Death in Venice and Other Tales

  His yawn expresses all this with an ill-mannered frankness impossible to misinterpret. And I have to grant that he has a point, that I owe him something, so I stretch my hand down to pat his head or shoulder in consolation. However, under these circumstances, he shows no gratitude and refuses to accept my endearments. He just yawns again—if possible, more rudely—and wriggles out from under my hand, even though unlike Percy, and in keeping with his commoner’s sensitivity to physical pain and pleasure, he normally likes to be patted. (Above all, he loves having his throat rubbed and has developed a comically frantic technique of jerking his head so that one’s hand is directed to the proper spot.) Disappointment is not the only reason for his temporary disinterest in my overtures. It also has to do with the fact that whenever he’s in motion—that is to say, whenever I’m in motion—he feels no need to be patted. He finds himself in too masculine a state for physical endearments—a situation that changes as soon as we come to a stop. Once we do, he is again receptive to my affections and will requite them with clumsily fervent insistence.

  Sometimes when I’m reading a book in the corner of my yard or under my favorite tree, I’m quite happy to interrupt my intellectual pursuits in order to talk or play some game with Baushan. What do I say, when I talk? Mostly I just call out his name, that sound which above all others is of particular interest to him because it designates himself, and which consequently has an electrifying effect on his whole being. By repeating the word with various intonations, I can rouse and ignite his ego, reminding him and making him ponder the fact that “Baushan” is what he’s called and who he is. If I keep this up for a while, I can put him in a state of rapture, a kind of ego-intoxication, in which he will spin round his own bodily axis and, chest bursting with pride, bark loudly and jubilantly up toward the heavens. Otherwise we entertain ourselves with a game in which I tap him on the snout, and he responds by snapping at my hand as if it were a fly. This makes us both laugh—yes, Baushan, too, laughs, and to me in my laughter, the spectacle of his mirth is one of the strangest, most moving sights in the world. It touches my heart to see the corners of his mouth, his typically haggard animal cheeks, start to quake and quiver when I tease him, to see in his blackish animal face the physical manifestations of human laughter—or at least their pale, somewhat hapless, melancholy reflection. I watch them appear, then disappear, giving way to startled embarrassment, before returning once more to tug at his face . . .

  Let me break off here before I lose myself any further in details. Despite my best intentions, this short description is already threatening to take on a distressing scope. I only want to sketch my hero in his full splendor, in his element, in that part of life in which he’s most himself and his talents appear in their best light, namely, at hunt. Prior to this, however, I must acquaint my readership with the arena of these delights, our hunting ground, my stretch of land by the river, for this location is intimately bound up with Baushan’s person and is as dear, as familiar and as significant to me as he is. So, without any further literary justification, the reader will allow me to introduce the hunting ground as the official heading and subject matter of my next portrait.

  THE HUNTING GROUND

  In every backyard of our spaciously planned development, there is a sharp contrast between older, giant trees that loom over the rooftops and frailer, artificially planted young ones. Easily recognizable as the original vegetative inhabitants of the region, the former are the pride and joy of our still quite recent settlement, and extreme care has been taken to protect and preserve them wherever possible. If in the process of measuring and dividing the lots a conflict arose—that is, if some venerable trunk covered with silvery moss happened to fall on a demarcation line—a fence was made to bulge out slightly, thereby incorporating it into someone’s yard, or a considerate gap was left in a concrete wall, where the old fellow still stands tall, half private, half public, its branches sometimes bare and snow-laden, sometimes adorned with tiny late-blossoming leaves.

  They are all specimens of the aspen, a tree that thrives on dampness as few do—which tells you something definitive about the unusual character of this stretch of land. It wasn’t long ago, no more than a decade and a half, that human ingenuity first reclaimed this area for habitation. Before that, it was only wild swampland, a real mosquito hole, where willows, dwarf poplars and other stunted growth cast their reflections in stagnant ponds. The region is alluvial, and a few meters below the earth’s surface there lies a layer of impregnable rock. Therefore the soil here was naturally marshy, and water collected in every depression. The land only dried out when the river level was lowered. I’m no engineer, but basically the trick was to get the water that couldn’t seep into the ground to run off laterally: in many places subterranean streams now feed into the river and the ground has firmed up. At least it has for the most part, for if you know the region as Baushan and I do, you can still find many a reed-overgrown hollow downstream that harkens back to the land’s original condition, remote areas where the damp keeps everything cool in even the hottest weather and where one gladly lingers for a couple of minutes on a summer walk to catch one’s breath.

  The entire region possesses its own curious individual character, distinguishable at a glance from the landscape of pines and mossy fields you might expect on the banks of a mountain stream. It has retained, I say, its original character, despite coming into the hands of the development company. Everywhere, not just in people’s backyards, the original, native vegetation has the clear upper hand over that introduced and cultivated by man. The horse chestnut, the fast-growing maple, even beeches and various other ornamental tree types occur along the esplanades and on the public grounds, but they are all cultivated, not natural, as are the Italian poplars that stand in rows of sterile masculinity. Earlier I identified the ash as aboriginal, and it’s quite widespread. You can find examples of all ages everywhere, from hundred-year-old giants to tender saplings that shoot up in great numbers like weeds from the sandy soil. It’s the ash—together with the white poplar, the aspen, the birch and the willow in both tree and shrub form—that puts a distinct stamp upon the landscape. These are all small-leaf trees, and small-leafiness—delicacy of foliage despite the often gigantic proportions of the trees themselves—is one of the regional flora’s immediately striking features. An exception is the elm, with its broad serrated leaves, whose bright, sticky surfaces spread out toward the sun in large clusters. Great hordes of creeping vines also wind their way everywhere in the woods around the younger trees and confusingly introduce their own lush foliage in amongst that of their hosts. The trim figure of the alder may collect in little thickets wherever there’s a hollow; the linden, however, seldom makes an appearance, the oak doesn’t occur at all and neither does the spruce. Such varieties can be found on the slope bordering our grounds to the east, where, in different soil, more usual forms of vegetation take over. They tower there dark against the sky, keeping watch over our shallow valley.

  No more than five hundred meters separate the slope and the river—I’ve paced them off myself. Although it may well be that the riverbanks fan out a bit upstream, the difference in breadth is insignificant, and it’s therefore remarkable what a wide variety of landscape this narrow stretch of land has to offer. This holds true even if one makes only restricted use of the open space available along the length of the river, as Baushan and I do, hardly ever prolonging our excursions beyond two hours in total. The variety of scenery and the vast number of possible routes for walks—which keep one from getting bored or noticing the narrowness of the park—are directly attributable to the grounds themselves falling into three quite distinct realms or zones, which can be enjoyed one at a time or combined via sharply angled diagonal paths. These are the river and its immediate banks on one side, the opposite slope, and the forest in between.

  Of the three, the widest is the forest, park, willow-thicket, or perhaps riverside-brush zone—I wish I could find a more accurate
and vivid name for this extraordinary terrain than the word “forest,” yet it seems I can’t. In no way are we talking about a forest in the usual sense: a great cathedral with a floor of moss and straw and countless pillars of approximately equal dimensions. The trees in our hunting ground differ radically in age and size. Principally on the riverbanks but also deeper within, there are massive ancients of the willow and poplar families. Then there are others that are fully grown but only about ten or fifteen years old, and lastly there is a legion of tender saplings—naturally sown nurseries of wild ash, birch and alder that might seem haggard were they not, as pointed out earlier, shot through with winding creepers and thereby given an almost tropical lushness. Nonetheless, I suspect that these weeds actually retard the development of their hosts, for in all the years I’ve lived here I never observed any of these saplings to have made much progress.

  The types of tree are few and closely related. The alder is a member of the birch family, and the poplar hardly differs from the willow. Moreover, you could even say that all of them tend to converge on the willow as a basic type, for as every forester knows, trees of various families tend to adapt together to an environment by imitating the lines and forms of the type originally predominant there. The lines that predominate here are those of the fantastically gnarled, witchlike willow, the faithful companion and neighbor of both running and standing water, whose sweeping limbs branch out in every direction like twisted fingers, and whose basic posture the other trees obviously attempt to emulate. The white poplar hunches over and can be quite difficult to distinguish from the birch, which, following the spirit of the place, also doubles up and grows extremely crooked—although I wouldn’t deny the existence of numerous individual specimens of the latter, that, especially when lit by the colors of a flattering afternoon sun, appear quite well formed and are delightful to behold. The birch is well known in these parts as a thin silver stalk with a few scattered leaves at its crown—as a charmingly figured and neatly attired maiden with a pretty chalk white trunk, whose leafy locks dangle in languid beauty. However, it also occurs in truly elephantine proportions, with a trunk far too thick for any man to get his arms around and a skin of true bark that turns white and smooth higher up while remaining rough, charred and cracked down below . . .

  Nor does the ground, for its part, bear much resemblance to that of a forest. It consists of gravel, clay, even sand, and hardly seems arable. Within certain limits, however, it is arable to the point of lavishness. A lush carpet of tall grass thrives there, which sometimes takes on the dry, sharp-edged form of beach grass, lying flat against the ground in winter like hay. Sometimes it gives way to reeds, though elsewhere—interspersed with hemlock, nettles, coltsfoot, all manner of creeping flora, overgrown thistles and tender young shoots where pheasants and other wild fowl take cover—it swells in soft, thick, abundant waves to touch the knotted roots of the trees. Wild grape and vine-hop twist their way up from these swells of ground cover like broad-leafed spiral garlands, and even in winter their stems remain firmly wound round the tree trunks like tough, uncuttable wire.

  The place is neither forest nor park—it’s a magic garden, no more, no less. I will defend the appellation, even though what we’re talking about is little more than a barren, constricted bit of nature conducive only to stunted growth, which could be summed up botanically with a few simple technical terms. The ground is rolling, constantly on the rise and fall, and as a result every vista it presents is pleasantly self-contained and sheltered on all sides. Were the woods miles wide—as wide as they are long—instead of only a hundred or so paces from middle to edge, you could hardly feel more hidden, enveloped and secluded. The ear alone is reminded, by the sound of running water from the west, of the proximity of the trusty river, which remains concealed from view . . . The ravines in that direction brim with elderberry, privet, jasmine and buckthorn underbrush, so that on humid June days one’s lungs can hardly contain the scent. There are also hollows, mere gravel pits along whose sides and bottom nothing grows but a couple of willow saplings and a bit of dried-out sage.

  The entire forest zone never ceases to have a peculiar effect on me, though I’ve visited it every day for a number of years. For some reason my fantasy is excited by the great number of ash trees that so remind me of giant ferns, by the twisting creepers and bedded reeds, by the dampness and aridity, by the scrawny jungle of underbrush. The ultimate impression is a bit like being transported to a landscape from another period of the earth’s history or walking on the bottom of the sea—a comparison with a grain of truth to it, since many places around here were once covered by water, especially those hollows, now rectangular grass basins with naturally sown nurseries of wild ash, that serve as pastures for sheep. One such basin is located directly behind my house.

  The wilderness is crisscrossed by paths, some mere stretches of trampled grass, others dirt trails clearly never planned but rather born of use, without any clear indication of who the people might have been who walked so often this way, for it is an unsettling rarity when Baushan and I do encounter anyone else. Whenever this happens, my companion will stop dead in his tracks and let out a single muffled yelp that quite accurately expresses my feelings about the intrusion as well. Even on beautiful Sunday afternoons in summer, when hordes of people come streaming from the city for a stroll (it’s always a couple of degrees cooler in these parts than elsewhere), we can normally wander along these inner paths in complete solitude. The others don’t know about the paths, and what’s more, the water, the river, has its usual allure. Pressing as close as it can up to water’s edge, up to the very edge if possible (i.e., if the river isn’t flooded), the great mass of humanity hurries out into the landscape and returns again at nightfall. At most we’ll stumble across a pair of lovers camped out in the bushes, their defiant yet timid animal eyes staring out from their nest, as though challenging us to raise some objection to their going about their business in this out-of-the-way spot. This we silently decline to do by turning off to one side, Baushan with his characteristic indifference toward everything that doesn’t bring with it the scent of game—I with an utterly blank expression that withholds judgment and never betrays the slightest indication of either approval or reproach.

  The paths are not my only means for conveying myself through my little park. Said location also has streets, or to be more precise, provisions for streets, which either previously were streets or were to have been streets and which—God willing—may yet still become streets. The explanation is this. Traces of a groundbreaking shovel and an idealistic entrepreneurial spirit make themselves felt far beyond the developed portion of our area, the little villa colony. The ambition was broad, the planning bold. The corporation that acquired the property ten or fifteen years ago intended something different—namely, bigger—for both the land and themselves than the handful of villas to which the settlement would eventually be restricted. Scores of building lots were made available, and one kilometer further downstream everything stood ready—as indeed it still does—to accommodate purchasers, enthusiasts of the sedentary life. Extravagance obviously ruled those initial board meetings. Not content with shoring up the riverbanks, constructing an adjacent boardwalk and planting a few trees, the planners extended their cultivating hand deep into the forest, clearing land, laying down gravel and partitioning the wilderness with streets—a few running lengthwise, more laterally—grandly envisioned streets of splendor, or at least the outlines of such streets in coarse gravel with indications of curbs and broad public sidewalks. Upon them, however, no public ever treads save Baushan and me, he on the sturdy leather of his four paws, I in my hobnailed boots to combat the gravel. The villas that according to the development corporation’s calculations and hopes were to be crowding these streets have refused to materialize, despite my setting good example and building my house here early on. The additional villas have refused, I say, to materialize at any time during the ten or fifteen intervening years, and thus i
t’s no wonder that a certain malaise has settled over the region and that steadfast resistance toward further expenditures or even the completion of the original grand designs now holds sway in the company bosom.

  Nonetheless, enough progress was made for these uninhabited streets to have been given proper names, just like any within the city limits or suburbs, and I would love to know who the dreamer and historically minded literary connoisseur was among the developers who thought them up. There’s a Gellert-, an Opitz-, a Fleming-, a Bürger- and even an Adalbert-Stifter-Straße, upon which it seems especially fitting for me to walk in my hobnailed boots. Signposts, similar to those one might find in suburbs, have been stuck in the ground at every intersection, and attached to them are the signs themselves, blue enamel signs with white letters, as is customary in these parts. Alas, they aren’t in very good condition. Too long they’ve designated mere sketches of streets where no one actually wants to live, so that they, as much as anything, now embody the local atmosphere of malaise, fiasco and arrested development. Neglected, with no one bearing responsibility for their maintenance or replacement, they stand in disrepair, and the rain and the sun have taken a heavy toll. Much of their enamel is cracked, and rust has eaten away the white letters, often leaving nothing but brown flecks or yawning gaps with unpleasantly jagged edges, so that the street names are difficult to read. One of them in particular presented a puzzle when I first came here and began to explore the area. It was an exceptionally long sign on which the word Straße was undamaged. In the name itself, however, which (as I said) was, or rather had been, quite long, most of the letters were illegible. The number of rust spots revealed how many of them there were supposed to be, but nothing could be made out beside half of an S at the beginning, an e somewhere in the middle and another e at the end. That was too little for my wits to go on; the equation had too many variables. For quite a while I stood, hands behind my back, staring up, studying this long sign. Then I continued with Baushan along the sidewalk. Yet even as I imagined I was thinking about something else entirely, my subconscious was working, searching for the mystery name, and suddenly it hit me—I stopped dead in my tracks, then hurried back and repositioned myself before the sign, testing my hypothesis. Yes, indeed, it fit. That was the solution. I was walking down Shakespearestraße.