What distinguished my brother’s orchard from others was its situation outside the village, surrounded by fields and pastureland, bounded on one side by a small mixed forest, whereas most gardens and orchards began right behind the houses and, seen from the road, gave the impression of long rows of trees, ending, as one was bound to suppose, in fallow land, with Rinkenberg as an island of apples and pears at its edge. My brother’s trees were small as in a plantation, and each tree, except for the usual plum and cider-pear trees at the entrance (intended, one might have thought, to mask the nature of the orchard), bore fruit of a different taste; on some trees, indeed, the variety changed from one tier of branches to the next. And most extraordinary of alclass="underline" among the cider-pear trees there was one secret branch, known only to the family, that bore fruit which looked deceptively like that of the next branch but which, when you bit into it, did not — as we said in the family—“pucker your asshole” but opened your eyes.
The whole orchard, if you entered it from the side opposite the forest, had a more and more experimental arrangement, which had many advantages. After the first corner, marked by a lone poplar, which looked odd among the fruit trees, it spread out until at the edge of the forest it was several rows wide. Though unfenced like the village orchards, which thus had the air of public woodland, the area beyond the poplar was hidden. One reason for this was that, crossing the open fields, one suddenly, without having seen a single house, came across branches laden with the finest apples; and another was the hollow in which my brother had laid out his orchard. From flat ground one unexpectedly stepped down into the orchard and then at its end just as abruptly up into the little forest. The hollow was not deep; one became aware of it only at its edge, and only there did one glimpse the tops of the small fruit trees on a level with the tips of one’s shoes; from far off, from the village or the road, one saw only the strange poplar, sometimes transformed into a torch by lightning, rising from treeless fields.
That depression — so the geography teacher had taught me — was formed by a prehistoric brook, an offshoot of the groundwater which in this particular plain does not stand still but flows down to the Drava in a regular, unbroken stream, hardly “the length of a walking stick” below the earth’s surface. At the site of the present orchard, this stream of groundwater had welled up, carrying the soil with it, and washed out a bowl, whence it had dug a narrow ditch leading down to the river. Then the brook had seeped away — the ditch was locally known as the “still brook”—so that the bottom of the oval bowl formed by the spring was dry; the water was no longer a visible single stream but had sunk and joined the endless underground flow or, in the form of “sky water” (a literal translation of what my brother called rain in his copybook), carried the fertile decomposed soil from the walls to the bottom of the bowl. (The bowl, to be sure, had its vegetation-clogged outlet where the ditch began.)
Around the trees grew orchard grass, more sparse than meadow grass, and hardly any flowers. Where it arrived at the poplar tree, the sand track, which led across the fields to the edge of the hollow, acquired a middle strip of grass; on the way downhill, it narrowed and deep shining ruts made by braking cart wheels appeared; in among the rows of trees, it became a solid strip of grass, the “green track” (as we called it in the family), which ran straight as an arrow over the slightly vaulted bottom of the bowl to the farthermost tree of the orchard, not only distinctly lighter than the ground around it, but positively luminous beside it.
In its hollow, the orchard was sheltered from the wind; only the warm fall winds from the south touched its bottom. Thus, the trunks of the trees were perfectly straight, while the branches, most noticeably in the winter, grew evenly in all directions. The orchard was also sheltered from noise, from either the village or the road; apart from church bells and sirens, one heard only its own sounds, in particular the buzzing not so much of flies as of bees in the blossoms or of wasps in the fallen fruit. It had a smell of its own, heavy, cidery, which came more from the windfall fruit fermenting in the grass than from the trees; it was not until autumn, in the cellar, that the remaining apples became truly fragrant; before that, only if you held them up to your nose (but then the smell was something!). In the spring the blossoms were a solid white, but in the summer the orchard’s color changed from tree to tree; the pale green of the early apples, to which passersby were free to help themselves, was the first to disappear.
Waiting for the different kinds of fruit to ripen was a part of childhood. Especially after a storm, I was eager to run out to the orchard, where at least one marvelous apple (or, under the improved cider branch, a pear) would be lying in the grass. Often there would be a race with my sister, who was long past childhood. We both knew in advance under which tree we’d be likely to find something, and each of us wanted to be first; it was not so much a matter of having and eating as of finding and holding in our hands. Autumn fruit picking was one of the few physical occupations in which I did not reach out blindly (and as often as not miss my aim). The trees were so small that one hardly needed the ladders generally associated with orchards. Our chief implement was a long pole, to the top of which a sack with stiff, jagged edges was attached. Even today, at this very moment, I can feel in my arms the jolt that occurred when an apple fell from its branch and rolled down to the other apples in the sack.
The crates being filled at the foot of the trees were also a part of my childhood, the lemon-yellow in one, and in the next the special wine-red, whose veins one could see extending from the peel through the flesh to the core of the fruit. Only the cider-pear trees could be shaken; then a loud rat-tat-tat resounded through the whole orchard. Instead of crates, there would be a ring of thick sacks around the pear trees.
Later came my deprived youth, my years at the seminary, during which I missed the fruit harvest; no more piled crates; at the most, a few apples would go into my suitcase before I left home and a few others in the course of the year, more and more shriveled as time went on.
Then my mother’s illness, my father’s stiffening limbs, my unlearning (yes, that is the word) of almost every kind of physical work which, after all, had contributed no less than my reading on the balcony to my childhood dreams — chopping wood, mending roofs, driving cattle, binding sheaves (for me at least, these activities never represented hard work, or, if they did, it never lasted more than a few hours).
Then came the decades of absence, during which the orchard was utterly neglected; only my sister kept going there for a time with a small basket and picking what apples she could reach with her bare hands; and then she, too, stopped going. Just one more dream about my brother’s orchard: early apples lying pale yellow on the snow, and the family sitting at a table in the sun nearby.
In the years after my return, I visited the orchard now and then. There is still no house in the vicinity, and the old sand track leading to it, like the green track down in the hollow, has become solid grass. The trees are covered over with lichen.
The last time I was there, the rain had washed away what was left of the dam my brother had built of sticks, stones, and clay outside the hole leading to the ditch. It was a winter’s day and the prevailing color in the orchard was the green of the lichen which completely covered every one of the trees and in places had destroyed the bark. The lichen seemed to weigh down the trees, and indeed there were broken branches, shaped like antlers, lying in the grass. The grass was no grass, it was moss; the few blades that pretended to be grass were colorless and as hard as bast, entangled with blackberry trailers that had crept in from the forest and the ditch. The most striking sight was the ash, an intruder from the forest, which had literally taken possession of one apple tree. Its seed must have taken root at the foot of the apple tree, and in growing, the young ash had half enfolded the old fruit tree. Through a slit in the living tree, one could see the dead one, from which the bark had been stripped. The graft scions, previously recognizable on the smooth, shining bark, had long been completely hidden by lichen; only at one point was their presence indicated by a square wooden splint fastened to a branch and lying on top of it. Over the years, a strange reversal had occurred; this branch, first the thinner of the two, had thickened and now carried the former splint wrapped in rusty wire on its back as a useless appendage.