The morning of the day before yesterday I let this path become nameless again, and after that likewise the High Path up on the edge of the plateau, which in sweeping curves followed its spine, and on which one can circle the entire forest bay, as if on cliff paths close to a precipice; free of names, from below ground for the moment the creation rose up.
I made a little detour from the forest to the office complexes of Haut-Velizy, one mirrored in the next, as glaringly lit up as empty, except for the night watchmen, whole divisions of them spread over the entire plateau, each by himself with his dog in his booth in front at the barred entrance. My Sunday evening walks during the year had been primarily for their benefit, and thus at least one, when he turned his head away from his tiny television monitor to look at me, his thermos bottle in his hand, raised a finger in greeting. And there was also something new: on the terrace of an abandoned office building, the company having gone bankrupt, weeds had sprung up.
Back in the forest, heading downhill on the Green Path (because of its grassy surface), instantly restored to namelessness, I smelled smoke, and then deep in the woods came, in an almost inaccessible preserve, through which I had fought and shimmied my way on many a morning (if ever a path for learning impressionability, then such a one), upon a fire, lighting up only the area around a hut, in whose middle it was, in a loose circle of fireproof poles, which led up, cylinder-shaped, to the smoke hole in the thatched roof; on one side the casbah was open, protected by the dense thicket; a layer of leaves on the ground; no human being.
But I met one, as it was gradually getting light, down in the clearing with the hollow occupied by the Nameless Pond (even it did not have its name anymore), by the spring behind it. Sometime after the lava flow from Mont St.-Valérien, this spring had become warm, which I did not notice until I was walking past one night, slipped, and ended up with my hand in its rather meager flow. It was far warmer than from even the warmest rain, and it smelled, in nose proximity, of sulfur. Later, right at its source, recognizable by a clear-clear pulsing, I dug myself a sort of tub and sometimes gargled there, or soaked my bruised, more than sore, numb feet: relief.
Early on the day before yesterday, however, I found my spring spot in the swamp beyond the bomb-crater body of water occupied by the person in whom, back in the spring of the year, on Lizard Way (this designation also canceled), I had seen the stonemason from the twelfth century. He was sitting there, up to his knees in the sulfurous water, and greeted me — here in the bay it had always, up until now, been I who greeted first — what a nodding of the head! and shifted to one side. There was room enough for two; he had built an earthen bench, lined with stones, around the spring, in the suggestion of a half-moon. The stonemason seemed more like a gardener, in the bareness of winter.
When I untied my shoes, I noticed that they came from different pairs: my mistake in the still-nocturnal house. With my feet warmed, I took off my hat in spite of the rain, and thought, gazing over the muddy surface to the edge of the pond, that it was no distance at all from the mud long ago behind my grandfather’s farm in the village of Rinkolach to this mud here now. And then, picturing my almost three seasons of writing by the root hill of the tipped-over birch, at the same time a hiding place for muskrats, I swore to myself that for me no path would lead away from this place into a so-called public arena. And at the same time I was seized with pain at the thought that I would never again sit there by the water to write, where, with my work in hand, I had been able to be with the daily world as never before. And then I saw that my year’s seat, the burned-out half tree trunk, last hauled out of the ice by me, had once more been rolled into the pond, certainly not by children playing. And then in the distance ravens flapped low over the forest floor, like black horses galloping soundlessly through the trunks of the trees.
The bomb-crater pond trembled, and trembled, and trembled, the different winter-morning gray grayed, and grayed, and grayed, the stonemason kept silent, and kept silent, and kept silent, and then he said: “I wanted to go south, and I ended up here. I am not the only one scattered to the winds. When I was young, we worked as a brotherhood, under the direction of my father, whose mark in granite was also that of our group. First we were stone breakers, then stonemasons, or both at once. For splitting we had hardly more tools than a hammer. First look, then strike! What counted at the beginning were eyes and ears. With the latter we listened to see whether the stone sounded as it should — even a small off-note inside, and it was no good; with the former we saw in what direction the stone was to be cut, whether lengthwise or crosswise, or, as a third possibility, and just as important for building, in the direction of the interstices, to obtain the keystones, as support; as anchor; as resting place; and as a bridgehead for additions. In the meantime we wander alone from project to project, or have disappeared in war, and at any rate we stonemasons no longer chisel our signs anywhere, and where does the scar on your shin come from?”—“I burned myself there as a child,” I replied, and invited the runner to join me for dinner with my friends in Porchefontaine.
When I then stepped out of the forest, already in daylight, I noticed that it was still silent as night in the bay, even down below on the bypass, and then came upon glare ice, even before I saw it, stretching far into the distance, a rigid gleam, so different from that of rain, covering and raising the asphalt, and even the pebbles in the lane, as I slithered home. Was it this way throughout the country? Would my friends be delayed by it? Then the bugles of the railway linemen, short and no-nonsense, but still lingering in the air for a long time afterward.
As I circled the house a few times in the yard, where even in the grass the ice crackled, I made two discoveries: on the one tree that I had believed all year to be without fruit, unexpectedly a pear, dwarf-sized, to be sure, and wizened, but unfrozen, and the one bite — that was all it yielded — of a sweetness that stayed with me all day; and about the other, the ash, its foot concealed by a hedge, the fact that it, which I had always thought grew on a neighbor’s property, grew on mine; belonged to me! It had followed me from the former cow pasture at home in Rinkolach (where I wanted to go right after the book, to sniff the air of my birthplace).
And I promptly propped a ladder against the particularly straight, smooth ash trunk, glassy from transparent ice all around, trimmed the branches so that they resembled the heavy rip cords of a parachute, and declared the tree a monument to that unknown American soldier who, after an emergency jump, got tangled in a thicket on the Jaunfeld Plain and was beaten to death by the crowd that gathered — perhaps also one of my relatives among them? — using all those tools that today are to be seen almost exclusively in local history museums, where they exude venerability.
And in the process I made yet a third discovery: on the evergreen shrubs all around the ash there were garlands of leaves, as if from crystal chandeliers, made of ice, frozen solid after the rain landed on the leaves, which had broken off as a result, so that only their ice forms hung in the air, attached to the woody branches by ice stems, true-to-nature copies, just like the lanceolate forms pointing away from them, in whose delicate glassy bodies the snapped-off leaves were precisely copied, the midrib and all the side ribs, but in reverse, and thus all the way up the bush, green and glassy leafage in one, except that in the latter the sky shone through at the top. “That can’t be!” I thought at the sight, which again meant that it seemed to me as real as anything could possibly ever be. “This empathic spelling-out means more to me than anything else.” And: “For us today how much more there was to tell about our days than about our years. And all the more difficult to find clear lines to follow.”