Visitation

THE GARDENER

IN THE SPRING he puts in a flowerbed along the side of the house that faces the road, filling it at the householder’s request with poppies, peonies and yellow coneflowers, with a big angel’s trumpet in the middle. For the border, he just pokes a few box twigs into the earth all around the flowers, they’ll put down roots and grow. In summer he sets out sprinklers on both lawns, twice each day they will bow to one side and than the other for half an hour, once early in the morning and once at dusk, meanwhile he waters the flowerbed, roses and shrubs. He cuts off the withered blooms and prunes the box tree. In the fall he harvests walnuts for the first time, coaxing the nuts from their soft husks that stain his hands brown, in the fall he gathers the dry branches that have broken off from the oaks and also a few of the pine trees during storms, he saws them into pieces, chops them up for firewood and stacks the logs in the woodshed.

By 1936, the potato beetle had already crossed the Rhine and was continuing on toward the East, in 1937 it reached the Elbe River, and now, in 1938, it is beleaguering the region around Berlin. With great patience the gardener plucks the beetles over and over from the leaves of the angel’s trumpet, which as the only representative of the nightshade family in the garden has been heavily affected by this plague. He crushes the eggs of these pests and even tries to seek out and destroy their pupae by digging up the earth all around the bush. This summer the sandy road is black with beetles for days on end. At the beginning of the infestation, the leaves of the bush with its splendid red blossoms merely have holes in them and display tattered edges, but by summer’s end all that remains of the bush is its skeleton, a few of the leaves’ ribs and the bare main shoots of the bush itself, the blossoms having long since fallen to the ground. On instructions from the householder, the gardener removes what is left of the angel’s trumpet and plants a cypress in its place as the new centerpiece for the flowerbed.