And neither did the forest.
Standing at dusk by the window of my flat on Weissenburgerstrasse— feigning even to myself a certain absentmindedness, so that I could always retreat into the wings of the curtain without having to feel ashamed about spying — to be able to witness undisturbed the scene that took place twice a week, I felt the same gently fluttering excitement I had when studying the painting, because, just as in a classical story where there's always an objective, down-to-earth designation of the time and place of the occurrence, however abstracted and rarefied the human events being dealt with, I could be sure that the little interlude on my street would always take place not only at dusk but on Tuesdays and Fridays; my own excitement arrived according to this timetable, I could feel it in my throat, in my belly, and around my groin, and I could no longer tell which image was more important, the one of the antique mural or the one I'd call real and could see come to life by looking through my window; at any rate, this is where I would have begun my narrative, with this scene, though I would have liked to leave out the observer and his creative feelings, so similar to sexual arousal; I didn't want to treat the story as if someone were actually witnessing it, but instead indirectly, as it unfolded of itself, always the same way, repeating itself, beginning with the arrival of the horse-drawn wagon: on nearby Wörther Platz the gas lamps were already burning, but the lamplighter still had to traverse the square, with his forked pole uncover the peaked glass bells, and with the same long fork turn up the bluish-yellow flames before he got to our street; it wasn't dark yet, daylight still lingered when in the shadow of young plane trees lining the street, and just in front of the entrance to the basement butcher shop across the street, the closed white wagon came to a halt and the slim coachman, after throwing the reins over the shiny brake handle, jumped off his seat; in winter, or if a cold wind was blowing, he would quickly pull two horse blankets from under the seat and spread them over the horses' backs, so that while the scene was taking place the sweating animals wouldn't catch cold — this bit with the blankets was omitted in the mild weather of spring or fall or when the ruddy twilight of a warm summer evening still played with the breeze among the trees and on the blackened roofs of the mean tenements; then he would take the whip and, after first cracking it against his boot, stick it next to the reins; by this time the three women would be standing on the sidewalk near the wagon, but since I was watching from my fifth-floor window, from the shadow of the roof, the wagon blocked my view of their shapely figures; moments earlier the three heads had popped up, one after the other, as the women emerged from the depth of the steep staircase leading to the basement; the heaviest of the three, by no means fat, was the mother, who, from a distance at least, hardly looked older than her unmarried daughters, more like an older sister of the twin girls, who in build and movement were perfectly identical, and only from close up could one tell them apart by the color of their hair, one being an ash-blond, the other's blond hair darkened by a tinge of red, but they had the same, somewhat blank blue eyes set in the full, white expanse of their faces; I knew them, though I had never made it down to the cold bowels of their white-tiled shop; once in a while I had seen them on the street when during their lunch break they went for a stroll in the square, arm in arm, their skirts swaying evenly around their waists, or when I peeked through the barred cellar window and they, like two wild goddesses, were standing behind the counter, their blouse sleeves rolled up to their elbows, carving bloody chunks of meat; and thanks to my good old landlady Frau Hübner, who cooked for me and who bought cold cuts and other meats there, I knew everything about these women, everything that could be gleaned from kitchen gossip; not that I wanted to include in my story those intimate details known to everyone on our street; what interested me was the mere unfolding of the scene, its mute choreography, as it were, and the series of exciting relationships it intimated.
The wagon came from the main slaughterhouse on Eldenaerstrasse.
The coachman could not have been more than twenty, just slightly older than the two girls, and hadn't yet lost the adolescent resilience that long years of hard physical labor would surely rob him of; his tanned skin had a healthy sheen, his hair was so black it seemed to glitter, and a profusion of wild, dark chest hair curled out of his always unbuttoned shirt; the three women looked even more alike on such occasions, because they all wore bloodstained smocks over their dresses.
As the young man strode to the back of the wagon, he gave each of the women, the mother included, a gentle slap on the face; they had been waiting for this, anticipating the pleasurable warmth of the rough hand on their cheeks, and now fell in behind him, giggling, touching, pinching one another as they went, as if to share among themselves what each of them had just received from the young man; he opened the wagon door and, throwing a large blood-spattered sheet over his shoulder, began to unload the shipment of meat.
The women carried the smaller pieces, shank, ribs cut in long strips, heads split in half, and haslets — livers, hearts, kidneys, and the like — in blue enamel dishes, while the coachman, with an exaggerated ease meant to impress the women, lifted and carried down into the cellar pigs cut in half and whole sides of beef; well, this is where the real plot of my story would begin, for they were apparently all working attentively, efficiently, at a nice even pace, yet they kept finding opportunities to touch one another, push, jostle, and bump into one another; moreover, under the pretext of assisting him, the women managed to touch the bare skin of the coachman's chest, neck, arm, and hand, and when they did, they relayed their pleasure in the touch, as if they were parts of a chain— sometimes they'd cling adroitly to his body for a while — but it was clear that, no matter how slyly or eagerly they did all this touching, this was not the object of the game, which, once accomplished, would satisfy them, but rather as if it was just an introduction to a more complete, purer form of contact, a more elaborate game they had to prepare gradually; but I was not given a chance to see this next phase, because they'd often disappear inside the basement shop for long periods, sometimes as much as half an hour, leaving the wagon full of merchandise open and unattended; occasionally dogs with bristling hair and cats dazed with hunger would appear on the scene, sniffing at the spilled blood and shreds of meat, but oddly enough they never risked climbing up or jumping into the wagon; there I stood, behind the drawn curtains, in the twilight dimness of my room, waiting patiently, and if the four of them did not appear for a long time, then in my imagination somehow the basement opened up, its walls fell away, and they, shedding their bloody clothes, stripping down to bare skin, reached that Arcadian meadow — I don't know how, or I should say