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It was clear to me that I knew little about him. But when I thought about it, it seemed easy enough to understand. He had never spoken of his past because for him it was over and done with. He was no longer concerned with it. I remembered a handful of unopened letters on the shelf next to the drafting table. He shrugged his shoulders when I asked him about them. The next day, their ashes lay in the fireplace, and I was convinced that he had burned them unread.
The warmth from the heater finally penetrated the soles of my shoes. I stood up and went to the low window in the arched niche of the dormer. It had begun to get dark again on the other side of the flat arched panes, although the rain had slackened.
I looked at my watch; it showed a few minutes before four, and I hesitated as to what to do next. Behind the curtain of the built-in shelves, I found a quilt, two wool blankets and the blue velvet cushion. The collapsed folding bed on which I had slept for two summers was leaning in the niche behind the square chimney which ran up through the roof in the middle of the room. At that moment, I came to a decision. It was five after four when I turned off the heater, pulled the plug out of the outlet and went downstairs to the workshop. I opened the door to the living room and edged up to the panes of the large terrace windows to take a careful look outside.
The caution was unnecessary. I had to look twice to understand. He had removed the stone flags right in front of the window and planted mallows along the entire width of the windows. They had grown into thick bushes higher than a man’s head, and now a tangle of bare stems blocked any view through the window.
As so often in previous years, I opened the left window and stepped over the low sill between the dripping mallow bushes. There was no one in sight. I stuck a strip of cardboard between the jamb and the window frame and pulled the window closed behind me as tight as it would go. The wind was from the north-west, but even when a gust pushed against the window, you could hardly see that it wasn’t latched. I could only hope that it would hold, I didn’t have the time to do anything more.
I stepped onto the terrace and crossed the flagstones to the path. At the last minute I remembered my coat. I went back across the yard where black puddles had now formed, opened the door to the shed, and took my coat from the nail. I snapped the lock shut and put the key back in its place above the rafter. I put on my coat at the same time, and the wind flattened it against my legs.
It had grown darker. From the west, heavy rain clouds were pushing over the woods, and I ran down the path to the village. At the inn, I paid my bill, got my suitcase, and then went down to the harbor.
Two people whom I didn’t know sat in the ship’s passenger cabin. The harbormaster showed up to cast off the mooring lines, and I shouted a few words about the weather to him. He growled something incomprehensible and went back to his office as the ship pulled out and took up its course after making a wide turn. I paid and put my ticket in the pocket of my coat. I left the ship when it docked at the next village on the island after a half-hour voyage. It was now quite dark.
A horse with its head hanging down stood in front of a wagon filled with empty fish crates next to the store. In the store I bought a loaf of bread, two packages of sliced cheese, and a hard sausage off the shelves. I found a tin of sweetened condensed milk and, just in case, added a package of tea.
I paid at the only open cashier next to the exit, and put everything into my large traveling bag. Then I crossed the street and went past the old mill toward the beach.
The wind drove the rain in my face in sharp bursts as I walked back on the wet hard sand. I followed the curved shoreline until the wooded cliffs rose before me as shadows, while on my left the white foam rushed over the granite blocks of the sea wall.
I continued on to the narrow stairs which led to the top of the sea cliff. The rainwater ran down to the beach in deeply eroded channels next to the half cross ties which made up the steps. The path through the woods, which I only knew from the summer as a green tunnel through thickly growing underbrush, now appeared strange and long to me.
Then once again, I saw the silhouette of the house on the hill. I wanted a cigarette, but I went on across the basin, and then along the path up behind the house. I had had enough of rain, cold, and wind.
I pushed through the mallow bushes to the window, and with some trouble pushed the window inward, slung the traveling bag inside, and then stepped inside behind it. I closed the window, pulled off my shoes and went through the workshop up to the room under the eaves. It was still a little warm. I turned the heater on again and hung the heavy baize curtain in front of the window. Then I screwed in the light bulb in the wall lamp and turned on the light. Although I had slept until noon, I felt tired and worn out.
A puddle had formed under the wet traveling bag, but the bread was on top and had only gotten a little damp. I pulled off my jeans, which were stiff with the wet and sprinkled with sand up to the knees. I dried my hair with a hand towel, pulled on a turtleneck sweater, and put on a second pair of wool socks. Then I took the small packet of tea and went downstairs to the kitchen.
The stairs were slippery. I tried to imagine what would happen if I fell and was injured, but as I thought of it I was already in the kitchen.
The venetian blinds on the window stuck as always. I pulled them down and tied the string around the nail in the window sill. I laid the flashlight on the kitchen table. Its beam made a semi-circular spot on the opposite wall. In the narrow cupboard next to the door I found the tall aluminum pot with the immersion heater and next to it the large yellow cup with a teaspoon in it.
Everything in the cupboard was clean and tidy, only the cup was a little dusty. I held the pot under the water pipe and turned on the faucet, which had dried tightly shut. The pipe knocked noisily and for a while nothing happened. Then rusty water sprayed out of the faucet in small spurts. I put the pot to one side. Gradually the noise in the pipe died down; the water flowed smoothly, even if only in a thin stream, and slowly cleared. I rinsed the pot out, then the cup, and filled the pot half-full. Then I took the brown teapot out of the cupboard.
The sugar in the paper bag had formed a lump as hard as stone. I put it back and plugged in the immersion heater. When the water began to simmer, I rinsed the teapot out with hot water and then waited until the water boiled.
Then I measured out the tea, two tea spoons from the green package. I placed the pot with the immersion heater in the empty sink to let it cool. The potato basket under the kitchen table was empty. I put the full teapot and the cup in it, took a cutting board from the kitchen table and put it in the basket as well, and then took the flashlight and went back up the stairs to the room under the eaves.
While the tea steeped in the pot, I unfolded the bed and pushed it into the niche under the wall lamp. Then I got the blankets and placed them on the narrow bed. With my pocketknife I poked two holes in the top of the can of milk, and put it, the teapot, and the cup on top of the stool. I poured the reddish, amber-colored tea into the cup and then poured the condensed milk in over the teaspoon, which I held above the cup. It ran out of the can in a thin thread which gradually filled the spoon. Then I stirred it in and the color of the tea blended into the milky cloud. I held the cup in both hands while sitting on the bed. The tea was hot and sweet, but it had almost lost its tea taste.
My watch showed seven. I had an entire night and day before me. But the workshop and the terrace room had no curtains – if I wanted to search for something there I had to wait for daylight. So, for this evening, there was only the room under the eaves left. I sipped the tea and looked around the room.
It covered almost the entire floorplan of the house. The longer walls sloped, interrupted on one side by the curve of the dormer with its small window. Shelves had been built in on both sides with sand-colored curtains drawn in front of them. The wall at my back separated the stair to the workshop from the room.
The gable end window under the overhang gave sufficient light to the staircase landing all day long , and from there a trap door led to the attic under the roof peak.
The other gabel-end which faced the southeast had been double glazed over its entire surface and was now completely covered by a thick baize curtain. The glass door behind the curtain led to an open terrace on the roof of the small workshop. The workshop and a porch were later additions which extended the width of the house by about three meters. The large drafting table, which had a white drawing board laid out on it, stood on two supports next to this glassed-over gabelend.
An open shelf between the curtain and the drafting table held a large cylindrical pot with brushes, two trays with pencils, bottles of India ink, and a glass with drafting pens and quill pens. Two different white plastic palettes hung to one side on a nail, and a small draftsman’s portfolio leaned against one of the supports for the drafting table.
I went over to the drafting table. There was a single sheet of paper on the white surface, a brush sketch done with a hard, flat brush and unthinned, black, India ink as if it were a doodle.
A rider on a horse, riding at a walk, on a line which looked like a wave. The sketch had the terseness and power of expression of a pictograph. It seemed to remind me of something, but I found no connection between the sketch and anything at all that I could remember. Perhaps I was expecting secrets everywhere and so had lost the ability to make simple, logical connections. I put the sheet of paper back on the drafting table.
The tea in the pot was still hot. I poured out the rest, which had now gotten very black, drank it down, and lay down on the narrow bed. I tried to remember.
5
The next day after that June night four years ago, I had gone back to the house on the hill, but there had been no one there. The house was shut up and a plastic sheet tied to the posts hung over the colored target. An old man in the neighborhood gave me the man’s name and told me that he generally shot at the target in the early morning before the tourists started using the path over the hill to get to the beach.
So the next morning I went back up the hill at about seven o’clock, and as I passed the last house in the village, I could already hear the dull thump of an arrow’s impact from the direction of the target. I went up the path to the level of the house and found a flat stone which lay near the fence in the sun with the night’s dew already gone from its surface.
I sat down so that I could keep an eye on the man. Although he had seen me, he took no notice of my presence. He shot six arrows at a time at the target, then laid his bow down and went down the slope to the target to get his arrows. Apparently he had gone that way a lot. Now, in the sunlight, I noticed a narrow, trodden path in the short grass.
In the daylight, the bow seemed less clumsy than I remembered. I could hardly make out the arrows in the target, but the morning sun threw their shadows on the colorful target and those black streaks pointed to the places where the arrows had hit.
Soon, however, all my attention was on the man. His movements were of a relaxed uniformity and were repeated at such regular intervals that they gave me the impression of a special kind of precision.
The sequence of movement which so impressed me then was always the same. The man picked up his bow, and then stood with his legs slightly spread so that his left shoulder was directed toward the target. He nocked the arrow while he kept the bow set on his left foot, let his right hand drop, and then, motionless, stared for a moment at the grass in front of his feet. Then he looked up and raised the bow toward the target with his left hand while the arrow remained on the string. Then the bow came to a stop. He grasped the string with his right hand, drew, and, almost at the same moment that the arrow reached his chin, let the arrow fly. For a moment he held the bow still in his hand, then he set it back on his foot. He repeated that entire series of movements until there were six arrows in the target.
The sun had risen higher and was hot on my shoulders. It must have been a half hour before he carefully unstrung his bow. To do this, he placed one end of the bow behind his left foot and pulled the other end of the bow over his right shoulder facing forward until he could take the bowstring out of the nock in the end of the bow. I got up and looked over at him. “Could I see the bow?” I asked when I saw that he was about to go back in the house. He hesitated and then came down the flagstone path to the opening in the fence between the high bushes. He looked at me, waiting, and as I said nothing, quietly handed me the bow. It was unexpectedly heavy.
The middle section was made of a mahogany-colored wood and had a deeply cut, sculptured grip area with a flat cutout section above it. The bow’s limbs, which were now relaxed, seemed to be whitelacquered and were surprisingly thin. They were the width of the grip at the ends where they were screwed onto the grip with large knurled screws. They tapered in a flat curve toward the other ends. There was a plate of dark, anodized aluminum screwed to the side of the bow toward the back, on which was seated something like a small disk held in place by a small set screw on its side. A narrow strip of Plexiglas emerged from a slit in the disk, in which a circle about the size of a pea was engraved with a black point in the center of the circle. That had to be his sighting device.
I took the bow in my left hand, as I had seen him do. The bow lay heavy in my hand and the form of the grip seemed to be remarkably unsuited to my way of holding the bow. I told him that, and he grinned happily.
“When you draw a bow,” he said, “then you’re not lifting its weight but rather pulling the bowstring which works along a line from the grip to your hand. It is…” He interrupted himself. “Look, this is an experience which is difficult to explain. When you draw a bow properly, then it fits into the movement of your body by way of your hand. This is the only way you can do it.”
I handed the bow back. That was how it had looked when he did it, and I believed that I had felt something of this confident “… This is the only way you can do it.”
“Do you believe that I could draw this bow?” I asked.
He looked at me carefully. Then he said, “If you seriously wanted to.”
I was astonished. “Isn’t it a matter of strength?”
“Strength,” he said, “strength is the least of what you need to shoot with a bow.”
“What do you need for it then?”
He stared at the target on the opposite slope and then after a while said absently, “I don’t know. Except, perhaps the conviction that you’re doing something completely. Exclusively. Perhaps”, he laughed, “perhaps archery is the most important unimportant thing in the world.”
We went to the house where there was a low wooden bench next to the door, and we sat down on it.
I didn’t know what to say. He leaned back against the house and closed his eyes. His face was tanned but his eyelids were very light.
“Do you want to try?” he asked without moving. He stood up without waiting for my answer. “Come back tomorrow morning early,” he said with his hand already on the door. “I’ll have a bow ready for you.” He nodded to me and closed the door behind him.
The first tourists came up the path next to the house with beach towels, bags, and beach umbrellas, on their way to the beach. Slowly I followed them.
So began my acquaintance with this man in whose house I now sat, without any real idea why I was here.
6
It must have been that same day when I found the piece of amber. I was no diver, and swimming with fins tired me out quickly. But I had discovered how fascinating it could be to float in calm water with face mask and snorkel and observe the sea bottom.
You could only do this rarely on the island – either the seas were too high or the water was too cold. But that day, after the sea wind had calmed down, a warm upper layer of water had formed and it stayed warm in the calm air near the beach. Besides, after two weeks I had grown accustomed to the temperature of the water, and now paddled leisurely along behind the stone wall of undressed granite boulders which had been built to separate the beach zone from the open water and to protect it against storm surges.
The reflection of the sun’s rays was broken up by the tiny waves and flashed across the flat parallel ripples on the sandy bottom. The ground swell had washed out flat ditches behind individual stone blocks which lay in front of the wall, and they were full of the remains of black mussel shells. When I stuck my hand in among them, I raised a cloud of dark particles. Tiny transparent shrimp, as clear as glass, slid away in all directions in convulsive movement, while the suspended material gradually settled back to the bottom. The shaggy manes of a poisonously green algae which had grown on the stones washed gently back and forth in the weak ground swell.
I no longer really noticed the flat artificial taste of the snorkel, as I floated over the level sea bottom. The yelling children on the beach were muted, as I had my head under water and only the dull sound of the water in the gaps of the stones was in my ears.
I was about to shove away from one of the square blocks when I noticed the lump, almost as big as an egg, caught between the twigs of a fascine bundle. Nothing about the round piece indicated amber, and with its dull, lumpy surface it could have been a piece of flint. As I reached for it, I saw a gleam from a fracture in its surface. I sat down on a stone in the shallow water and examined my discovery. First I noticed four small barnacles adhering to the flat underside. The fracture in the surface had broken out in the shape of a shell and was not yet abraded by the sand.
When I held the piece against the sun, it shone with the color of old port wine. It was a marvelous piece; the first that I had ever found.
Those were the final days of my vacation that year. My joy in finding the amber was followed the next day by disappointment with my first lesson in archery.
7
I arrived at the house on the hill a little bit later than the day before and I found the man in the shed busy making a bow-string. When he saw me, he came to meet me.
“Hello,” he said, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans and looking at me carefully for a minute. Two leather objects were lying on the bench in front of the house, and he told me they were a bracer and a tab. While I was trying to put on the bracer, he brought a bow out of the house. It was a crude thing like you see in sporting goods stores. A thick middle lamination of clear oak, with bright red fiberglass laminations glued to it.
He saw my disappointed expression and laughed and then took a handful of arrows out of a wicker wastepaper basket which held about two dozen, and went to his shooting position next to the birch. He shot one arrow at the target on the opposite slope. The wooden arrow with the white feathers wobbled a bit and hit in the blue ring on the lower half of the target.
After his first shot, he adjusted the bowsight and then shot three arrows in rapid succession, two hitting in the red and one in the yellow center. He left the arrows sticking in the target and came back to me.
“You can shoot and hit what you’re shooting at, even with a bow like this,” he said. “When you’re just starting, the main thing is to learn to draw the bow. As far as strength and the form of the grip is concerned, this bow is similar in principle to my laminated bow. Right now, we don’t need anything more.”
He put the bow in my hand and then hauled a thick sheet of polyethylene foam about a meter square out from the shed. He hung it on two wooden pegs in the shed wall and had me take up a position a couple of paces in front of it.
After he had showed me the correct stance and posture, he let me draw the bow - at first without an arrow. I felt that I was fighting against a strong resistance, and as I struggled to bring the string back to my chin with my right hand, the left trembled and the bow wavered. Slowly, I let the string down again.
He corrected my hold on the grip and adjusted the position of my wrist and had me draw the bow again.
“Smoothly,” he said. “You have to draw the bow smoothly, in a single uninterrupted motion. You must understand that you are not fighting the bow. Imagine that you are giving your strength to the bow when you draw it. The bow collects all your strength and focuses it at a single point.”
Again and again I drew the bow until I believed that I had attained a certain smoothness. It seemed that the bow was becoming a little weaker each time I drew it. When I mentioned this to him, he nodded his head. “It’s your muscles which are getting used to the movement.”
He let me nock an arrow and then said: “There is far too little time for a systematic beginning. I’m not a trained coach, and some of what I’m telling you now may be wrong just because it may be too soon for you. But I have to try to make you understand. Everything that you do in archery is in preparation for the shot. You have to do all these things in a certain time interval; stance, posture, drawing the bow, and holding the bow, and everyone does these things a little differently. You need many weeks to get it right.
But the most important thing is the moment in which you let the arrow go – the release. You must try to focus all your concentration on this point. No time should elapse between the decision to shoot and the release of the arrow. When you think ‘now’, the arrow must be on its way. Imagine that all your strength is concentrated in these three fingers of your right hand. Only when you have a very quick release will all of that strength be passed on to the arrow.”
He hadn’t spoken at such length before, and I understood scarcely half of what he said. But I did understand that he considered that moment to be the essential point in archery.
So I nodded in agreement and shot my first arrow at the poly-ethylene foam sheet.
After the first shot, he had me continue to shoot with my eyes closed, so that “I could better concentrate on the release,” as he put it. Twice the bowstring struck my left arm painfully. The second time, he saw it and took the bow from me. The skin was swollen with a blood blister above the bracer. He went into the house and brought back a salve smelling of camphor, which he had me rub on the swelling.
I had lost my pleasure in archery, but I didn’t say anything and watched as he unstrung the bow, collected the arrows, and took the foam sheet back into the shed.
A pair of wild rabbits hopped across the path at the edge of the woods and began to eat the grass. I pointed at them and asked if he had ever hunted them with bow and arrow.
“That’s poaching,” he said slowly. “Have you ever been poaching?” I really wanted to know. He grinned wryly. “You can’t avoid it. Besides, they taste good.”
It didn’t take me long to convince him. When I left, we had made arrangements to get together that afternoon at five o’clock.
I rubbed my left arm, which hurt from the slap of the bow-string, and thought about archery with considerably mixed feelings. But I forgot it all when I got back on the beach again to lie in the sun.
I almost didn’t go back, but just after five I was in front of the house on the hill again. He came to meet me with a thin bundle wrapped in canvas under his arm and we walked down the path toward the woods. We left the path in the depression behind the chain of hills and we prowled north through the tall grass in the flat valley floor. Gradually the hills became lower and finally we climbed over a knoll and down the other side a little and stopped under a round hawthorn bush. He unwrapped his bundle in the shadow of the hawthorn. The grip, the limbs, and the bowstring lay next to each other in a plastic bag. He put the bow together and strung it, pulled two arrows out of a sleeve sewn into the canvas and rolled the bundle up again.