Now if some unauthorized stranger were to rummage through my things and go over my papers… well, this stranger, this secret agent who'd appear after my death to make out a report about me based on the papers found among my effects had often cropped up in my dreams; although he was faceless and of indeterminate age, I found his immaculate shirtfront, stiff collar, polka-dotted necktie adorned with a glittering diamond pin, and especially his rather shiny frock coat all the more characteristic and significant; with long, bony fingers he rummaged expertly through my papers, occasionally lifting a page close to his eyes, giving me the impression that he was nearsighted, though I didn't see him wearing eyeglasses; he perused a sentence here and there, and I noted with satisfaction that he derived completely different meanings from the ones I had hoped my sentences would imply; no wonder I had managed to fool even someone like him; after all, I made sure that my fleeting ideas, fragmentary thoughts, and hasty descriptions were jotted down so that my papers remained well within the bounds of middle-class propriety, counting also on the possibility that dear old Frau Hübner, taking advantage of my absence and driven by simple curiosity, would likewise look through the pages piled on my desk; thus I became an unauthorized stranger to my own life, because seeing myself as a criminal, a miserable misfit, I still wanted to remain a perfect gentleman in the eyes of the world, I myself became that shiny frock coat, the starched shirtfront, and the tie pin, the irreproachably inane form of bourgeois respectability; secretly, and proud of my own slyness, I figured that if I used a private code when recording my accumulated experiences, then, since I possessed the key, I'd always be able to open the lock of the code; but as might be expected, the lock turned out to be foolproof, and by the time I finally came around to opening it, my hands, trembling with anxiety, simply could not find the keyhole.
That is how some things remained a mystery forever, my own secret alone; no, I'm not too sorry about it, after all, whatever doesn't exist, what no one has declared a public and consensual secret, should be of no interest to people; and so the reason I took with me to Heiligendamm those two little booklets by Dr. Köhler about the Helix pomata, the common edible snail, remained a puzzling mystery, as did the question of any possible connection between these snails, the above-described insignificant street scene, and that splendid antique mural.
The snails Köhler describes so dryly and dispassionately in his books were consumed by the dozen each morning by guests at the spa; raw, ground to a pulp, the snails together with their shells were lightly seasoned and sprinkled with lemon juice; eating them like that was as much part of the cure as were those breathing exercises at sunset; these snails — classified by the doctor according to their shape, build, habitat, and characteristic traits, and grouped into species and subspecies — are amazingly solitary and at the same time very lively little creatures in whom the slightest contact with other snails produces profound terror; it takes them hours — which in their terms may mean days, weeks, even months — to ascertain with their feelers, and later, on a higher level of certainty, with their mouths and their undulating undersides, that they are indeed suited to one another, and there is no need, because of some compelling and disqualifying reason, to crawl on, disappointed, in search of another potential mate; in principle, any snail can couple with any other — in this sense they are nature's most favored creatures, being the only ones to preserve and act out nature's primeval unisexuality, being androgynous, like plants, their bodies possessing qualities that we humans can only vaguely recall, which perhaps explains their exceptional fineness and timidity; each one is complete in itself, and therefore two complete wholes must find each other, which must be an incomparably more difficult task than simple gratification; and when they do unite, in complete mutuality, simultaneously receiving and fulfilling each other — Köhler's description is at this point most detailed, his prose most impassioned — they cling to each other with such force, and no wonder, this is the strength of the ancient gods! that the only way they can be separated, experimenters tell us, is by literally tearing them apart; but like the characters in the mural, the snails would not have appeared in my narrative; studying their physiology was also part of my preliminary research, material that nourished the work but would not be found in the finished product; secret ingredients like this can be found in abundance in any work of art worthy of the name; or perhaps they would have appeared but only in some incidental, seemingly unimportant image, as some symbolic device, say, sliding past on a large fern leaf at the edge of the forest, or on fragrantly decaying leaves on the forest floor; there might have been a pair of them, and we'd noticed them just as they touched each other with their seeing tentacles.
Yes: every step I took, whether toward vile death or in my longing for the happiness afforded by vileness, carried me to this forest.
It was not a dense forest, but when finding one of its trails and letting it take you randomly among the trees, you quickly realized why popular lore referred to this woods as a wilderness; no one ever came here to mark the trees with white chalk or chop them down, clean them carefully of their branches and cart them away; nobody gathered brushwood here, picked wild berries or mushrooms at the edge of its snail-inhabited clearings; it seemed as if for ages, for unconscionably long ages, nothing had happened to or in these woods except what we might call the natural history of flora and fauna, which of course is no small thing: trees come into leaf, mature, live, and, after slowly passing centuries, die away; under their foliage, germinating, sprouting, and growing at the mercy of sunbeams the leafy boughs let through, there is an undergrowth of shrubs, bushes, ferns, creepers, runners, and climbers, grass, nettles, a thousand different weeds, garishly colorful and sickly transparent flowers, all taking their turn according to the changing seasons, until the thickening foliage completely deprives them of light and they perish, yielding their places to moss, lichen, and fungi that prefer cool dimness and, thriving on decay, sustain the life of the ground's spongy surface; there is silence here, and the silence is also ancient, and thick, because undisturbed by the wind; the air is so redolent that within a few minutes you'd be overcome with a feeling rather like a pleasantly soothing swoon; and it is always warmer here than out in the real world, a hazy warmth that makes one's skin moist and slick, like the body of a snail; the trails here are not real paths, trod and beaten down by human steps, but the life of the forest shapes these passages, whimsically, gracefully, unpredictably, as gaps in the continuous story of the ground's surface, pauses that only our resolute human intelligence would dare name, for it has learned to disregard other, perhaps much more important occurrences, and is accustomed simply to cut through the thick of things and, in its own doltish way, make use of nature's silence.