Читать книгу Understories - Tim Horvath - Страница 11

Anyone but Lear, Schöner thinks. He hobbles across the pebbled path, toward the periphery of the woods, where he can still plant the walker almost flat. On he goes, “Let not . . . to true mind’s marriages . . . admit . . . impediments.” Even as he pitches himself forward on hard end consonants, he senses the quote is off: the right author but the wrong words, the right words, the wrong play, maybe not even a play. Not only wrong but ironically wrong. Anyone but Lear, he has vowed for a long time, and he is none other.

As he pauses to survey the woods, he feels them staring back, judging, rejecting his desire for entrance. Like he is some illegal, trying to cross a border without the proper papers. The sun catches him as he curses the wood that he wants to be in. This is the most devastating part of age, he thinks. He can laugh at slipshod memory along with the others, the misplaced glasses and pills. The hearing aid is no picnic, but he does not miss the birds nearly as much as the trees they sit in. Aches and pains are jarring, but there are medication and sleep for such things.

He can even deal with the way objects double and then vanish like sea lions bobbing at the ocean’s surface—all of these are compromises he can come to terms with and has. But to be repudiated by the woods, his woods—this is intolerable. Of course, he must recognize that the walker (an overly optimistic name, he thinks) cannot possibly commandeer the undergrowth, the splay of fallen wood overgrown with moss and fungus, the tip-up mounds with sideways roots that permeate the plot. From here, he can almost enter in memory. Every inch of the plot is stored somewhere in his brain. Even now, he can taste rampant leaf litter, inhale the ground’s rank riches. Mosquitoes left him alone. Maybe he scrambled their signals. Whatever the reason for their aloofness, their indifference to him afforded him many hours in the woods alone.

But he won’t be alone for long now. In a matter of hours, he will see the blue Subaru hatchback pull up, carrying his daughter and Alan. That assortment alone makes it radically different from Lear’s situation—not three sisters vying for land, and affection in the form of land, but merely one daughter and her husband. He breathes relief at the divergence. They will try to convince him, again, as they used to do every few years, as they now do more insistently, less obliquely, to clear out the fallen debris, to clean up that forest. They love the woods, they insist, but the plot is a mess. “A rain forest,” his daughter, Sabine, calls it, “in the middle of Peterborough, New Hampshire.”

He jokes that if they can find an anaconda there, they can have the woods, do with them what they will. Raise cattle. Put in a roller coaster. Sell the land to the “developers” who wait like pitcher plants for their prey to stumble in.

Sabine insists that developing the land is not what they want. “We want to be able to walk to the lake on the property. Imagine if we could do that. We could hire someone to carve a trail through there. I’ve already gotten an estimate—a local guy who loves this area, not some tree-hating jerk. And then we could walk to sit by the lake. Our kids could, and your great-grandkids, whenever they arrive. And we won’t have to exploit the McElroys from Rhode Island and wait for invitations to go out on their boat.”

He is familiar with the arguments. And not necessarily opposed, at least not to the principle behind them. He has nothing against boats and lakes to cool down in in midsummer heat, and trails to access those lakes.

But he will wait it out until they drag out that anaconda. Will not submit to the desire to clean up the woods, to haul away the degenerating matter that trips one up at every turn. It is not purity that he is after; on the contrary, it is precisely the lack of purity on which he insists.

In the spring of 1930, he is honored with the venia legendi, followed swiftly by an appointment as Privatdozent on the faculty of Botanical Sciences at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. He is twenty-four. He is euphoric upon learning of his position. Suddenly he is a peer of his own teachers. But more importantly, Freiburg abuts the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald, and yet it is a big city, too, so much more colorful and stately than the small village in which he was raised. He is further honored with an office in a building dating from the 1700s. Then again, in this university, which goes back to medieval times, this does not even qualify as the Alte Universität.

But it would be more accurate to call the woods both his office and his classroom. Though he is expected to do research, and it is clear that he had better be seen hunched over his library carrel from time to time, the head of his department supports his idea to take the students out into the woods, their notebooks poised to sketch out the leaves, trunks. He makes them draw, damnit, makes them see. Some drop out, and that is precisely the way he wants it. For soon he makes them learn a good deal of Latin, insistent that they not only know everyday German terms. “That’s Fagus sylvatica. Over there, Picas abies,” he says. “You must be able to speak of the trees in a way that your mother will not always understand.” As he teases them, he prods them gently with the knotted end of the gnarled stick that he otherwise carries to point to signs of incipient disease, or lightning scars in the bark.

The students want to carry him down the streets on their shoulders, chanting “Schöner! Schöner!” with steins in their free hands. He teases them about carving their initials in the trees. “If I ever see yours, I will carve the tree’s own initials in you,” he says, aiming the stick at Gunther, a promising student who everyone knows is lovesick. Gunther asks for a repetition and then he calls out, with moderate confidence, “AB.” The professor nods; a balsam fir. The students know that he adores them and the trees. They know that his family is days away, that he has no car, no wife, and that his life consists of them and arboreal species.

Their ventures into the woods afford them more time to talk than they would have in an ordinary class or in a laboratory. When they are not bending down to examine an unusual fungus or char marks on the trunk of a tree, they fall into step with one another, and conversation unfurls. Over the semester, he learns whose fathers fought and died in the Great War, whose families’ businesses went belly-up, who studied their plant biology by candlelight after sweeping up the floor in the store beneath their parents’ cramped apartment. And so he gains an intimacy that only the rarest professors achieve so quickly and most never do. Meanwhile, they ask him why he doesn’t have a Fräulein of his own. At first he dodges the question, but they drop hints that some suspect he is a bit of a Fräulein himself, and so he feels perhaps it would be in his best interest to respond.

“Hans, where can I find a woman who will put up with my long walks? She will wonder where I’ve been all day, whom I’ve been frolicking with. I smell like a peasant. And what will I bring her, a spruce cone for a ring?”

But what really gets him famous is the way he makes them clamber up trees. It is what he did as a boy, whenever he could. He remembers his arms extending desperately toward the lowermost branches of a beech behind the cottage in which he was born, and then the day he woke up and could reach them, and then the sense years later that the branch he was perched on was about to snap under his own weight. “If you are not willing to climb, how else will you see what is truly in the canopy?” he asks them. Then he turns their stratagem against them. “If you want to be Fräulein, stay down here on the ground. If you want to be scientists, then up and away.”

They call him ‘Schimmler’ because he has taught them the English word “shimmy,” which he learned at an international conference held in Paris. Paris! He is the first member of his family to travel out of the country, as far as he knows. It is just a play on words and a generic German name. No one has heard of Himmler yet.

And so he teaches them about forest succession, not out of a textbook, but in the woods themselves, standing in a Lichtung, a clearing, calling upward to Rudolf, asking, “What do you see?” If Rudy fell out, would he lose his position and be forced to take up a broom of his own? Worse, would he be jailed? Possibly, but he doesn’t worry about such contingencies. He chooses trees that are sturdy and broad-branched, oaks of hundreds of years, and he has his dream job and he has hundreds of years himself, he thinks.

When he says the word succession, he thinks of the royal families of England and France, the border of which is only a few kilometers away. He envisions trees vying for the throne of the canopy, Tudor Firs and Stuart Oaks, and the revolutions of fires and winds that could upend the existing lineages, bringing forth new pretenders and contenders alike. The top of a tree is called a crown. This cannot be coincidence. It signifies, rather, that no matter how rigorous the science, no matter how precisely calibrated one’s instruments, trees are, in the end, regal beings to whom we are obligated to bow.

It is late September of 1931, and the class is heading back from an eight-hour hike that took them into a favorite stand of oak and yellow beech, a quiet spot a way’s off the notched trail, overlooking a hidden waterfall. He will take them there again in winter to mark the differences. By then they will be different, the students. He will ask them to note the changes, some obvious, others more subtle, in the grove, and then to note the changes in themselves. In the silent vacancy left by the dormant falls, they will seem much more than a couple of months older, and will feel it, too. As for himself, the mustache he has cultivated in order to distinguish himself from his students will have thickened. He will have allowed it to do so in spite of knowing full well that appearance can belie age—a thin tree can be deceptively old, and a thick one, even peeling with shaggy bark, rather young. It’s a favorite lesson, the sort of intuition-defying phenomenon that astonishes them in September, though it might leave them unmoved in December.

As they are returning from the stand, a mood of mirth permeating the group after a swim at the falls, Max, one of his quieter students, gets his attention.

“Herr Dr. Schöner?”

“Yes, Max.”

“I’m afraid I may have to . . . switch from the class.”

It is late for a student to leave class except for medical reasons. He is accustomed to students dropping from the roster—many find themselves unprepared for the onslaught of information and the discipline of Latin nomenclature. Others, though they might like the idea of the class, find their tendons and knees aren’t up to the challenge. Still others find that a day of strenuous hiking is no way to nurse a hangover. Of course, those who are cowed by climbing trees have not even signed up for the course, as Schöner’s reputation is already well established by now.

He has watched Max carefully for the past couple of weeks. He is a superb student, and through quizzes and the first exam, he can see that Max has a knack for it, and he’ll be sad to lose him. He’ll be sadder by far, though, if it has to do with Schöner’s being a Jew. So far, he hasn’t lost any students that he knows of to this fact, but Freiburg has no shortage of anti-Semitism; odds are, he’s lost some he doesn’t even know about.

So he’s relieved when Max says, “It’s not that I want to cut out this class. It’s just that with the hour earlier, I miss out on Herr Heidegger’s lectures.”

Now it makes sense. He has asked them to gather at eight rather than nine, so that they can make the most of daylight hours and cover more ground. There has never been a conflict before. But he knows that Heidegger is the university’s true superstar. Winning him from Marburg was a great coup. Students come not only from all over Germany but from throughout the Continent to hear the author of Being and Time hold forth at the podium. Some swear to his greatness and brilliance, while others consider him the biggest sham in the university, a propounder of mystical terms, a spider weaving webs in midair. He’s heard the mockeries, as students parody his jargon—“Dasein yawns in its being-toward-bed”—and scoff at his rustic appearance. He thinks about it for a few minutes.

Then he turns to Max and says, “How badly do you want to be there for Herr Heidegger?”

Max curls his lip. “I want to do both. It’s not an insult to your class.”

“Well, suppose we leave at the original time from now on?”

“I’d still need to leave his lectures early.”

“Perhaps I can write a note to Herr Heidegger for you.”

“That might work,” says Max. “I’m always there for his seminar, and I enter into discussion a lot. I mean, he forces us to. But I feel like he notices that I’m not at all the lectures.”

Hunched over a magnifying glass the next morning, examining a diseased bit of bark, Schöner receives a knock on his office door. When he says “Come in,” he is surprised by the presence of the striking figure he recognizes immediately as Martin Heidegger. He knows him from faculty meetings, but up close, certain features are accented: the high, barren forehead, hair arching back, the mustache tightly clipped on the upper bank of the lips, and, most of all, the penetrating eyes. His outer garb is that of a peasant, though a tie lurks beneath.

“Herr Professor Heidegger,” he greets him. “Herr Schöner. What brings you to this part of campus?”

From what he has heard of Heidegger’s lectures, he expects a booming, larger-than-life figure, but the man is soft-spoken, almost shrinking his way into the tiny office. “Call me Martin,” he says. Heidegger looks him over. “So, here he is,” he goes on, the slightest trace of a smile visible. “The teacher who climbs trees.”

“Yes,” Schöner laughs. “It’s a necessary part of my job.”

“Hmmm, yes,” Heidegger says. “Well, it’s as Hölderlin says, ‘Others climb higher/To ethereal Light who’ve been faithful/ To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit/Of the gods.’”

“Well,” says Schöner. “I just do it to get the best view of the canopy.”

Heidegger looks mildly embarrassed, or perhaps disappointed. He clears his throat. “In any case, it seems that we have a student in common.”

“Ah, yes, Max.”

“Indeed. He is a talented thinker.”

“He’s a talented young man, then, because he shows signs of doing well in my class, too.”

“So he’ll be leaving my lectures a few minutes early.”

“If that’s all right. You see, I asked the students at the beginning of the term if they could leave a bit earlier for some of our walks, if they had any conflict. But if it imposes on you, I would certainly discourage him from—”

“Nonsense.” Heidegger waves him off. “It’s all right. To be frank, he’ll learn more in the open air than sitting in a hard chair daydreaming about pine trees.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s hardly the case,” says Schöner, somehow embarrassed himself now.

There is a protracted silence. Then Heidegger says, “That piece of bark . . .”

Schöner looks back at his specimen. “Yes?”

The philosopher looks puzzled. “What can you learn from it? I mean, by examining it thusly?”

“Well, I’m trying to figure out what got to it first, animal, fungus, or pathogen.”

Heidegger nods, and Schöner can’t tell whether this is genuine interest or mere politeness. He hears Heidegger’s intense breath, then hears him ask, “How well do you know these woods?”

“Fairly well,” Schöner replies. Probably an understatement—he knows them, by now, better than any professor at Freiburg, surely as well as some of the woodsmen who earn a living there.

“Perhaps you can show me, sometime, some of your favored routes.”

“It would be an honor, Herr Professor Heidegger,” says Schöner.

“Please. Martin,” he says, scratching above his mustache right into his nostrils.

Schöner and Heidegger go on lengthy walks through the Schwarzwald. “How is your work?” is always the first thing Heidegger asks him the moment they’ve gone beyond the garden and through the gate at the edge of the foothills. Schöner points out the various kinds of trees, explains the dynamics of the cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, while Heidegger holds forth on poetry, art, music. Schöner knows some scattered lines of poetry from secondary school, his Goethe and some Trakl.

On one of their earliest walks, Heidegger recoils in horror as he rattles off names with which Schöner has only the faintest familiarity. “Schlegel? Heine? Hölderlin?”

It is only when Schöner realizes he’s being, at least in part, had that he retaliates with equally exaggerated dismay: “Not know a black spruce from a red spruce? Norway from white?” This prompts a lengthy excursus from Heidegger on Goethe’s theory of colors. Schöner, accusing him of trying to change the subject, insists on bringing him back to the trees, offering up the same mnemonics he does to his students. After several misidentifications, Heidegger throws his arms up in despair, and Schöner drops it.

After they’ve gone for several of these jaunts, Heidegger gets him a copy of Schlegel’s Shakespeare. He explains that Schlegel was influenced by Herder in his translation, recognizing the playwright not merely as a great dramatist, tragedian, and shaper of characters but as a splendid wordsmith, whose puns and poetry and musicality are inextricable from the works’ greatness.

“In Schlegel’s rendering,” Heidegger says, “Shakespeare is almost German.”

Looking through it in the evening, Schöner sees that he has inscribed the volume: “To my tree climber, who lends me his forest spectacles.”

Schöner, in turn, gets him a tree-identification guide, which he inscribes: “May this be soon as dog-eared as Viburnum plicatum.” Though it is a plant he’s pointed out to the philosopher, Schöner worries that his inscription is too impersonal. Nevertheless, he cannot risk a joke such as “Great being-in-the-woods with you,” since Heidegger is highly sensitive about the accusations that he coins terms and phrases with flagrant disregard for clarity and logic.

As for Schöner, he feels certain that there is clarity in Heidegger’s thought. As they are walking, sometimes, he loses himself in Heidegger’s voice, as soothing as though they’ve been following the banks of a stream. There is always a sense of connectedness, of going somewhere, even if Schöner is lost mostly in the sounds of the words. He can distinguish the grammatical distinctions between Sosein (“Being-as-it-is”), Sein-bei (“Being-alongside”), and his namesake, Schon-sein-in (“Being-already-alongside”) but he cannot follow the conceptual distinctions that the philosopher is attempting. At times, Heidegger makes him feel a little like he doesn’t speak German at all. It is something that the scientists will often poke fun at the philosophers for, this lofty propensity for abstraction, which sometimes seems to be a peculiarly German affliction. But in Heidegger’s voice the words are infused with something that makes them as palpable as the furrows in bark.

Though the pair return continually to the joke of their respective intellectual blind spots, they also find themselves returning again and again to science. Heidegger vehemently maintains that philosophy is a science, and Schöner remains skeptical. Further, Heidegger says, science has become too fragmented—he rattles off the various divisions and disciplines in the university as if he is a judge pronouncing a lengthy sentence. “But,” he says, “it is not too late. All science needs to do, really, is to recover its essence.” He praises the Greeks, how in the true spirit of discovery they had no separate designations for chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, physics, and so were better able to apprehend nature as a whole. At first, Schöner is thrilled to learn of Heidegger’s enthusiasm for such work, for he has secretly lamented such divisions, the petty snobberies and snubbings that they invite. The mathematicians look down on the physicists, who can’t quite do the pure math. In turn, the chemists couldn’t cut it in physics, and the biologists, like himself, are at the bottom of the pecking order, dealing with spotted haunches and big leafy greens, even while the physicists are plying away at the atomic limit of matter. Schöner feels that he is viewed by many, in spite of Freiburg’s prestige, as a taxonomist, or, worse, a glorified gardener.

He is also delighted by Heidegger’s reverence for classical civilizations. At last he’s found an ally who will sympathize with his own insistence on instilling Latin terms in his students’ minds. Heidegger, though, never simply agrees or disagrees, and in this case he frowns.

“The Romans translated everything, but the essences were destroyed in the act. Unlike the Greeks, remember, the Romans were a brutal, materialistic people right down to the morpheme.”

Schöner is no match for him as a philologist, so he tries to swing the conversation back to the need for interdisciplinarity, where they will surely agree. “Anything else is sheer stupidity,” says Schöner. The trees grow in the soil. For that, we need to understand nitrogen compounds. To understand these, we must understand nitrogen atoms, right down to physics. Labels impede scientific work. Worse, they impede progress.” He practically sings the last word.

Heidegger seems more amenable as he speaks, but in the end he continues to hem and haw. “Progress. A word to be infinitely suspicious of,” he says. “Science needs to get back to its roots, its origins. In its essence, science has no divisions. But the essence of science has little to do with its practical forms.”

“I’m afraid,” admits Schöner, “that maybe I don’t understand what you mean by the ‘essence.’”

“You’re not alone, then,” says Heidegger.

On many occasions, they loop around to a spot they’ve been that morning, and Heidegger will ask, “Were we here earlier?”

“We were.”

In these cases, Schöner is so sure that the other is thinking, “As with our conversations,” he doesn’t bother remarking it himself.

In late November, crunching through fresh-fallen snow, they come upon a veritable army of towering pines. Heidegger asks, “How old are these?”

Schöner looks over them, tightly bound with crisscrossing bands of branches at chest height and upward, a stand of the type that gives the Black Forest its name. “Probably a couple of hundred years.” Together, they search for a downed tree that will reveal its rings.

After they confirm that the trees are at least 250 years old, Heidegger gazes up, marveling at their lattice formation. “They live so much longer than us. For that, and lacking consciousness of their mortality, they call our attention to our own.”

As winter comes through, they ski, and Heidegger is a daredevil, even though he claims he did not start skiing until he was an adult. The philosopher teases him for taking turns too wide, especially on precipitous slopes, and Schöner wonders if this is how his students feel when he antagonizes them for being reluctant to climb. At some point, several minutes behind, he hears Heidegger’s scalding laughter from below, echoing off the walls of a canyon. As he skis downhill toward the sound, for a moment he feels a sudden urge to run Heidegger down. Instead, as he pulls into a stop, he tears off his skis and leaps into the lower branches of a beech tree and begins ascending, panting and calling down, “If I’m such a coward, you won’t start to look like a little mouse as I get higher and higher above you.” Heidegger stays on the ground, and his voice sounds faint as he calls up, “Schöner, you’re braver than I thought.”

By 1932, the university is beginning to feel the effects of political ferment, which are still just a ripple, not quite a shudder, throughout Germany. Freiburg may be far from Berlin and Munich, but the National Socialists have struck the universities, like the bark disease striking beeches, youngest first. Of course, soon nothing will be intact; for now, the Nazis are overrepresented in the schools but still a minority elsewhere.

Over time, Schöner has taken on greater responsibilities, sitting on various committees and administrative bodies, which all take away from time he’d rather be spending in the forest. Still, he teaches his class, and gets outside as much as possible. Heidegger, too, has increased his commitments, and while they see each other less regularly, their relationship is still cordial.

The students seem different, though, more brazen, more disaffected, less drawn in by his enthusiasm and his humor. The enthusiasm feels more forced, too. He is reluctant to prod students, even gently, with his walking stick. He doesn’t climb trees anymore, after a couple of students filed an anonymous complaint and he was reprimanded. That felt like a gut punch, and while he always suspected who it was, and that it was resentment and laziness that had motivated the complaint rather than genuine concern for the well-being of their fellow students, he could never pin it down with certainty. During classes, he has begun to feel as though he’s being watched.

Moreover, the students are more inclined to challenge him directly. “What exactly is the point of all this?” one asks.

He’s heard the question before, in a less acidic tone. Nevertheless, he holds his ground and answers patiently. “Germany’s forests are a source of her history, her greatness. If we do not understand what is around us, we will never understand who we are or where we are going.”

But the students are not as quickly appeased by this sort of answer as they once had been. “Where we are going has nothing to do with the woods and these Hansel and Gretel fairy tales,” one says. “Germany’s greatness is in its blood, its resolve. Our science ought to be about the Volk, not the trees.”

On a desk in his classroom, someone has written “Who gives a flying damn what’s in the canopy?” Because he holds class inside more often now, he is forced to look at it day after day. And in different handwriting, frighteningly neat and compact, someone has written, “Is a Jew hanging in a tree shade-tolerant?” beside a drawing of a hanged man dangling from a noose. No longer does he admonish them about carving in the trees. Recently, he has sighted a couple of swastikas etched into them, and he shook his head and said nothing. It occurred to him then that the swastika, with its many straight lines, might very well have been invented by a veteran carver of trees.