Each of the two upper meadows with its natural frame will become an arena, the landscape architect says to his cousin, the householder, while the gardener is dumping out a wheelbarrow full of compost-rich soil on the site of the future rose-bed in front of the terrace. The householder says: Basically it’s always just a matter of framing the view. And providing variety, the landscape architect says: light and shade, open spaces and thickly overgrown ones, looking down from above, looking up from below. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed. The vertical and the horizontal must stand in a salutary relationship to one another, the householder says. Precisely, says the landscape architect, and that’s why this naturally cascading slope leading down to the water is ideal. The gardener wheels the empty barrow away. The two men stand on the terrace and from this vantage point gaze down at the lake, which is gleaming and sparkling between the reddish trunks of the pines. The gardener wheels up the next barrowful of soil and dumps it out. To tame the wilderness and then make it intersect with culture — that’s what art is, the householder says. Precisely, says his cousin, nodding. With the edge of his shovel, the gardener distributes the soil evenly across the bed. To avail oneself of beauty regardless of where one finds it, the owner says. Precisely. The gardener wheels his empty barrow past the two men standing on the terrace, both of them now silent.
And so the gardener fells several pine trees, saws them up and stacks the wood in the woodshed, he clears the roots and spreads a generous layer of topsoil over the Brandenburg sand, the gardener lays the path between the small and large meadows, and then extends it down the hill, eight times eight steps made of natural sandstone, he sows grass, plants the roses, plants shrubs to frame the small and large meadows, plants bushes on the slope, sets out hawthorn, walnut, Japanese cherry and blue spruce, as he digs he works his way through a thin layer of humus and then strikes bedrock that has to be broken up with the spade, for only beneath this is the layer of sand with the groundwater coursing through it, and finally beneath this sand is the blue clay that is found everywhere in this region. Once upon a time the waters of the lake washed over this rise that is called the Schäferberg or Shepherd’s Mountain by the locals, and thousands of years ago the Schäferberg was nothing but a shoal beneath the surface of the water, just as the Gurkenberg is today, or the Black Horn, the Keperling, the Hoffte, the Bulzenberg, the Nackliger, whose name means “naked man,” or Mindach’s Hill. The layer of sand beneath the bedrock that the gardener uncovers when he is digging his holes still displays a wave-like pattern, immortalizing the winds that blew across the water long ago. The gardener excavates the holes for the plants up to a depth of 80 centimeters and fills the bottom with composted soil so that the shrubs, bushes, Japanese cherry, hawthorn, blue spruce and walnut will flourish. Down beside the shore of the lake the gardener chops down five alder trees, clears the roots, braids green spruce twigs and places them in the boreholes so the black earth at the bottom will dry out. The gardener waters the roses, shrubs and young trees twice a day during the summer, once early in the morning and once at dusk, and he continues to water the bare soil of both meadows until the grass begins to sprout.
The gardener prunes all the bushes that overhang the stone perimeter in the fall, and prunes the forsythia and lilac the following spring as soon as they have blossomed. He removes the weeds from between the roses, prunes the roses, and has the farmers give him cattle dung that he uses to fertilize the hawthorn, walnut and Japanese cherry as well as the forsythia, lilac and rhododendron; he waters the roses and bushes twice a day during the summer, once early in the morning and once at dusk, on each of the meadows he places a sprinkler that bows to one side and then the other for half an hour twice a day, once early in the morning, and once when dusk is already beginning to gather, the gardener mows the grass once every two or three weeks. In fall, he saws the dry branches from the big trees with a long saw and smokes out the moles, in fall he rakes up the leaves from the meadows and burns them, when fall is coming to an end he empties all the water pipes in the house and shuts off the main valve, in winter he heats the house when the architect and his wife will be arriving and turns the water back on for the length of their stay.
THE ARCHITECT
HOW BITTER IT IS that he is having to bury everything. The porcelain from Meissen, his pewter pitchers and the silver. As if it were wartime. He himself doesn’t know whether he is burying something or simply laying in provisions for his return. He doesn’t even know if there’s any real difference between the two. In general he knows far less now than he used to. Just before the Russians marched in, his wife had packed up these very plates, these tankards and this silverware in crates, but that time she’d rowed out on the lake with the crates and lowered everything into the water on the shoal of the Nackliger which she knew from swimming. That was the place in the middle of the lake that was so shallow that when she was swimming far from shore in summer her feet would suddenly get tangled in the water plants and then she would start laughing and pretend to be drowning. The Russians, looking for what might have been hidden from them, only thought to poke around in the grass and the flowerbeds with long sticks, and while they were jabbing their sticks around, the lake was unhurriedly rinsing the dust from the treasures that were being kept safe from them. The new occupants of the house will have more time for swimming.
He’s lucky the winter is so mild this year, lucky that he’s able to get his spade into the earth at all. He buries his pewter pitchers among the roots of the big oak tree, the Meissen under a bushy fir, and the silver in the rose-bed right next to the house. Rest in peace. He knows that two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt. The architect fills up the holes, wondering whether pewter pitchers will now sprout from the buried pewter pitchers, plates and cups from the plates and cups, and forks, knives and spoons from the forks, knives and spoons, shooting up between the roses. He considers whether he shouldn’t finish up by burying the spade as well and use his bare hands to cover this final pit. And finds that he no longer knows something he once used to know: what counts as valuable and what does not. Will finding his Meissen porcelain again when he returns — if he returns — really make him any happier than finding this spade worth 2 marks 50 whose wooden handle has been polished smooth by the hands of the gardener over the past twenty years? But a wooden handle like this would be eaten by worms in any case. And so he doesn’t bury it, he brings it, as usual, back down to the toolshed beside the water, where for the past twenty years the spade has occupied its place among hoes, rakes, picks and shovels. Locks the toolshed, the golden spoon lure he once fished with dangling from the key, walks back up the shallow stone steps, hangs the key on the key hook in the living room, rinses his hands in the bathroom, two hours from now he’ll be sitting in the S-Bahn to West Berlin, his fingernails still rimmed black with dirt, he draws the crank for the shutters out of its niche in the wall one last time and closes the shutters from inside by means of the hidden mechanism he himself once thought up as a young man, to make his wife laugh.