ANNA STANDS BESIDE THE FENCE, STRETCHING. The wood feels soapy, it is rotting and splintered. Slats are breaking away from the fence, coming loose, missing. In the beam of her headlight the green of rot shows through the brittle veining of the wood. Anna has never seen the fence in anything but this ramshackle state, nor the field on the other side of it as anything but running wild. The undergrowth rustles in the wind, the branches of wild rose bushes reach out to her. Rain falls slanting down. Anna can smell cadaverine; the field has made a kill again, it gives and it takes away.
Anna has grown up with that field. It was waiting outside the window while she was studying, it watched her playing in the yard, it was never a playground itself. Right next to the garden. On her way to school. Never beautiful. Hard and dirty, even in spite of dew and hoar frost. In the evening it disappears abruptly into night, it won’t linger in twilight. Ordinary stinging nettles. Debilitated greenery. No one calls it “mine.” Well, Anna does now and then. Untamed, unused, uncleared of vermin. The next world beside this world, beside Geher’s Farm that will be inhabited again some day. After Anna. After Anna, her mother and her grandfather. Briefly, there was a father too. Before that, during the war, Polish forced laborers. People called it the Polish farm, the Poles leaned on the fence, quietly reciting poetry to each other, and before that two or three more generations of the Geher family, all farmers except for one innkeeper, and the field was always there. It has listened to them all, has taken an interest in them all as it takes an interest in Anna now: does the field think she looks sexy in those tights? With her leg on the fence, Anna is stretching the back of her thigh.
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.