburn, Lancashire, where his battalion was quartered in a disused cotton mill. Not long after he arrived in Blackburn he was invited by a fellow soldier to spend Easter Monday at his home in Burnley, a town whose black cobbled streets, derelict factories, and zigzag rooftops of back-to-back houses outlined against the sky like dragons' teeth, made a more forlorn impression on him than anything he had so far seen in England. Curiously enough, twenty-two years later, when in the autumn of 1966 I came from Switzerland to England, my first outing, on All Souls' Day, together with a prospective secondary school teacher, was also to Burnley, or rather to the moors above Burnley. I can see us still, driving back down from the moor in the teacher's little red van, via Burnley and Blackburn to Manchester, as dusk was falling at about four in the afternoon. And not only did my first excursion from Manchester take me to Burnley, where Michael had been in 1944, but, moreover, the very Stanley Kerry with whom Michael made his trip was one of my first acquaintances in Manchester also. At the time when I took up my teaching post at Manchester university, Stanley Kerry must have been one of the longest-serving lecturers in the German department. He had something of a reputation for eccentricity, owing to his habit of keeping a distance from his colleagues and devoting most of his spare time to the study of the Japanese language. In this he was making astounding progress. When I arrived in Manchester, he had already begun practising his writing skills with brush and pen and would spend many hours in deep concentration drawing one character after another on immense sheets of paper. I recall now how he once said to me that one of the chief difficulties of writing consisted in thinking, with the tip of the pen, solely of the word to be written, whilst banishing from one's mind the reality of what one intends to describe. I remember also that when he made this observation, which applies to poets as well as to pupils in primary school, we were standing in the Japanese garden he had created at the back of his bungalow in Wythenshaw. Evening was drawing in. The banks of moss and the stones were beginning to grow darker, but in the last rays of the sunlight that fell through the leaves of the acers I could still see the lines left by a rake in the fine pebbles at our feet. Stanley, as always, was wearing a somewhat crumpled grey suit and brown suede shoes, and, as always when we talked to each other, he inclined as far as he could toward me with his whole body, not only in order to show his interest but also out of a punctilious courtesy. The leaning posture which he adopted recalled that of a man walking into the wind, or a ski jumper who has launched himself into the air. Talking to Stanley, one not uncommonly had the feeling that he came gliding down from on high. When he was listening, he would tilt his head to one side, smiling blissfully, but when he himself was speaking it was as though he were desperately struggling for breath. Often his face would contort into a grimace, the effort bringing beads of perspiration to his brow, and the words came from him in a spasmodic, precipitate manner that betrayed severe inner turmoil and presaged, even then, that all too soon his heart would cease to beat. When I now think back to Stanley kerry, it seems incomprehensible that the paths of Michael's life and mine should have intersected in the person of that extraordinarily shy man, and that at the time we met him, in 1944 and in 1966 respectively, we were both twenty-two. No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of this kind occur far more than we suspect, since we all move, one after the other, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrases and gestures. The physical sensation closest to this feeling of repetition, which sometimes lasts for several minutes and can be quite disconcerting, is that of the peculiar numbness brought on by a heavy loss of blood, often resulting in a temporary inability to think, to speak or to move one's limbs, as though, without being aware of it, one had suffered a stroke. Perhaps there is in this as yet unexplained phenomenon of apparent duplication some kind of anticipation of the end, a venture into the void, a sort of disengagement, which, like a gramophone repeatedly playing the same sequence of notes, has less to do with damage to the machine itself than with an irreparable defect in its programme. Be that as it may, on that August afternoon at Michael's house I felt several times, either through exhaustion or for some other reason, that I was losing the ground from under my feet. When at last the time came for me to take my leave, Anne, who had been resting for an hour or so, entered my room and sat down with us. I cannot remember whether it was she who turned the conversation to the fact that nobody wears mourning any more, not even a black band on the sleeve or a black stud in the lapel. At all events, in that connection she told the story of a certain Mr Squirrel from Middleton who was almost of retirement age and who, as far as anyone knew, had never worn anything but mourning, not even as a young man before he was apprenticed to the undertaker in Westleton. Contrary to what his name suggests, said Anne, Mr Squirrel was not particularly spry or nimble. In fact he was a swarthy, ponderous giant of a man whom the undertaker presumably employed as pallbearer more for his physical strength than his propensity to mourn. In the village, Anne went on it was thought that Squirrel had no memory at all, and was quite unable to recall what had happened in his childhood, last year, last month or even last week. How he could therefore grieve for the dead was a puzzle to which no one knew the answer. Another foible of Squirrel's was that, despite his lack of a memory, he had always wanted to be an actor, ever since he was a boy, and had so persistently pestered the people in Middleton and other nearby villages who occasionally put on a play that in the end, when there was to be an open-air production of King Lear on Westleton Heath, he was given the part of the gentleman in the seventh scene of act four who, except for a line or two, remains silent throughout. Squirrel laboured a whole year at learning by heart those few lines, said Anne, which on the night he did indeed deliver most movingly, and to this day he repeats the one or other, whether the occasion suits or not, as I once discovered for myself when I said good morning to him and he replied in sonorous tones across the street: They say Edgar, his banish'd son, is with the Earl of kent in Germany. Shortly after Anne had finished her story, I asked her to call a taxi for me. When she returned from making the call, she said that, as she replaced the receiver, the dream she had had just before she awoke from her afternoon nap came back to her. We were all three in Norwich, she said, and, because Michael still had appointments to keep, I had ordered a taxi for her. When it drove up it proved to be a large, gleaming limousine. I held the door open for her and she climbed into the back. Without a sound the limousine began to move, and, before she had settled herself, she was out of the town and surrounded by an immense forest, shot through by rays of sunlight, which extended over many miles all the way down to the Middleton house. At an even speed that could neither be said to be fast nor slow we travelled along a soft, gently curving track. The atmosphere through which the car moved was denser than air and somewhat resembled streaming currents of deep, silent water. She saw the forest, Anne said, with absolute clarity and in meticulous detail impossible to put into words, as it slid past outside: the tiny fruit capsules on stems protruding from patches and cushions of moss, the hair-thin grass stalks, the quivering ferns and the upright grey and brown, smooth or rough-barked trunks of trees that were lost a few yards up amidst the impenetrable leafage of the evergreens growing amongst them. Higher still were clusters of mistletoe, mimosa and lobelia, and cascading down into them from the next level of this luxuriant forest realm, in clouds of snow-white or pink, were hundreds of flowering plants and lianas from branches that reached out like the yard arms of great sailing ships, festooned with bromeliads and orchids. And above these, at a height the eye could hardly attain, the tops of palms swayed to and fro, their delicate, feathery, fan-shaped fronds of that unfathomable green which seems underlaid with burnished brass and which Leonardo used for the crowns of his trees, in the Annunciation, for instance, or the portrait of Ginevra de Benci. I have only an indistinct notion of how beautiful it all was, said Anne, nor can I properly describe now the feeling of being driven in that limousine that appeared to have no one at the wheel. It was not really like driving at all, it was more like floating, in a way I have not experience since my childhood, when I was able to hover a few inches above the ground. As Anne was talking, we had walked out together into the garden, where night had already fallen. We waited for the taxi beside the Hölderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.