Over the white pond
The wild birds have taken flight.
In the evening an icy wind blows from our
stars.
Over our graves
The night bends its broken brow.
Under oak trees we sway on a silver barge.
The city’s white walls ring for ever.
Under vaults of thorns
O my brother we blind clock-hands climb
towards midnight.
That was early May 1945; It was not much longer before I grasped his very delusion of ours as the essence of blindness and realized, shuddering, that we blind clock-hands had indeed climbed with desperate strength towards midnight. But what disturbed me still more, much later: the poet himself saw the clock-hand, and saw midnight, and saw himself, and yet, self-seeing, could see himself as blind? - Was it the blindness of the eye within the eye, or the blindness of the old seers, the blindness of Tiresias?- It took a long time to realize that what Trakl invoked was a blindness incapable of looking past its own time; the blindness of all the gifted ones who have eyes to behold themselves and whose boldest gaze sees : blind clock-hands. – Here we shall stop.
The street was silent when I left the house; wan
darkness, no stars; from the doorway where my parents waved the hall light,
mocking blackout regulations, welled cloudy in the mild air. – To this day I
hear my father saying as we hugged goodbye and afterwards, as I went down the
front steps typical of mountain homes, that next time he’d tell me much, much
more about George, it was all coming back to him, such odd and droll things;
he’d fill me in after the war was won – I never saw my father again: he died a
few days later, reportedly of blood poisoning, though I suspect he resorted to one
of his vials; at any rate that was our last conversation. He left behind no
writings and doubtless wouldn’t have thought it worth the effort to note down
memories of is crazy bunkmate. Though he had told me more about Georgie that
night, I can vouch only for what I related above and for one other detail which
I believe my father shared, though I later found it recorded in another source,
in Albert Ehrenstein’s remembrances: leaning out of the window at dusk, Trakl
loved to toss a glowing cigarette stub on the street and watch it fade. – The
same movement is found in some of his poems, the quiet passing of a small tranquillity
amid all the indifferent forces that are like the night vanquishing the evening
– Fled is the gold of the days, | The evening’s brown and blue shades:| The
shepherd’s flutes have died away| And evening’s blue and brown shades| Fled is
the gold of the days - and a
consciousness that preserves this fading.
I turned off into total darkness; water rushed far below the street. – Was I
thinking of Trakl? I hurried to the station, where the trains were still
running, it was a long way, an hour at least, and I was still hobbling on a stick.
I was probably humming one of the idiotic verses that you use to drum yourself
into the trance of automized marching, a mercenary’s verse, a mercenary’s tune,’
all I recall is my hounded haste in the warm, dark night. But I know that
premonition and madness and lurking fear were already solidifying into the
figure of an angel, often invoked in those days, regularly by my father.
Michael, the angel of the Germans, would cleave the heavens with his sword and
descend to save his people, clad in flaming armor, at the final hour when night
is darkest. – I had never seen Michael as a guardian angel; even before that
May he was the Angel of the Apocalypse, the angel of the sixth trumpet and the
falling fire who proclaims in all the tongues of the Earth: Babylon the great
is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every
foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. Babylon the great is
fallen, is fallen; all nations have drunk the wine of the wrath of her
fornication! – I’d grown terribly familiar with this angel now that fire had
fallen from the sky, an envoy with pinions of snow and temples of scarlet; the angel
of my heart was gentle and pure but now his wings were stained with faeces and
worms dripped from his lids; in this shape, I took Trakl with me – and I still
carried in my knapsack the large grey book with the broken lyre on the cover,
for five or six days more, then tossed it away along with my knapsack, coat, blanket
and tinned meat in the hope of making it more quickly to the Americans who were
said to have halted at the Elbe.
All the people hastening through Bohemian forests strove to reach the
Americans; the war was over; no angels appeared; beneath the oaks and the
spruce, the SS marauded and the henchmen of a southward-fleeing field marshal
court-martialled and hanged the northward fleeing soldiers; and tens of
thousands of POWs trotted eastward, steps dragging, heads hanging, to meet an
inconceivable fate. Since that fate was not the instant execution we had
anticipated, it could only mean that young and old would spend the rest of their
lives in the Siberian lead mines, -it was the end of Nazism, and we did not
doubt the downfall of the thing we called Germany; it was what we were experiencing.
-The war was lost; no angels appeared; the way to the Elbe was blocked by a
victor whose wells we had choked with dirt, whose apple trees we had felled,
whose mines we had flooded, whose cities we had burnt down – he would take his revenge
now, no doubt about it. At this hour each saw a dark omen – mine was an icy
cattle car filled with singing Ukrainian women, rolling off into the grey of a
February dawn- and we tore the insignia from our uniform shirts, the officers
shed their epaulettes, the military police their glittering gorgets, and here
and there the SS with glowing iron expunged their sigils from their own flesh.
-What was left was a void; it expanded.-Hastening westward through the woods to
the Elbe, I hoped to join some foreign legion; I was twenty-three and had my A
levels, taken early due to the war, but all I could do was operate a machine
gun, obey and carry out orders; some colonial service might be able to use me,
that was my final hope, now that Germany was a hope no longer. But on all the
roads to the Elbe and surrounding the woods soldiers stood in long, earth-brown
coats with long bayonets on their guns; their watch fires smoked, they drank
and laughed, bells peeled, now and then a machine gun stuttered, and hanged men
swayed from the oaks.- A suicide attempt in the brush by a field and my last
escape had failed, and I trotted with the ten thousand eastward for seventeen
days, sun stabbing, cherry trees blooming; we ate their sap and ate the grass
where we bivouacked and swam in streams and ponds and ate water and ate dirt
and heard the bells from the Moravian steeples and stared into the alien, yet
already unbelievably familiar, faces of the young Kirghiz soldiers who escorted
us and it was May. – In those days I thought nothing; it was a sense of perfect
lightness, of floating in an empty space. - No longer here, not yet there. –
After swimming we lay naked in the sun, animal torpor beyond hunger and despair,
perhaps, for a few days, the bliss of nothingness. I owned only what I carried
on my person, and that was little: belt and boots still, coat no longer, no
watch, no lighter, no pen, no knife and no book; that lay somewhere on the side
of the road, a knapsack filled with tinned meat and Trakl’s poems. I didn’t
even wonder whether someone would find and read it, I thought nothing.
And yet I carried these poems with me as a wan glow against which I now aw the
world. Just as you see a landscape at sunset, in murky November, when fog and
red glow mingle in a smouldering dusk where trees and houses loom blocked in
black, nearly nothing but black, faraway things indistinguishable: a fading
into the realm of shadows, yet an unreal light prevailing in the consciousness
of nearing night. – Twilight and decay; it was May, the cherry trees were
blooming and we trotted, grey with hunger and dread, towards the east, towards
a reception camp near Brno where we were interrogated and shorn and received;
in place of the confiscated pay-book, the abbreviations for voyennoplenny
in yellow oil paint on the back of our uniform jackets and on our trouser legs
and on our caps; this was our new home, and there was food for the first time
and I crouched in the mud outside the overfilled barracks and dunked dry bread
in the millet soup and heard the silent din of the lines:
There is a light, extinguished by the wind.
There is a field of stubble, where a black rain
falls.
There is a vineyard, burnt and black with
holes full of spiders’
There is a road towards downfall.
These were Trakl’s verses, mingled with lines of my own, relentless droning litany of a fading consciousness seeking self-pity as its sole crutch. – So I took Trakl into captivity and my brooding and despair wore his colors: shadows embracing in front of a mirror gone blind, former lives slipping past on silver soles. – This was Trakl’s ‘Psalm’, which I learnt by heart back then; for a long time I kept it in my memory, and had I been asked in the summer 1945, in the convoy from the Brno transit camp to the labor camp at Neftegorsk in the Caucasus, what the seminal event of my last few years had been, I would have replied without hesitation: The discovery of George Trakl’s poem.
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