For the first week of my sojourn in W. I did not leave the Engelwirt inn. Troubled by dreams at night and getting no peace till the first light of dawn, I slept through the entire morning. I spent the afternoons sitting in the empty bar room, turning over my recollections and writing up my notes, and in the evenings when the regulars came in, whom I recognised, almost to a man, from my schooldays and who all appeared to have grown older at a stroke, I listened to their talk while pretending to read the newspaper, never tiring of it and ordering one glass of Kalterer after the other. Hunched over the long table they sat, most as in the old days with their hats on their heads, under an enormous picture of woodcutters at work. This painting, which had hung in the same place in the old Engelwirt inn, had by now become so blackened that it was scarcely possible to make out what it actually portrayed. Not till one had looked at it for some time did the phantom shapes of the woodcutters become apparent. They were in the process of stripping and clamping the timber, and were painted in the powerful, energetic postures characteristic of images that glorify work and warfare. The artist Hengge, by whom, without any doubt, this picture was done, had produced many such woodcutter scenes in his time. His fame reached its peak in the 1930s, when he was known as far afield as Munich. His murals, always in dark shades of brown, were to be seen on the walls of buildings all around W. and the surrounding area, and were always of his favoured motifs of woodcutters, deer poachers and rebellious peasants carrying the Bundschuh-banner unless a particular theme had been requested of him. On the Seefelders house, for example, where my grandfather lived and where I was born, a motor race was depicted, because it had seemed to old Seefelder, a blacksmith by trade, to go with the machine workshop he had set up a couple of years before the war, and appropriate
also to the new age which was then dawning in W., and the transformer station on the edge of the village was adorned with an allegorical representation of the taming of the power of water. For me there was something most unsettling about
all of these Hengge pictures. One especially, on the Raiffeisen Bank, showing a tall reaper woman, sickle in hand, standing
in front of a field at harvest time, always looked to me like a fearful battle scene, and frightened me so that whenever I passed, I had to avert my eyes. Hengge the painter was perfectly capable of extending his repertoire. But whenever he was able to follow his own artistic inclination, he would paint only pictures of woodcutters. Even after the war, when for a variety of reasons his monumental works were no longer much in demand, he continued in the same vein. In the end, his house was said to have been so crammed with pictures of woodcutters that there was scarcely room for Hengge himself, and death, so the obituary said, caught him in the midst of a work showing a woodcutter on a sledge hurtling down into the valley below. On reflection, it had occurred to me that those Hengge paintings, apart from the frescoes in the parish church, were pretty much the only pictures I had seen until I was seven or eight years old, and I now have the feeling that these woodcutters and the crucifixions and the large canvas of the Battle of the Lechfeld, where Prince Bishop Ulrich, astride his grey charger, rides over one of the Huns lying prostrate on the ground — and here again all the horses have this crazed look in their eyes — made a devastating impression on me. For that reason, when I had reached a certain point in my notes, I left my post in the Engelwirt bar to see the Hengge murals once more, or those that were still there. I cannot say that their effect on me on re-acquaintance was any less devastating, rather the contrary. At all events I found that as I went from one of his works to another I was drawn onward, and I walked through the fields and towards the outlying hamlets
on the surrounding mountainsides and hills. I made my way up to Bichl and walked on to the Adelharz, to Enthalb der Ach, to Bàrenwinkel and Jungholz, into the Vordere and the Hintere Reutte, out to Haslach and Oy, into the Schrey and from there on to Elleg, all of them paths that I had walked in my childhood at my grandfather's side and which had meant so much to me in my memory, but, as I came to realise, meant nothing to me now. From every one of these excursions I returned dispirited to the Engelwirt and to the writing of my notes, which had afforded me a degree of comfort of late, even as the example of Hengge the artist, and the questionable nature of painting as an enterprise in general, remained before me as a warning.
I had learned that the only member of the Seelos family still living in W. was Lukas. The Seelos house had been sold, and Lukas lodged in the smaller house next door, where once Babett, Bina and Mathild had dwelt. I had been in W. for about ten days before I finally decided to go over and call on Lukas. He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him, and now spent his days sitting at home on the sofa, while his wife continued to run the little stationer's shop belonging to old Specht. He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside. Moreover, he was troubled by the fact that, apart from Regina, who was married to an industrialist in northern Germany, he was the last of the Ambrose clan. He told me the story of how Uncle Peter disappeared in the Tyrol, and of the death of his mother soon afterwards, who during the last weeks of her life had lost so much of her considerable weight that nobody had recognised her any more; and he expatiated at length on the strange circumstance that Aunts Babett and Bina, who had done everything together since they were children, had died on the same day, one of heart failure and the other of grief. No one had ever been able to find out much, he said, about the car accident in America in which Lena and her husband were killed. It seemed that the two of them simply left the road in their Oldsmobile, which as he knew from a photo had whitewall tyres, and plunged into the depths. Mathild had lasted a long time, until she was well over eighty, perhaps because she had the most alert mind of any of them. She had died a quiet death in her own bed in the middle of the night. His wife, Lukas said, had found her the next day, lying just as she always did when she retired in the evening. But Benedikt, unwilling to go further into the subject, had been consumed by ill fortune and now, he added, it was his own turn. Having brought to an end his chronicle of the Ambrose family with this remark, not without satisfaction as it seemed to me, Lukas wanted to know what had brought me back to W. after so many years, and in November of all times. To my surprise, he understood my rather complicated and sometimes contradictory explanations right away. He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normaclass="underline" most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling. To which Lukas replied that now, laid up as he was on his sofa for much of the day or at best performing pointless little tasks about the house, it was quite unthinkable that he had once been a good goalkeeper and that he, who was ever more frequently assailed by dark moods, had in his time played the clown round the village — had indeed held for years, as I perhaps remembered, the honorary office of carnival jester since a successor was not to be found who could hold a candle to him. As he recalled that glorious time, Lukas's gouty hands began to move more freely, demonstrating how one grasped the great carnival shears, which he said required exceptional strength and poise, and how he had stuck his fool's staff up the women's skirts at the very moment when they least expected it. Just as they imagined themselves safe, behind locked doors on the top floor, and were leaning out of the windows to watch as the carnival floats passed by, he had climbed up at the back through the hay loft, or up an espalier, and given them the fright they were hoping for all along, though they would never admit as much. Often he had ducked into the kitchen and filched the freshly baked doughnuts in order to distribute them in the street to the applause of the women until, seeing the empty plates, they realised it was their own doughnuts that had been handed out.