The Room

9

My uncle drives to Frauenwald. The sun is still in the sky, just visible over the Johannisberg. Besides me, my uncle was the only person in the family who would go up to the Johannisberg to watch the sun rise from time to time. Sure, nowadays the Bad Nauheimers trek up to the mountain in their droves on New Years’ Eve to drink and stand around in their ski jackets as if they were on the slopes, despite the fact that there is never any snow on New Years’ (but it could, it could snow!), they drive their all-terrain vehicles all the way up onto the Johannisberg first, then if the upper part of the Johannisberg is already full of parked cars, they drive to the half-way point, parking in the middle of the forest road, and finally they drive to the foot of the Johannisberg, because it’s the only place they can still park, while the last ones drive home because they can’t find a parking space anywhere, then drive their all-terrain vehicles (purchased as though they have to trek across deserts and moors in the Wetterau) into the garage and head back to the Johannisberg on foot, reaching it just five minutes later and still in time for midnight, with a child clasped in one hand and a large bag containing fireworks and sparkling wine in the other. But on a normal morning, during a normal sunrise, I have hardly ever seen a Bad Nauheimer up there, and even my father would have said thank you for the invitation but that he had more important matters to attend to. Sunrises only fit into the lives of people like my father — if at all — when they set off on holiday to Italy at half past three in the morning in order to beat the early morning traffic in Frankfurt, and after that in Nuremberg. But my uncle would linger up there while the sun rose just like I do. We, the two good-for-nothings in the family, he a shift worker, I merely in despair and always walking, deeply distressed, between Bad Nauheim and Friedberg.

At first everything is black; then a blackish-blue brightening announces itself, a slow process. Later, you get the impression that it’s becoming properly blue and light, that the day has already begun even if the sunrise is yet to come, but that’s not the case, your eyes have simply become accustomed to the dark. Sometimes the light is restricted by a wall of cloud, making the rest appear completely black and the small amount of blue even brighter. Then, very quickly, the red comes, flowing into everything, into the forefront of the sky as you gaze out from the Johannisberg at the whole landscape, at the whole of the Wetterau spread out in front of you. And then, as if everything was vibrating with anticipation, as if this morning landscape was trembling, the sun suddenly appears, and now the Wetterau lies there golden and red and still sleeping, and you stand there in the cold of the morning, rubbing your hands, having forgotten that you’ve been staring at one fixed point for over half an hour, the point where you were waiting for the sun to appear. This is sunrise from the Johannisberg. Then the first lights come on, the first aeroplanes appear, then comes the rush of workers and employees, and you climb down from the Johannisberg with a sunrise that no one can ever take away from you, not for the rest of your life.

But right now, with J on his way and Julia forgotten, the sun is going down and the skies are turning red for the evening. Autumn foliage is all around, coming towards my uncle and colouring the paths and boughs alongside and above, making it feel like walking through a room filled with autumn. He has entered the forest now, leaving the automobile behind him in August-Viktoria-Strasse. To the left, a meadow with scattered fruit trees which no one has harvested yet, they gleam red and want to tell him something, and he seems to understand it too. Things always talked to him, the woodland creatures and the plants, as if he belonged more to them than he did to us, the human beings. The apples, what did they talk to him about? How did their language sound? Did they talk to him about the time, about the year, about how the summer was, how the sun shone down on each apple in the most personal of ways, as if it existed for that apple alone? Later, he will be able to talk about the wonderful apples in Forsthaus Winterstein, making them superlative, the reddest that have ever hung in this meadow, the best and ripest and sweetest, even though perhaps he doesn’t even taste one, for he’s in a bit of a hurry and wants to get to the Forsthaus. But first, a walk through the forest. To his right, on a branch, sits a red-breasted robin. It sits there and looks at him and doesn’t fly away. It just stares at him, and he at the robin. They seem to know each other. As if it wasn’t just that the robin was a natural part of the forest and this day for my uncle, but that my uncle was an unquestionable part of the forest for the robin too. Maybe it can hear him. Maybe my uncle said something in the robin’s language. Not that he has learned the language or anything like that — he just knows it. Perhaps he just utters a slight sound, and the robin knows exactly what he’s saying, what he wants, where he’s standing and how he’s feeling at that moment. It starts to sing as he walks past, and the further away he moves, the further away the birdsong sounds, and my uncle knows that a robin always sounds as though it’s far away, even when it’s nearby. And after just a few metres it really does sound as though it’s a long distance away. No bird sounds as lonely as the robin. My uncle doesn’t remark on that to himself, at least not in words, but he takes notice of it. He doesn’t even think about the robin at all, to be precise, but I need to now, in order to give my uncle a language I can understand; otherwise he wouldn’t be there at all, just dead and forgotten except for his gravestone and the two numbers on it. In reality, everything in my uncle is wordless. In reality, he speaks a completely different language, a language before words, one which is always between things, but mostly we don’t know what they are because we’re always talking and are therefore too loud for the things. Now, in the forest, my uncle is in constant conversation with everything, and to him this conversation is a kind of Being-at-Home. Everyone understands him there, and he understands the forest, there’s no pretence, nothing is kept secret, and everything is allowed to be the way it is. Nothing is hidden there, for once, not even where he is concerned. And so he walks past the oaks and beeches, up the hillside, his hands in his coat pockets, not smoking. He never smoked in the forest. It never occurred to him to smoke there, not even once. The cross-country ski trails come into view on the right hand side, and he strides out of the forest, knowing that the two hares are about to come by. My uncle stands there on the skiing meadow (back then, it hadn’t yet occurred to anyone to build a golf course there), and after less than thirty seconds the two hares really do come rushing past, looking at him, getting closer, eyeing him in a very critical manner, as is their nature, then hopping up the slope of the meadow. He stares after them for a long while, the sloped meadow cuts a long swathe through the forest, then the ground fog draws in, just a light veil, and shades of darkness begin to fall. Only the foliage seems to have managed to imprison the light, shining brightly. All along the edge of the forest, a multitude of colours blaze. The evening falls over the forest trail, and soon so will the night. My uncle walks up to Else-Ruh (Else, like his grandmother), then heads further on to Augusten-Ruhe (Auguste, like his mother), and now J is in the Frauenwald and walks another circuit there, maybe he might see a deer, maybe a marten, or on the edge of the forest, next to the houses there, a short-tailed weasel. My uncle always saw something in the forest where others see nothing. Yet he never saw things among people, it was always everyone else that did.

And as the forest slowly seals itself off into dusk and darkness, my uncle exits it again, a small, lone forest wanderer, or that’s how I picture him amongst the huge trees, almost lost in the scene, a person alone at the edge of the forest, alone under the skies, alone with himself, and yet perhaps in this very moment connected by and with everything and parted and separated from things like never before. And the automobile is waiting down below; he heads there and drives off, over the Johannisberg and over to the forest sports ground, where the first team is training. Most of them come here by car now.

My uncle drives higher and higher up into the forest and is then released from it, under open skies now, driving across the countryside with the Taunus before him, darker and darker, the Autobahn alongside, the cars all with their lights on, rushing through the scene like tiny glow-worms. If J had been born just a few years earlier, he would have been able to come here as a child to marvel at the construction of the Autobahn. It would have been the biggest building site he had ever seen in his life, and certainly the longest. He could have seen an entire army of machinery making its way through the Wetterau, slowly lumbering through the landscape and leaving a multi-lane Reich Autobahn in its wake, along which people have been able to drive ever since, always straight ahead and internationally connected from Sicily to Oslo, maybe even to Helsinki. Today it’s called the Federal Autobahn. Back then, the Wetterauers stood at the edge of it and thought, Now we are at the centre of the world, and everyone celebrated, and the newspapers celebrated too. A new world. Wherever they built these Autobahns, everyone always suddenly thought they were at the centre of the world, just because the whole world was driving past them. Yet when it came down to it, the whole world was driving past everyone else too. But in every district, each new slip road was celebrated as though the world had finally taken notice of this particular corner of the world, as if, like Sleeping Beauty, it had finally been awoken from its deep slumber. And anyone who had a car drove past Bad Nauheim on the Autobahn on the very first day, to try it out just the once, and then came off it again a few kilometers further on at Friedberg, able to say from that day forward that they too had driven along the Autobahn. In essence, the Wetterau is just an Autobahn with a service station attached. Now my uncle sees the construction site for the service station, towards the back of the scene, where the glow worms are hurtling up and down as if they’ve suddenly gone mad and all they want is to strive forwards as quickly as they can and arrive somewhere. In much the same way as my uncle sees the packages at the central postal depot at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof as always having come from the big wide world, like Barcelona perhaps, or Appenzell, here he sees the cars as having come especially for him, from Amsterdam or perhaps Milan or even from Rome, where the Pope lives, the descendent of Christ, for whose birth the bells of St. Stephen’s in Vienna ring when my uncle sits in front of the radio to listen to them. Inside every glow worm was an entire world. And so J feels safe and calm and like he belongs and is connected to the whole world, the world he is able to be part of, and that is all because of Route 5 of the Federal Autobahn.

Now my uncle is on his way up to the Winterstein. The Variant is struggling noticeably. The path goes straight uphill and is tarmacked. Half-way along, a light comes towards him, a vehicle, and suddenly an American is standing before him on the side of the road in full uniform, shining a light into his face and shouting, Stop! The American, like all Americans in the Wetterau, has a chalk-white face that’s visible even at night. He seems agitated and frantic, coming up alongside the car and making gestures which my uncle takes to mean that he should pull over to the side of the road. My uncle pulls over and stops the car. Now there are suddenly another two Americans there too, who seem to have come out of the forest. One is smoking, and all three have American soldier’s helmets on and seem occupied with something. Now an off-road vehicle comes driving past, but without taking any notice of the three soldiers. One of the Americans is speaking into a walkie-talkie. My uncle gets out of his car.

Hey you, calls one of the Americans.

I, says my uncle. He can’t actually speak English.

Yes you, calls the American, grimacing as if disgusted that a German would have to turn up here at this precise moment.

As my uncle has not mastered English, with the exception of words like I or you and yes and no (essential tools for understanding the occupying forces), he is of course unable to follow what the American is about to say to him. The American waves his machine gun in my uncle’s direction, with the result that J chooses to stay close by the Variant. And now, softly and from afar, a noise that my uncle is familiar with resounds out. All four of them, the three Americans and my German uncle, look up the road. A light shines down the road from above, the noise gets louder, a second light becomes visible behind the first, and they come rolling down one after the other, almost too wide for the road. It’s not implausible that my uncle knows the tank models and is able to identify them, just like the birds in the forest and the meadow, or at the very least he would have claimed that he knew them, but perhaps he doesn’t know them after all and is just overwhelmed by excitement. They get bigger and bigger and louder and louder, shining their headlights on each other, turning into the forest path one after the other. My uncle can see the first one clearly now, its immense gun pointing straight ahead as if the gunman wanted to shoot the way clear and perhaps even sweep the Variant from the road, and an American is looking out from the top and has a helmet on and is allowed to drive the tank and maybe has full responsibility for it, controlling everything and with everything under control and his chalk-white face looking important and officious and stern all at the same time. Even though the tanks are already very close in the darkness, they keep getting bigger and bigger, and then they glide past my uncle on the Winterstein forest path, immense, raucous metal mountains, and no one can hear themselves think anymore, and the Americans can’t make out each others’ words, so a rapprochement is out of the question. The tanks and the Americans staring out of them roll heedlessly past the group of people by the Variant, each of the Americans with his gaze fixed as straight ahead as the tank he is on, or so it seems to my uncle, as if they had grown up together and belonged together always, and it would be impossible to think of them any other way, and yet my uncle, back when they had military shows on the Friedberg fairground, wasn’t even allowed into the little German armoured reconnaissance tank, because he was no longer a child and in any case had the appearance of someone you preferably wouldn’t want to put anywhere. My uncle had never been in a tank. He lived without it; it was only the longing that endured forever, something he was only ever able to dream of. The Winterstein, which during his lifetime was not just the Forsthaus and the TV tower but also the tank road of the Americans, who had come to the country twenty-four years ago but remained ever-young while the Wetterauers got older and older. Occupied Wetterau. My uncle didn’t like Americans. But he did like their tanks. They continue to roll past him, and my uncle stares with his eyes protruding from his head again, longing to have an expert discussion with the soldiers (soldiers in uniform, and there in the forest on a tank exercise to boot, the very highest level of Being) about the tanks and their construction and all their details and technical data, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible due to the language barrier between him, the occupied Wetterauer, and his occupiers. And also because of the awful noise that is currently engulfing the forest road as my uncle stands there next to his Variant. Has he ever been this close to the tanks before? He can almost reach out and touch them; they’re not moving quickly. And now the convoy has passed, an off-road vehicle bringing up the rear, and even the three soldiers on foot are moving away from the scene of the incident. My uncle stands alone in the beam of light that’s coming from his Variant. The tarmacked street has been transformed into a wasteland of sludge and mud clumps and is barely passable. During these years, the Americans would turn up with their tanks every few days, making half of the Winterstein impassable, and in the Wetterau Zeitung they would quarrel about why it was always the Germans who had to clear it all up afterwards. Or, to be more precise, the Wetterauers. They didn’t just quarrel in the newspaper, but in Jagdhaus Ossenheim too, in the Goldenen Fass, in Hanauer Hof, in the Licher-Eck (if indeed it existed back then), in the Alter Schmiede, in the Schillerlinde, in the Dunkel, in the Deutsche Haus, in the Krone, and last but not least and above all in Forsthaus Winterstein. Because if you go to Forsthaus Winterstein on a day like this, you’ll need to wash your car straight after. The mud and the slime is spread out on the road all the way to Ockstadt and down to the Friedberg barracks. Some of the metre-long clumps of earth held on for a while, riding the tanks all the way to Friedberg before splatting down on the street and — in doing so — dirtying the whole of the district capital so that everyone always knew: These are the Americans, and you are occupied. And then the Friedbergers would stand before the clods of mud on their road, become inflamed by rage and have to go for a quick beer, and ideally a schnapps too, in order to cope. Exactly how many glasses of beer and how many schnapps were drunk as a result of the dirtying of the little German town of Friedberg in the Wetterau by the occupying powers of the United States of America, no one knows: Bad Nauheim, where the Americans lived, always remained clean, and Friedberg was always soiled. By now, the rumble of the tanks has become quieter, almost non-existent. My uncle gets into his car and struggles to drive over the mud left by the tanks’ tracks; the wheels spin here and there, and within seconds everything is clinging onto the undercarriage, making the Variant heavy and then heavier. But now there are only a few hundred metres to the tank ramp, and from then on the road is in an orderly condition, because the tanks don’t drive there, or at least they’re not allowed to, and the Americans aren’t allowed to set foot in the Forsthaus either (it’s ‘off-limits’). The Winterstein is divided into two, back in ’69 there was the civilian German zone and the American exclusion zone, fenced off and equipped with signs including words like:

Immediate Use of Firearms!

In German, mind you, so that it could be understood.

Sofortiger Schußwaffengebrauch!

Sometimes, you would see the Americans on the road at night. But then again, to me, with their white faces they always seemed devoid of light. At night, these faces had a tendency to gleam. You could see them from afar, and you were best advised to let the occupying forces have the right of way, for beatings were commonplace, while at the same time the white-faced Americans would meet with the German Fräuleins, as the soldiers called them, in the back-rooms of local bars for communal getting-to-know-you sessions. Even at home, on the old company premises, my entire youth was lived in the constant presence of American soldiers, sometimes the whole terrace was full of them. None of these Americans ever saw the inside of our bars, not the Dunkel, not the Schillerlinde, nor the Lascaux, where I spent my youth, a cellar tavern in which even we became lightless figures, running around like rats and slowly grasping something about the world that we were never to forget.

Over at the edge of the meadow, Forsthaus Winterstein comes into view. The windows of the main room shine out into the early evening, there are four cars parked out front, no one comes here on foot at night. The Forsthaus lies there alone; the family that runs it lives in the middle of the forest, completely alone on the Winterstein. My uncle parks in rank and file with the other cars, gets out and stands there for a moment, hunched over a little. Then he walks around each of the other cars, studying them with interest. He walks over to the paddock, but everything is dark there, not a single horse left outside. Aside from the fact that my uncle is almost forty now, everything here is just as it used to be, nothing has changed; only the cars are newer models. My uncle walks into the inn.

The hunters were there.

…