GÜNTHER BACH

THE HORN OF THE HARE

A NOVEL OF ARCHERY

VERLAG ANGELIKA HÖRNIG

Günther Bach

The Horn of the Hare

© 2000 by Verlag Angelika Hörnig

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

without the written permission of the publisher.

Illustrations: Günther Bach

Translation: Robert Dohrenwend

Cover design: Angelika Hörnig

Lecturer: Mitch Cohen

© 2012 ebook

ISBN: 978-3-938921-25-8

Verlag Angelika Hörnig

Siebenpfeifferstr. 18

D-67071 Ludwigshafen

Germany

www.archery.de

Table of Contents

Foreword

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

Author

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“Perhaps feelings are somewhat uncertain,

but there‘s no help for it,

we have to depend on them anyway.“

Johannes Bobrowski

FOREWORD

When this book was written, it was impossible to get it published in the part of Germany where I lived at that time.

The manuscript lay in a drawer for almost twenty years and I only occasionally glanced at the pages while they become increasingly brittle as time passed.

From today’s viewpoint, it is hard for me to describe to an American reader the conditions under which people lived in East Germany (DDR), a state which called itself democratic, mocking those who had to live there.

When the Second World War came to an end, I was ten years old. I had grown up in a small city 900 years old with many Gothic brick churches which had escaped the bombing during the war. My father was a hunter and a man with a deep love of nature. Only poor eyesight kept him from making this passion his career. So he became a banker, weekdays in his office in a neat gray suit, quiet, friendly, and dependable, but on the weekends, he was outdoors in the woods and fields wearing an old green loden coat and an even older shabby felt hat. The hat had a spray of grouse feathers on it whose original colors were no longer recognizable.

There was only a short period in my life when I was allowed to accompany him, but it was long enough for me to become familiar with this, his most lovable side. If really lasting impressions are formed in childhood, impressions which are significant for the rest of your life, then these were mine. Even today when I go into the woods, I am silenced by a feeling of magic which I try not to disturb.

This childhood, peaceful in spite of the war, ended with the end of the war, with white flags at the windows and jeeps and tanks rumbling through the empty streets.

A proclamation by the commandant required the inhabitants of the city to bring all their weapons to the city market square. I was there when my father handed his two hunting weapons, a drilling and double barreled shotgun, to a friendly officer.

The officer laid them in a row with other hunting weapons, with the barrels on the curb of the sidewalk and the butt stocks in the street. Then he waved to a soldier who sat smoking in the turret of a Sherman tank. The soldier drove the tank forward, and my father watched with a stony expression as his expensive and cherished guns were smashed into a heap of bent scrap metal and splintered wood.

For the rest of his life, my father never again owned a weapon. The Americans soon pulled out as a result of the arrangement among the allies. They were followed by the Russians, whose arrival was anticipated with fear and terror by many in the city. And at that time, the first people began to flee to West Germany for fear of what was to come. We stayed in the Soviet occupied zone, which four years later became the so-called German Democratic Republic (DDR).

My home city lay only 100 kilometers away from Berlin, which was located in the middle of the DDR. Berlin – the former capital of the “Third Reich”, proclaimed capital of the DDR, and now finally the capital of reunited Germany, was then the only open way out when things no longer seemed to work out for people. If you couldn’t take it any more, if you could no longer pretend to be satisfied with the restrictions and hypocrisy of this police state where only members of the state party could advance, if you could no longer stand the smug self-satisfaction of the ruling mediocrity, it was good to know that you could always go to Berlin, take a tram to the West, and be free.

Then came August 13, 1961, the day the Berlin Wall went up. Before that date, many thousands of people daily had flowed out of the DDR through West Berlin into the Bundesrepublik, and it was often the best who left. At the time the Wall went up I had finished my architecture studies at the Technical University in Dresden and was working for my certification. When I finally arrived in Berlin with the certification in my pocket, the border had been sealed. A stranger in the city and without friends or anyone I could trust, I found no hole in the Wall anywhere. The way to freedom seemed to be blocked forever.

But the tighter border security became around the DDR, the more ingenious people became in their escape attempts. Many got into West Berlin through the canals or by digging tunnels; lucky ones made it in the trunks of diplomats’ cars.

Entire families entrusted their lives to homemade hot air balloons and attempted to cross the border in the air by night or in fog. Others tried to cross the Baltic in rowboats or on air mattresses to reach a Scandinavian country. All of these desperate acts were considered crimes. They were called “flight from the Republic” and, if you were caught, you were punished with a long prison term. Later the regime issued orders to the border guards to shoot at all escapees. It has never been exactly determined how many escapees were killed in this way. But some people still succeeded in making their way to freedom.

Much later, after I discovered that advancement in my professional career was blocked because I refused to join the official party, I began, like many in that country, to search for something which would repay dedicated effort. I found it in Chinese watercolors and in archery.

This is the period when my story takes place. Even today, I regard it as symbolic of a person’s inability to survive if he must reject everything around him.

Perhaps so. It is better to be for something than to reject everything. The only important thing is to find that which is worth living for.

Günther Bach

Berlin 2003

1

The road lost itself in the snow behind the last houses. Up-slope, the wind had blown the snow over the side of the steep cut and buried the sweetbrier under an impassable snowdrift. Blue shadows lay in the only track which led up the hill to the only house standing at its top. The track then went on in a gradual curve toward the woods. The white surface was undisturbed all around the house. A high drift of loose snow blocked the threshold, and the windows looked cold and black in the clear light of day. A gust of wind drove a swirling, glistening banner of powder snow from the peak of the roof. The leafless birch twigs rustled as they rubbed together. A crow flew over the narrow strip of woods along the steep shore. A glance back over the village revealed white banners of smoke rising vertically above the roofs and then fading just above the scattered groups of trees. Further away in the background, the noon ship to Stralslund trailed a white wake behind it on the bay. And the light was cold which played across the surface of the bay.

It was the end of March, but it seemed as if winter had come back once more.

At this time of year it was hard not to attract notice in the village. During the summer, visitors arrived daily in their hundreds to wander over the hill, to crowd around the small number of cafes and bars, to buy cheap souvenirs in the stalls and souvenir shops, and to swim at the beach. You could remain unnoticed in the crowd.

But now?

The exposed position of the house meant that no one could approach it without being seen. It was impossible to get to it unobserved. Up to now, everything had seemed clear and simple. Just take the path behind the village at nightfall, go past the old smithy and between the woods and the hill, and then come back between the hedges of bearberry and seabuckthorn.

You would be out of sight of the village.

But now there was snow on the ground and it would betray every footstep. If the snow stayed on the ground, I had made the trip for nothing. Four days – a long weekend – that was all the time I had to find out what had happened.

2

He had disappeared perhaps at the end of September. It is possible that his absence wasn’t noticed right away.

He regularly spent four weeks of vacation abroad, mostly at the height of the season, to stay out of the way of the tourists who, partly out of curiosity and partly in a search for a place to spend the night, pestered him even on his own land. The low wire fence, which ran along the side of the road and then surrounded his place at the top, was ignored by many people who misunderstood the flagstone walk up to the house as an invitation to come in. So he often shut himself in and rarely answered knocks and shouts. If you wanted to talk to him, you had to make arrangements ahead of time.

The slope to the south ran down into a flat basin, then rose to fall gently again toward the village. The wooden posts of the targetstand stood in deep snow on the opposite slope. The lower crosspiece which supported the target barely emerged from the snow. A piece of blue plastic tarp, which had protected the target from rain, fluttered from the upper crossbar. In the low rays of the afternoon sun, the shadows, broken by a rise in the ground, also looked blue.

How long had it been? Three – no, four years. It had been a warm night in June, bright and still. It was one of those nights on the island when it didn’t seem to want to get dark, in which you get a taste of the Swedish midnight sun.

I hadn’t been able to sleep, so I had gone for a walk up the hill. There was a group of tourists standing on the road next to the house staring at the dark slope opposite. A square target with colored rings was illuminated by two flashlights in the grass. Remarkably, the target surface seemed to float above the black background of the lawn. Two men sat under the birch on the terrace next to the house.

A third man stood to one side unmoving, a bow in his hand with a glint of metal coming from the clumsy-looking middle section. The man had set the end of the bow on his left foot and was staring at the target, which seemed to be on the same level as his position. As he bent down, I saw some arrows sticking in the grass in front of him. He nocked an arrow and, facing the target, raised the bow, drawing it in a smooth motion. The light thrum of the bowstring as he shot was followed almost immediately by the dry impact of the arrow on the target. A black V-shaped shadow had appeared suddenly in the gold spot in the middle of the target. Before I realized that the two lights at the foot of the targetstand threw the shadow of the arrow shaft across the target at the same angle, the sounds of the shot and impact were repeated. Once more in the gold, a little lower, and now the shadows intersected to form a large W with its upper joint pointing into the darkness above the upper edge of the target.

The man nocked a third arrow. It seemed that his movements were always at the same pace. This arrow too landed in the illuminated golden spot, and the shadows of the three arrows now formed an angular gridwork across the gold.

The man laid the bow in the grass and went down the slope to the target. In the lamp light he seemed to be a small man rather than of middle size. Barefoot, in jeans and a dark T-shirt, he pulled the arrows out of the target without apparent effort. He bent down to the flashlights, which went out immediately, and then walked slowly back to the house, carrying the arrows in his hand. He sat down next to the two men on the terrace, who now bent over his bow, which he held across his knees. I stood next to the house, about twenty meters away and watched the men talking quietly. I couldn’t understand anything they said.

The group next to me, who, like me, had watched silently, was getting ready to leave. As they passed me, I asked, “Excuse me, do you know that man?” “The one with the bow?” I nodded. It seemed that they had seen this kind of thing often. “He makes those things here. But you can’t buy them.”

They went on. I looked back at the target. My eyes had adapted again to the diffuse lighting in which the target, now light gray, stood in front of the dark grassy slope. I had the impression of a staged effect as I recalled the scene which I had just seen. But it had been unusually fascinating.

I wasn’t interested in archery. On television I had seen men in wheelchairs who shot at targets in gyms. I regarded it as a sport for the disabled or for children, and I couldn’t imagine that anyone could take it seriously. It seemed to me to be a waste of time, but it fit my image of the island.

And I wanted to get to know the man who shot at the colorful target at night. And that was how it began, four years ago.

3

The wind picked up. It came in gusts across the bay and raised glistening clouds from the rose hedges, whose brown twigs stuck up from beneath the snow. I turned my back to the wind and pulled up the collar of my jacket. I was freezing.

Slowly I went back down the path I had taken. In the harbor inn I drank a grog, then another. Outside it had gotten dark. When I pressed my face close to the black windowpane, I could see the masts of the fishing boats sway. The halyards on the flagpole in front of the inn smacked against the wood in a broken rhythm. Fishermen drinking rye and beer sat at two tables next to the bar. When I had first come in, they had looked up at me silently. Then they began talking again. A group was playing skat at their usual table. Their black sailor caps lay on the chairs next to them. The only woman in the room was the tired looking barmaid, who was leaning on the counter behind the bar. Only the murmur of voices and the slap of the cards on the wooden table could be heard in the half-dark room.

With warmth came fatigue. I paid and went up to my room. I stood in the dark room, leaning next to the door. The light from the courtyard outside cast the tangled shadows of a tree against the ceiling above the window. In the sharply defined rectangle of light, the chaotic images of the twigs danced with the irregular gusts of wind. Waves crashed heavily against the breakwater of the mooring basin. The featherbed was damp and heavy. The room hadn’t been heated before afternoon. I got up once to put on some wool socks, which I took out of my traveling bag beside the bed. Then I went to sleep.

During the night, there was a change in the weather. I woke up when the rain began to beat against the window, and I thought of the house on the hill before I went back to sleep. The morning was overcast and gloomy. The wind had died down and it was raining. The view from the window reached only to the harbormaster’s house, then everything vanished into an ashy gray. A thick curtain of raindrops obscured the rain and the water in the harbor. I went back to bed and slept until about noon.

The dining room was empty when I left the inn. The snow was gone and black water shot gurgling out of the raingutters of the houses and ran through the gardens and across the washed-out path to collect in the ditches. I took the lane to the smith’s place and then turned off onto the narrow path from the village to the lighthouse. Then, in the valley where the path crossed the paved road to the Hermitage, I went back up through the dripping grass toward the hill. There was no one to be seen.

The cold water ran off my coat at about knee level, soaked my trousers, and filled my shoes until they made a squishing noise at each step. I was even colder than yesterday, and I would have preferred to turn back. Only the fact that there was no one watching me allowed me to keep going. I would have a chance to dry my feet at the house. A reserve pair of socks bulged one of my jacket pockets; my flashlight was stuck in the other.

It seemed like a long time before the roof came up over the edge of the hill. I climbed the slope and reached the hedge behind the yard without being seen. I found it hard to believe that just yesterday there had been snow lying where now last year’s yellow grass lay in withered bunches against the first green of the new year. The branches of the hedge blocked my way and sprayed my face with cold droplets as I pushed through them to get under the shed roof.

At that moment my reason for coming was no longer important. I wanted to get inside where it was dry before my fingers became too numb and stiff from the cold to open the lock. I felt behind the beam over the door and found the key in the knot-hole of the second rafter where it had always been.

The padlock had a thick film of light brown rust. When I put the key in and turned it, flecks of rust stuck to my hand. I wiped off the lock and opened the door.

The air in the shed seemed to be colder than outside. I put the open padlock back in its staple and pulled the door shut behind me until the hasp lay over the staple. From a distance it might look as if the lock was still on the door. There was nothing else I could do.

It was pitch black. When I turned on my flashlight, its beam fell on a rectangular basin nearly covered over by a gray, gritty sheet of ice which reflected the light dully. An area of some two by three meters had been excavated and the dirt piled up to form a wall around the hole. The hole was lined with a sheet of plastic and filled with water which occupied a narrow gap between the ice sheet and the edge of the basin and which reflected the beam of the flashlight.

A convex shell which looked like a bathtub lay in the rear of the empty shed. Four plastic containers, grease-proof paper, and a roll of fiberglass net lay in one corner. I didn’t understand it at all.

I took the grate off the light well of the cellar window, which had provided a little light to the cellar before the shed had been built. After I had hung up my coat on a nail next to the door, I let myself down into the light well. As I expected, the window sash wasn’t bolted, but just swollen from the damp. With some difficulty, I managed to get it open and shone my light inside. There were some dusty bottles on the shelf under the window, and I pushed them aside with my foot. I laid the flashlight on the shelf and jumped stiff-legged into the dark. A bottle rolled from the shelf and broke with a dull report.

I swore at my curiosity and for a moment had the feeling that I had fallen into a trap. Then I took the flashlight and went to the door. It was latched but unlocked, and the beam of the light led me to the cellar steps. The fuses had been taken out of the electric meter and lay on top of its black housing. Without looking around any more, I went up the steps and entered the hall.

Nothing was locked except for the front door. All the keys hung on the board next to the light switch for the cellar steps. There was a key in the lock of the door to the workshop. One after the other, I unscrewed all the light bulbs from the electric lights: in the living room, the floor lamps; in the kitchen, the wall lights over the stove; in the workshop; and finally in the room under the eaves. Then I went back into the cellar and screwed the fuses back in. When I pressed the light switch in the cellar, the light came on.

I shaded my eyes with my hand and sat down on the cellar steps. My feet burned. I pulled my shoes off, stripped the wet socks from my feet, and, after I had dried them off with a rag which I found under the steps, pulled on dry socks. Unwillingly, I stuck my feet back into the wet shoes.

I found the electric heater in the workshop under the tool bench. My morale rose. I took it up to the room under the eaves and plugged the extension cord into the wall outlet. The smell of burning dust reminded me of my cigarettes. The package was flattened, but it had stayed dry. I sat down with my back against the wall and pulled the heater over toward my feet. Only now, with the first drag from the cigarette, did I feel the tension which had already started to slacken.

Up to now, everything had gone smoothly, exactly as planned. I was in the house, and once here, I had lost that vague feeling of uneasiness, of doing something forbidden. At this point, I had clearly committed the crime of breaking and entering. If I were discovered, no one would believe that all I wanted was to find out what had happened to him. But I believed that he would have understood me.

The reflection of the glowing overhead heater shimmered in the varnish of the wooden floor, and as the room slowly warmed up I glanced around the familiar surroundings. On the windowsill I found an empty tin box to use as an ashtray. Water was running down the dirty windowpane. I could hear the muffled, steady sound of the falling drops on the thick thatched roof.

I felt secure and sheltered. There was still enough daylight to begin a search.

But really, what was I looking for?

4

I wanted to find some clue to his disappearance. Although I was much less interested in where he went when he left unnoticed than in the reasons and circumstances surrounding his departure, I suppose that they were closely connected. I didn’t know why I had excluded an accident or a crime. They simply didn’t fit in the picture my imagination had created. It had to have been something else, and I was convinced that his departure from the island was the final link in a chain of events.

Since I had known him, I found any excuse justified coming to the island, even if just for a long weekend. But I had never been here later than the beginning of October nor earlier than the end of May. Several times he had invited me to come during the winter. I had seen color slides showing dunes of snow and ice-encrusted granite boulders which glistened in the sun like crystal, with blackish green water standing between them and with fringes of prickly hoarfrost on their edges. I found it splendid, but I wanted to lie in the sand in the summer when the sun was high in the sky and I could listen to the rolling and rumbling of the stones which the surf moved about on the narrow stretch of shore under the steep cliffs.

Perhaps I would have learned more about him if I had come for a visit then, but each year I had thought that I would be able to return to the island.

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.

We were sitting a little below the flat crest of one of three hills which surrounded the basin and looked across one end of the basin at an overgrazed pasture. The road to the next village on the island ran along the other side of the pasture parallel to the reeds marking the edge of the bay.

The paved-over dirt road was fringed with bushy old ash trees, and their dark green leaves contrasted with the lighter tones of the meadow and the distant reeds.

I could see about a dozen rabbits in the depression below us and along the edge of the pasture. They had jumped for cover in the tall grass and in among the high stems of the mullein and watched us carefully.

But we crouched motionless beneath the hawthorn, so they came back out and began to feed again.

“Do you see the stone down there?” He pointed at a large boulder that a narrow footpath passed on its way between the two nearby hills.

I nodded. He spoke again, softly. “There are four burrows on that slope”. He pointed at the dark entrance holes to the rabbits’ burrows which showed up on the light yellow sand, a different color from the beach sand. “They are all about the same distance from that stone down below. It’s about thirty meters. Follow me slowly and take cover behind the stone. Clear?”

I nodded again and stood up. He nocked an arrow and stuck the second one in the top of his basketball sneaker. He held the bow low and went slowly down the slope until he reached a point halfway along the footpath. I stayed close behind him and we followed the path down to the stone in single file.

I stepped back behind the stone and looked at the slope. The burrows were about half way up the slope, and I understood what he meant. The rabbits had hopped up the slope through the deep grass and bushy stems, and they now sat in front of three of the four burrows, ready to take cover inside at a moment’s notice. Their ears twitched with a reddish glint as they stared in our direction with heads erect. He slowly raised the bow in the direction of one of them, sitting alone against the yellow sand.

As he drew the bow, the rabbit moved but at the same instant the string sang. I thought I heard the impact of the arrow as the yellow sand spurted up in front of the burrow. After a great deal of movement, everything was quiet. The white feathers on the arrow shaft whipped about in front of the dark hole and then were still.

He lowered the bow slowly and then turned to me.

“Well,” he said. “Just like Robin Hood.”

Slowly we climbed the slope. The rabbit lay in front of his burrow with his head in the hole, but the arrow which had passed through his neck had kept him from going any further. He pulled it out, wiped it clean on a fuzzy, broad mullein leaf, and stuck it in his shoe next to the other one. Then he picked up the rabbit by its hind legs and we went back to the hawthorn bush. The rabbit bled heavily from the neck wound, and he hung it up on a branch of the hawthorn to bleed out. We smoked a cigarette and watched the slope opposite. It wasn’t long before the other rabbits emerged from their burrows, hopped back to the meadow and began to feed again.

I lay in the grass and stared at the cloudless blue sky through the hawthorn’s thick foliage. While he was wrapping up the bow, I sat up. Only then did I notice that the aluminum arrows had a different head than the others which he used for shooting at the target. I picked up one of the arrows to look at it more closely. The massive, cone-shaped point which had the same diameter as the arrow shaft had been slit with a thin saw, and a thin steel blade in the shape of a long triangle had been inserted in the slot. The edges had been honed to the sharpness of a razor.

I wondered about his lack of concern, carrying such dangerous edges in his shoe, but he shrugged his shoulders when I asked him about it. Then he stuck the arrows back in their canvas sleeve.

The bundle was thicker as we walked back, for after putting the rabbit in a plastic bag, it too had been wrapped in the canvas sheet.

We walked back the same way. The perfume of thyme rose over the fields and the yellow stalks of the mullein shone bright against the dark meadow.

I watched while he cleaned the rabbit. He took it down into the cellar and invited me to supper for the next evening. I also stayed that evening. We drank beer and ate smoked flounder. The sky took on a reddish gray color over the gradually darkening woods, and the sinking sun burned holes through the gaps between the thick crowns of the pine woods. Swarms of June beetles hummed in the branches of the birch and provided a background to the clear chirping of the crickets.

I felt contented and wondered at the memory of the many previous evenings which I had spent in the smoke-filled bar. I was at peace with the world, and I felt that this vacation had been different from all the others.

8

The wind brought the sound of a dog barking angrily in the village and pulled me out of my reverie. My gaze fell on the open traveling bag next to the bed, and when I saw the bread I suddenly felt hungry. I put the teapot, cup, and can of milk on the floor and put the bread and cheese on the stool.

The bread was a firm, dark, whole grain bread, but it was fresh when I cut into it. I cut some strips of cheese and broke pieces from a thick slice of bread. The cheese was dry and crumbly, but very sharp. While I alternately ate pieces of bread and cheese, I knew that I would be thirsty again in an hour. But I wanted to wait before making tea again. I ate two thick slices of bread and the entire small package of cheese.

The warmth and the full feeling made me sluggish, but before I went to sleep, I wanted to do a thorough search of at least this upper room. I got up and pulled the curtains back from in front of the shelves, which were built against the wall between the slant of the roof and the floor. I pushed my traveling bag inside. Then, one after the other, I pulled back all the curtains and looked into all the drawers.

On the window side lay piles of underwear, tools in a wooden box, a small radio, a shoe box containing photographs, books, a couple of glasses, and some empty bottles.

The shelves against the wall on the other side, where the drawing table stood, held paints, pastel chalks, art supplies, an assortment of new brushes, and a lot of paper: separate sheets of watercolor board, which had become corrugated in the damp, along with flat, grayish-blue, coarse, wood pulp paper. There were four years of a technical journal for designers in another drawer. There were strips of paper as bookmarks in some of the issues.

When I looked at the places marked, I found articles on chairs and seating arrangements, sporting goods, and an essay on design methods. I put them all back on the shelf. In the drawer beneath there was a coffee-table sized book with a colored dust jacket. It had the title “Submersible Boats” and showed a bizarre yellow underwater vehicle with silver bubbles of air rising from it against a shining blue background. There was a strip of paper marking a place in this book as well. I pulled the book out and put it on the drawing table to read it a little before going to sleep. Beneath it I found a brochure on acrylic skylights. Along with color photos which showed interior shots of rooms with skylights, the brochure contained drawings with dimensions. One page with a halfround cupola was checked. With the pamphlet in my hand, I again had the feeling that this should remind me of something.

I leafed through it to the end and held it by its back and shook it, but nothing fell out. Slowly, I put it back.

The next thing that came into my hands was a stack of multicolored folders. One contained invoices and bills, the others patent descriptions. They were in his name and covered several different fields. They concerned interchangeable assembly elements, light fixtures, and a stackable chair that could be set up in rows by hooking the seats and backs together. There were also some foreign patent registrations from a number of countries among them.

A hard-cover binder held a series of typewritten poems. There must have been a good two dozen pages, mostly without titles, but each with a date at the upper right, in the same place as on a letter. The first and last pages covered a time span of eight months, but that was two years ago.

I found it unimaginable that he had bothered with poetry – at least we had never spoken of it. But he had surprised me just as much last year when he suddenly became interested in small sculptures, small terra-cotta figures which he formed on the beach from the blue-gray clumps of clay at the foot of the sea cliff and then baked in the retort furnace in the cellar. There were two shelves on the living room wall full of these hand-sized figurines.

I shoved the binder back on the shelf. Behind the next curtain lay two rolls of drawings wrapped in brown tubes. When I held up the first vertically, a roll of drawings on transparent tracing paper slid down into my hand. I laid the roll on the drawing table and shoved the books to one side. When I unrolled the brittle paper, I saw that the drawings were full-size curves of bow limbs. Two of them carried the names of well-known high-performance models made by an American and a Japanese company. Evidently, he had drawn them for comparison with his own designs. The others were drawings of his own models, which he had designated by the name “Arco” along with the model number.

There were four drawings, and I had been there when he drew one of them.

In different colors, the sheet showed the step-by-step deformation of the bow limb when gradually drawn back. Besides the direct technical value of the data represented, I found that the drawing had considerable aesthetic attraction. The deformation of the bow limb, which normally took place in a fraction of a second, was shown here in separate stages presenting a visual representation of the dynamics of the gradually straightening recurved bow limb.

At the time, we had taken the drawing board out to the yard and clamped the bow to the edge of the drawing board. At the midpoint of the bow, we had placed a thin board which had been provided with short pegs driven in at 5 cm intervals. Then with a spring scale, we pulled the bowstring back in steps, stopping at each peg.

After entering the strength of the pull at that point in a table, we traced along the inner curves of the limbs with a felt pen, until the sheet was covered with sweeping curves.

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