I should go in, says Julia, gazing into the aforementioned corner of the yard, then quietly directs the retort idiot at Bornträger and goes in to wash her hands.
Now Maiwald comes back into the yard, and Bornträger sits there happy and content, and perhaps with a certain degree of excitement, on the bench next to the jerry can; nothing has happened, everything is fine, and Maiwald talks for a while longer with Bornträger and my uncle about the time of year, the weather, the apples, the harvest, and in the end Bornträger takes three litres of yesterday’s sweet cider with him, and my uncle gets back into his Variant, and Christine Maiwald stands with her husband in the courtyard and says, Those repellent beasts, they only come because of Julia, but it’s not like we can lock her away inside.
Maiwald: Ay, ay, I guess she’s just at that age.
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.