As the years and even decades go by, Schöner watches as the species composition in the forest changes radically. In 1948, pin cherry has shot up from impetuous seedlings, and red maple, white ash, and red oak, sprouted from stumps, rule the upper canopy. He sometimes thinks that if he looks hard enough, he will see the pin cherry grow another millimeter before his eyes. When he’s not out in the woods, Schöner manages to keep in touch with his American Freiburg colleagues, many of whom have gone on to venerable careers, some returning to Germany after the war, others staying on, or returning elsewhere in Europe. Their numbers include Nobel Prize winners. As for Heidegger, Schöner learns that he has fallen on grave difficulties after the war, forced to defend himself for his apparent embrace of the Nazi program. His library, it is rumored, has been confiscated. Schöner pictures troops thumbing through the tree guide, seeing his handwriting. Again, with this image in his mind, he writes to Heidegger, but again he hears nothing.
Schöner drives to Boston for a copy of the May 31, 1976 issue of Der Spiegel. Heidegger has famously given an interview, to be published only upon his death. Its publication means, of course, that Heidegger has died. But it is as if he is still alive for the duration of time that it will take Schöner to read this interview.
He drives with the magazine on the front passenger seat all the way back from Boston to Peterborough, where he will walk out onto his property to read. It is only appropriate that his last conversation with Heidegger take place in the woods. By now, the pin cherry is gone. Gray birch has come and gone into decline, still here but weakened and prematurely aged.
Hemlock, dark latecomer, looks as though it means to stay forever, claiming even the floor with its dry red-brown needles. He can see, too, the trees from 1938 pointing northwest, even greatly decayed. Still, he finds a log firm enough to plant himself on as he reads through the article.
What does he hope to find? A personal apology? An admission that he, Heidegger, has wrestled in private with the facts of the matter of the Holocaust for the past thirty years? Has agonized over them? That he made a mistake? A grave mistake, one worthy of a dunderhead rather than what Schöner is certain is one of the most astute minds of the twentieth century?
If he expects any of these things, Schöner is disappointed. Heidegger explains his “brush” with Nazism. Or explains it away. Or attempts to.
On the rest, he is silent.
When Schöner sees the symbol at the foot of the column that marks the end of the story, sees that Heidegger has only a few words left, too few for what he must do, Schöner shuts the magazine.
Now, as he hangs on the walker and looks at the plot, untouched for over fifty years, he hears the Subaru sputter and the spitting of gravel that means they are pulling up the driveway to the house. It seemed long when he first moved here, because it was longer than any driveway he’d seen before, but by now he is used to it. In less than a minute they will be here. Soon they will be showering him with bundt cake, or framed pictures of grandchildren in formal attire. Beneath all this will be their agenda: to convince him to clear the forest, to make way for the future. He wishes he could explain to them why he can’t allow this to happen, what the forest means to him intact. But at times like these, he feels like he can almost understand why Heidegger stayed silent right up to the end, why he found it so difficult to speak of a past in which he’d been at once king and fool. And he suspects that even now, he won’t be able to say it, won’t be able to name all those left behind — Lechenmeir, Schott, Fiedler, Tannenbaum, Kindler, Schöner, Schöner — parents, friends, uncles, aunts, students, teachers. Nor will he be able to articulate how this plot preserves them, how in it they preserve themselves, having risen up from the leveled earth like resurrected beings from the fallen heaps and mounds, risen in every conceivable way as none other than themselves.
Urban Planning: Case Study Number Three
There is no room at the Manswer-Antoli, the city’s eponymous hotel, but he’s so accustomed to being turned away that signs barely register. His boots, trudging about the city, are somewhere on the far side of mud-caked, a thick-crusted record of travels through floodplain and savanna, taiga and miasma. He would do well to stop and borrow a chisel and scrape them, lose some of that deadweight. But every time he’s about to do that, he thinks, Wait, maybe he could plant something in them — what, after all, is more precious than land? He could grow vegetables — nomadic tomatoes, wandering watercress. He cannot tell whether this is a good notion or simply hunger’s delusional logic, so he bends down and tucks a two-leafed twig into one of his mudbanked feet — for memory, so he can reconsider when his mind is clearer, once he’s rested.
The shops are closed for the night, grates tightly drawn, those lacking grates sending out red alarm pulses at staggered intervals. In their inaccessibility, objects take on heightened desirability — a baguette that looks like it might regenerate endlessly, a chest of drawers that promises to keep him company, talk or listen if he decides to unravel his own story.
For a city so utterly shut down, it is strangely alive, bustling with pedestrians. After some of the places he’s been prior, he is most grateful for this heavy foot traffic, this to-and-fro. Whenever he thinks about dying, he reminds himself that when he has pictured his own death in the past, it has always been him alone. Because nonexistence runs so counter to the spirit of such company, he feels protected by the crowds. So long as he can distract the part of himself that will decide to die, he reasons, it cannot happen.
And once he settles down, finds lodgings, gets a few bites in him, showers away the grunge, he’ll revel in it like an anthropologist, a theatergoer, a bird-watcher, a flaneur in situ. In his current state, he knows, his mere watching will seem threatening, arouse suspicion that he is sizing them up for robbery and worse. Best to maintain distance, feign disinterest. Little stolen glances and peeks must suffice for now. The scarf of gauzy translucent red, trailing a woman who rolls forward with the certainty of a shore-bound wave. Two businessmen, mirror images but for one’s mole, the other’s suspenders. Boys with flatulent elbows and sharp whistles and spasmodic laughter.
Who knew Manswer-Antoli was so popular, so teeming with life? All this he would’ve missed if he’d heeded the warnings against coming here.
Hours? Days? He can’t keep track of how long he soldiers on, the signs all identicaclass="underline" NO VACANCY, CLOSED. If I could just rest on a bench, he thinks, sighing at the streamer of tape that seems to partition off each and every one, warning of wet paint. It would be worth anything simply to sit. A pair of pants — small sacrifice, that, for savory comfort, renewal.
Crouching to slip under the tape, he hears the policeman’s piercing whistle.
“What’sa matter, can’t read, buddy?” says the officer.
“I can,” he grumbles, moving on. What civic diligence they abide by here! It’s too much. As he shuffles off, he hears the officer’s radio blasting staticky bulletins and glances back to see him shaking his head in obvious pity and disdain.
Soon enough, soon enough, thinks the officer, watching as the man with the tiny tree growing out of his shoe hobbles away. It’s not his job to inform him, obvious newcomer, that he is dead, that ghosts can never sit, never alter, but only walk the streets and boulevards ceaselessly, exactly as they arrive. No, let him wait, the officer thinks. Let him wait while he still can for the shop doors to spring open like shutters on country villas, wait, as we all did once, for the aroma of fresh-baked bread to burst forth and fill the air.