From out of their turbulent Midst two Men stepped out before the assembled Village, one being tall and one short, both with long Beards and strange forreyn Clothing of fine Fabrick in Motley Hues. Without beating about the Bush, they offered a strange Trade: let the Village bring them, before Morning, all its Dullards, Lunatics, the Feeble-Minded, Fantastics, Deranged and Demented, all those possess’d of Devils and assail’d by Despair, that they be brought to the Northern Sea, where a great sea-going Vessel waited to take them Aboard, as was the Custom, for ever and a Day, the cost being ten Thalers for one such Person.
After this a great Silence fell, into which the Smaller Man cried: We know it is not an Easy Thing to part with your own Kin, yet surely your Lives would be greatly Eased thereafter. See them now making merry, and well cared for, with their own Ilk. And when you think you may fall into Despair yourselves, picture the delightful Sea Voyage they are making!
The Village assembled and debated what were Good and Christian to do. They could not tell, and each made his own Decision.
There was no Peace that Night for the screaming of the Lunatics and the playing of all Manner of Lutes and the like Stringed Instruments. In the Morning the Procession went on, and some, aye, some of us with it.
And if you ever be faring in a Ship on the High Seas, then know that you may at any time meet with a Ship of Fools.
O praise the unfathomable Mercy of God.
THERE IS A SMALL TV SET ON THE CHEST OF DRAWERS beside the visitors’ toilet in the Homeland House. The TV has an integrated video recorder. We think that is a good, practical idea, and we are surprised and sorry that such combi-sets are not so common these days.
What the TV shows confuses us. The TV transmits exclusively the horoscope section of the Breakfast TV program on Sat 1. Frau Schwermuth records it every morning and keeps it running nonstop until it’s time to close the Homeland House. The horoscope lady is called Britta Hansen. The village has known Britta since she was that high.
We’re confused because the TV is on now, at this time of day, with Frau Schwermuth doing knee-bends in front of it.
Britta Hansen says: Think of every star sign as telling its own story. You are the hero or heroine of that story as you move past the signs.
The color adjustment can’t be regulated any more. Britta Hansen’s jacket, which is very red anyway, looks as if it were blazing brightly as she thinks out loud about our star signs.
After reaching the Homeland House, Frau Schwermuth first locked the Archivarium properly. At least that meant Jochim the Tinker was in his proper place and couldn’t do any damage. Then she sorted the papers on her desk and stuck a newspaper over the broken window. And now she is doing exercises and wondering how to proceed as Britta Hansen, in a very red dress and shiny nylons, devotes herself to the subject of Libra, the Scales.
Venus, forever in love, gives you an unexpected romantic and emotional adventure. Take what she offers, and who can tell, you too could know the magic of eternal love.
A cardboard notice above the TV set says: THE STARS WITH BRITTA HANSEN. Hansen is a qualified astrologer. She draws conclusions about people and their feelings from the position of the heavenly bodies in the sky. The universe is an open book; Britta Hansen translates it into German.
Hardly anyone goes to the visitors’ toilet without stopping to look at the stars. That’s what happens when there’s a flickering screen in a dimly lit corridor. Visitors — people who used to live in Fürstenfelde, old folk, tourists wallowing in homesickness — stare at Britta Hansen’s bright red jacket. Many children, seeing the set, have lost interest in the horse-shoeing demonstration in the yard, and have had to be rescued from the nonstop horoscopes by their ambitious mothers, who didn’t bring them on a two-hour journey to watch TV but to see a horse shod.
Visitors from outside the village don’t know what to make of their encounter with Britta Hansen. Most of them don’t like to talk about it. Some think the TV set is part of the exhibition, an everyday item from the GDR, but that’s wrong, the TV set is an everyday item from Czechoslovakia in 1988. Very few venture to ask what horoscopes have to do with Fürstenfelde or the Homeland House. It could be that they’ve failed to understand something, that something has escaped them, and if that something is also to do with the GDR, people often feel very uncomfortable about it. Frau Schwermuth gives the braver visitors one of Britta Hansen’s business cards. You can get Britta to describe your own interior landscape for a fee of 100 euros.
This weekend the Sun meets Neptune, there is magic in the air, enough to amount to divine providence.
Even Frau Schwermuth doesn’t always understand everything she says.
The soap dispenser in the visitors’ toilet hasn’t been refilled for two years. If people from the village go to the visitors’ toilet they may stop and say, “Ah, there’s Britta,” to the TV set. But the vast majority don’t talk to it.
Britta Hansen’s hair is red, although just how red isn’t clear. Frau Schwermuth likes it when Britta wears her cowboy hat with a denim shirt and cowboy boots. She is surprisingly often right when she says what will happen in the next few days.
The weekend will be dynamic, heated and fast-moving. Saturday begins in confusion. If you happen to suffer from insomnia, expect a sleepless night. Give all you’ve got, and you will find the sense in it. That, for instance, is what she predicted on Friday for Cancer, the Crab. Frau Schwermuth loosens up her neck muscles. Her star sign is the Crab.
Every year Frau Schwermuth invites Breakfast TV to the Anna Feast. An outside transmission about the festivities would be great. A fax goes to the TV station and another to Britta Hansen. Frau Schwermuth always gets a reply from Frau Hansen. Britta would really love to come, she says, but unfortunately she’s not the one who makes such decisions, her hands are tied.
At the end of her horoscopes Britta Hansen quotes a proverb, an old saying, or a quotation from some famous person: If you are going the wrong way, the faster you walk the more lost you will be.
Frau Schwermuth once said that even as a child Britta was interested in the sky, which is particularly beautiful in these parts. She really wanted to study physics but, fair enough, it turned into something like metaphysics. “Metaphysics between us and the stars.”
Frau Schwermuth’s eyes glow as she looks at the unblinking screen. Now and then her pupils move to the extreme left and then the extreme right. All of life, says Britta Hansen, smiling at Frau Schwermuth, is a matter of beginning again.
“Very true,” whispers Frau Schwermuth. She switches the TV off and goes down to the cellar. She has a few more questions for the tinker.
Fürstenfelde, Brandenburg. Number of inhabitants: dropping. We have a sign up at the entrance to the village. Welcome to the Uckermark. The countryside gets beautiful here. Number of trees marked on the up-to-date walkers’ map as “individual trees worth seeing”: two.
Whatever you’ve heard about us that doesn’t come from ourselves is wrong. This village is not like what they say in the tourist guides, the books, the demographic studies. If a window gets broken somewhere here, and stands open, we’re more afraid of what might get out through it than what might get in.
And you mustn’t believe that stupid map: we have a third individual tree worth seeing — the oak in the field on Geher’s Farm. They like to leave it out of guides because it’s as crooked as backache, and because the field makes no sense for even the most ambitious walker, although the tree is really old and any other 500-year-old oak has a blog of its own.