Arrows In The Fog

5

It wasn’t until the next stop that passengers climbing into the car discovered Bärger, unconscious and lying in a pool of blood and beer from the discarded beer can. Disgusted by the sight, an elderly lady informed the driver that there was a drunk lying in one of the cars who must have passed out, fallen, and injured himself.

Two men carried him out and laid him on the bench at the tram stop where he slowly regained consciousness. The wound on the side of his head was still bleeding slowly.

An ambulance happened to be passing and was stopped by the tram driver to pick him up. Bärger’s damp clothes were sticking to his body, and he began to freeze. A drum began beating in his head and he felt that he was going to be sick.

“What happened?” asked a voice in his ear. Gentle hands wound a bandage around his head.

“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” said Bärger.

“He’s not drunk,” said a woman’s voice. The hand was now wiping the blood from his ear. It hurt and Bärger started.

“I’m cold,” he said after a bit, while the ambulance raced through the night.

“At the moment, that’s the least of your worries,” said a man’s voice. The ambulance raced through a crossing with siren going and lights flashing.

“Where are we going?” asked Bärger.

“To the emergency room at the casualty hospital,” answered the woman’s voice.

“Oh, hell,” he said despairingly.

“What’s wrong?” asked the doctor.

“Tomorrow, I’m flying to Japan,” Bärger said tonelessly.

The doctor laughed. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he said.

“I think that I have to throw up,” said Bärger. And he did.

He was still nauseous when they finally put him in a clean hospital bed, almost flat on his back with his hands clutching the sides of the mattress to fight against an increasing sense of vertigo.

On his arrival, a tired ER doctor diagnosed his problem as a brain concussion with all the typical symptoms and, showing little further concern, went back to bed. Before he did, however, he had Bärger taken for an x-ray, and in spite of his protests he was rolled across a dark courtyard on a gurney with wheels that were too small. The narrow cart bumped across the uneven surface and he tried to keep his head up to avoid the jarring which caused the pain to pulse in his head. His wound seemed to be trivial in the eyes of the hospital personnel. It still hurt a little after stitches had been placed in the crescentshaped wound. Instead of the bandage, he now had a light pad that was stuck with wide tape unto the shaven half of his head.

He gradually became aware of all this after a hurrying Sister awakened him the next morning. Bärger had trouble remembering; he had a raging headache; he was nauseous; and he had no idea how long he would stay that way.

For several hours, all that Bärger threw up into the gray plastic basin was only a greenish slime. Unwillingly he drank some insipid herbal tea, only to give it back by return mail, as he put it.

He was doing that at the moment when a Mr. Bärger from Berlin was being paged for the last time at the Brussels airport to present himself at Gate 14 for the flight to Narita/Tokyo. At the same moment a small Japanese rolled up his banner with the legend “Noyama-Travel” and rapidly left the departure lounge.

He didn’t feel better until the next day.

His headache gradually faded, and the attacks of nausea occurred less frequently. Bärger wanted to go home, but the doctor wanted to keep him under observation for another couple of days. So, swearing, he went to the reception area and called Lothar.

His friend’s first question was to ask where he was calling from. He took a deep breath and then, as briefly as possible, told him what had happened.

There was a short silence at the other end of the line, then Lothar said, “It won’t make you feel any better, but you can be glad that it wasn’t any worse.”

Bärger hadn’t thought of it like that, and he said, “It will be a while before I can agree with you. At the moment I have other things on my mind.”

Then he asked Lothar to bring his daypack down to the hospital. It was in the corridor of his apartment next to his suitcase.

“It has everything that I need,” said Bärger. “You don’t have to look for anything. You can get the key from my neighbor. You know her. And please bring my mail with you.”

Late that afternoon, Lothar showed up with the small daypack that Bärger had packed with such care for his trip. As Bärger looked for the pouch with his shaving tackle, a map of the city of Tokyo fell out. He picked it up and stared at it until the picture of the skyline on Tokyo Bay swam before his eyes. An ice-cold rage began to slowly rise in him, and the wound on his head began to throb again.

Lothar could see how he felt and left after only exchanging a few words, dismissing Bärger’s thanks with a careless wave of the hand.

Listlessly, he leafed through the thin stack of mail. He put a picture postcard from Denmark to one side; the rest was junk mail and he threw it unread into the wastebasket in the hospital waiting room.

Once he had shaved and thoroughly inspected his half-shaven bandaged head in the mirror during the process, he lay back in his bed and began to read the architect’s monthly journal that Lothar had brought along with his mail.

Under the title, “Condensed Living” he found an article on an investigation of housing construction in Germany. Eighty percent of all Germans, he read, wanted to live in their own home surrounded by green grass. Daily, 129 hectares were devoted to meet this demand.

Bärger dropped the magazine, fished through his daypack for his calculator, and set up an approximate calculation.

That meant more than nine square kilometers per week. How large was Germany? He thought that he remembered that it was something around 350,000 square kilometers, but this number didn’t tell him much. He had to know how much was under cultivation, how much devoted to forests, how much to roads, autobahns, and finally how much to cities and villages. Although these data were certainly available somewhere, even if he had them, area calculations of land lost over the long term didn’t mean much. All that he had were the actual numbers; nine square kilometers a week – 470 per year.

Bärger put the calculator down and, with his hands behind his head, stared unseeing at the ceiling of the hospital room.

It would have more interesting to know how much cropland was destroyed by the construction of suburban homes. Many of the cities in Germany went back to the Middle Ages.

At that time the surrounding land was the food source for the city, so it was mainly cropland and pasture. Useful arable land was unavoidably destroyed as the cities grew. Transport had to bring in the necessary products from great distances to compensate for the inability of a modern city to feed itself from the surrounding land. Always just in time. Or perhaps not. It had been a long time since there was any control over the process. There had been no control in East Berlin for a long time. Perhaps it could be said better that control had been neglected in the comrades’ plans for city development.

Marzahn, with its negative image as a prefabricated housing development and which was still plagued by massive social problems, had been built on what had been the best arable land in Berlin at the time. It had been built, although there was really no need for new housing in East Berlin. Apparently, it had only been built because Erich Honecker was irritated that East Berlin had fewer inhabitants than West Berlin, then about two million. In order to fill the endless rows of residential blocks, accommodations were offered to the construction workers from the north of East Germany who had erected them. So everyone had some reason at the time to support the rotten decision to build there.

Bärger looked out the window. It was late in the afternoon. The low sun cast a warm light through the autumn leaves of a maple in the hospital courtyard.

I never understood it and I will never understand it, he thought resignedly.

In Berlin now, there are about a million and a half square meters of empty office space, and no one knows if that space will ever be used. Even in this case, he supposed that the construction must have been based on something like a study of the space needed. But either there had been a mistake right from the start or the evaluation had been slanted as “a favor to the banks”, as people now called it in this country. You could only be sure that someone had made a bundle from it, but what irritated him the most was the thought of that senseless waste. A waste of site, material, and work – quite apart from money. The only things that were ruthlessly economized on in this country were the wages and salaries of those doing the work.

There was a knock at the door.

“Ja, come in please,” said Bärger, surprised. A man in a gray parka with a thin briefcase under his arm entered the room. Bärger sat on the edge of the bed and waited. The man looked at him closely for a moment, and then finally said:

“Mühle. My name is Detective Mühle. I am from the police.”

Oh, really,” said Bärger bad-temperedly, and crossed his arms on his chest.

The man was unimpressed.

“The doctor told me that I could talk to you today. But if you’d rather not, I can come back tomorrow.”

Bärger felt suddenly tired.

“No, it’s OK,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Tell me what happened,” said Herr Mühle.

Bärger didn’t have much to tell. He had only a vague memory of the guy who had poured the beer on his book. For the first time he heard that the tram driver had testified that, except for Bärger, there had been nobody in the car and at first they had thought that he was drunk.

“Would you recognize him?” asked the detective.

Bärger thought about it.

“He was dressed all in black, with a sweatshirt with white lettering, and wore boots with white laces. He had a red face, somewhat bloated. That’s about it. Do you have any suspects?”

Herr Mühle arranged his notes and smoothed out a wrinkled form.

“ If you wish to make out a complaint against a person or persons unknown, you must sign here.”

Bärger skimmed through his testimony and the report, then he signed the papers and gave them back to Herr Mühle, who put them in his thin briefcase. With a short goodbye, he went to the door and vanished noiselessly.

Meanwhile, it had grown dark outside.

Bärger turned on the lamp over his bed and listlessly picked up the monthly journal of the Architectural Council. The entire issue seemed to be devoted to the problem of housing space; he had never been really happy with that kind of planning assignment. This time, the article concerned town houses. The size of a lot for a medium sized house, he read, had now shrunk to 180 square meters.

Lothar lived in a medium sized town house. Bärger had been invited to the housewarming party, and he still was embarrassed to remember how little he had tried to hide his discomfort with this lifestyle. Lothar could hardly have missed it, and Bärger wasn’t sure if Lothar held it against him even now.

Nevertheless, it was evident that the economics of this floor plan, the ratio of living to traffic space, would be really hard to beat. But at what a price! The stairs changed direction twice and were so narrow that no normal piece of furniture could be taken up that way. Moving companies had long mobile cranes to lift cupboards and upholstered furniture through the windows into the apartments in such new buildings.

It was even unpleasant to remember the obligatory party with a grill in the newly laid out garden, where the edges of the rolls of turf had not yet grown together. If he had thought the apartment was small before, now it felt cramped. It was so close to the neighbors that it would take great self-control to endure it. There was no possibility of a pleasant drinking party among friends. It would have brought angry protests from neighbors on both sides. Stay professional, he told himself finally. It’s an alternative, and the bottom line is that it is a clear improvement over the Marzahn flats. He could trust Lothar to come to some arrangement with his neighbors. He had often demonstrated his ability to compromise as head of the Construction Commission. It was only for himself that Bärger was unwilling to accept this kind of housing.

Before his divorce, he too had lived in a duplex in a development from the thirties. Even then the lots only averaged 500 square meters, but at least there were a couple of old trees growing on his. Instead of a lawn, he had let a colorful meadow grow up, which he cut twice a year with a sickle. While lawnmowers were rattling all around him on the weekends, he sat quite happily on his terrace and watched the butterflies flying across the tall grass from flower to flower.

There was a compressed bale of straw next to the compost heap at the end of his garden. If you went back far enough into the narrow gangway between house and garage, you could shoot at the 30-meter distance. He had always shot at colored FITA targets on that straw backstop. Until two days ago, during his trip to the atomic power plant, it had been a very long time since he had seen those targets.

By then his marriage had become no more than a hollow shell, but he was unable to escape it. He didn’t understand why his wife was unwilling to leave him after the endless years in which she had become so indifferent to him. At first it had bothered him but then, with time, he had become indifferent to her. They had endured an increasingly dead relationship for far too many years. He had noticed the change in himself only from time to time, but his tolerance of the continuous humiliation had cost him the respect of his son.

When he finally decided to leave his wife, and filed for divorce, it had been a kind of release. Bärger had not expected that his son would be unable to understand this step, much less to accept it. His son had broken off any contact with him, and it had taken years for him to become resigned to that loss.

No, he was happy in his well-lighted apartment with its peculiar floor plan, the large bath, and the huge living room window that even saved him heating costs on sunny winter days. What he really missed was the garden where he could shoot in his bow whenever he wanted to.

And to the loss of his cellar, he corrected himself. Soon after the reunification it had become possible to install gas heat. He had painted the cellar white and had even put light gray lacquer on the floor to make it easier to keep clean. He had set up a small model builder’s workshop and provided it with everything that he needed to work with wood and plastic. Since then, he had often bitterly regretted the loss of his cellar workshop.

It had always been a good feeling to take the bow down from its hooks over the door of his room, take a half dozen arrows from the home-made rack next to it, and then go and shoot a few quick arrows at the straw bale at the end of his garden. Oh yes. That had been a good feeling.

Bärger got up slowly from his bed.

He took a deep breath and stood erect for a while in front of the open window. I am now really relaxed, he thought, and he let his arms hang and closed his eyes.

It is summer. I am standing under the old plum tree and I have my bow in my left hand. The wood is quite warm, and when I feel the shape of the grip, it is as if I am holding another hand – smooth, warm, solid, and reliable. There is a soft snap, when I place the nock of the arrow on the string. I can feel the cool grass under my bare feet and I raise the bow toward the target.

But just as he was pulling his shoulders back to feel the sensation of drawing a bow, the door opened. A Sister stood in the open doorway with her hand on the knob and looked at him blankly. Then she laughed as if she understood and asked, “Are you practicing gymnastics, Herr Bärger?”

“Something like that,” he said, and felt a little stupid.

“Dinner,” said the Sister, and left

Damn, thought Bärger. When am I going to be able to shoot in a bow again?

6

More from boredom than any real interest, Bärger opened his monthly journal again after he had returned his empty tray to the corridor.

While he automatically sipped the insipid herbal tea, his glance was arrested by the word “competition”.

Look at this, he thought. This is interesting. The Brandenburg district is offering a twolevel competition for ideas and plans for a juvenile detention facility.

They have to know, thought Bärger, that the existing capacity is no longer adequate, because more and more of these useless thugs are hitting other people over the head just for fun. Perhaps the quality and furnishings of the existing structures no longer meet the requirements of a modern prison – also understandable.

Was it really true that today these young criminals were sent to the Caribbean with their social workers to go surfing for the purpose of resocialization?

He had read that a while ago in a newspaper and wasn’t sure whether a couple of clever sociology students hadn’t just figured out a way to get a first class holiday at the taxpayers’ expense. He supposed that, as a rule, the victims of attacks such as he had experienced would never have enough money in their entire lives to spend a vacation in the Caribbean.

The bump on the side of his head began to throb, and Bärger rubbed the bald spot behind his ear with the flat of his hand.

In the newspapers he was constantly reading that the youth of today were increasingly prepared to use violence, as if this were a puzzling phenomenon. He didn’t like the expression “prepared to use violence”, probably thought up by some nutty psychotherapist who believed that a screwed-up childhood gave thugs the right to hit other people on the head.

Preparation was a word that expressed positive social behavior, a word such as sacrifice, help, or industry. He found it perverted to combine it with violence. That combination of words was fundamentally wrong, as it tied together two completely opposite concepts and lacked clarity.

Quite apart from the circumstance that the assailant was almost always under the influence of alcohol and outnumbered his prey or at least was stronger, the violence seemed to be almost an addiction. He doubted whether such an addiction could be treated successfully by vacations in the Caribbean.

The newspaper article had put it well. Accepted social work in many places had become a cover-up for indolence at the cost of the state. He had nothing to add to that.

A contest for the design of a juvenile jail? He would have to get the documentation. There must be specific legal requirements and insurance regulations, including guidelines for the materials to be used. But it was also presented as a competition for ideas, so they were looking for suggestions that departed from current standards as well.

Bärger had been paging through the journal at random when, on the last page, he came across a photograph of the interior of a building. At first glance, it looked like a typical German prison. Of course, he had never been in jail, and that was true for most of the people he knew. But he had seen that particular configuration in so many films that he immediately associated it with a German prison. It was exactly like the photo.

There was a long four-story room, seen in central perspective, with narrow galleries to the right and left and a wide shaft between them reaching from the bottom floor to the roof with daylight coming through a skylight at the top. There were uniformly painted rows of doors on both sides. Just like a prison.

Only in the films, the galleries were always steel and set with steel bars and steel plate. Bärger could almost hear the prisoners walking in lockstep on those steel plates and the clanging of a closing cell door echoing in the empty central chamber.

He was very surprised when he turned back to read the title of the article: “Prize Winning Administration Building for a Major Cosmetics Company”. Even so, he didn’t really think it was very funny. If someone could design an office building today on the pattern of a Prussian prison, what then should (what was the proper expression?) an institution for penal servitude look like?

That night, he slept badly.

He woke up several times, sweating in spite of the thin covers. Finally, he opened the windows as far as they would go just as the sky began to gray over the roofline.

When he eventually fell asleep toward morning, he had a remarkable dream that he was able to remember with knife-edge sharpness after he awoke.

He was standing in the middle of a gigantic cooling tower and was looking about for something to resist a swirling suction pulling him upward. He was tempted to give in to the suction, which was pulling him up into the light of the sun. But it wasn’t the right time yet. He had to wait for something; the right sign had to appear.

Then shadows grew from the triangular openings around the supporting intake ring, black silhouettes against a light background, vague as if they were illuminated from the outside. There were more and more of them until every opening had become a frame for human shadows which now slowly approached him, taking on form as they approached. He saw faces full of evil and malice, which grinned and bared their teeth. As they approached him, and as the ring around him grew tighter and cut him off, the triangular openings behind the shadows began to close slowly and silently. The black triangular surfaces closed from top and bottom into the openings like the sharp teeth in the jaws of a shark.

At the last moment, just as the last opening shut and the ring had become completely dark, the suction began to pull him up, higher and higher toward the bright circle of the tower opening. With out-stretched arms he floated upwards until, blinded by the glaring light, he had to close his eyes.

He awoke as the morning sun glared in his eyes.

Bärger was released from the hospital on the morning of the fourth day after he had been admitted. The nurse gave him his shirt and jacket in a plastic bag. They looked and smelled as they had on that evening when he was brought in unconscious from the streetcar. He threw the bag into a trash container in the hospital courtyard.

The thought that he would have to come back the next day to get his stitches taken out spoiled his joy in the late summer weather. Unhappily he shuffled through the yellow linden leaves under the trees to the tram stop.

When the tram arrived, he hesitated a moment to cast an eye over the passengers before climbing in. Shaking his head, he got on. Never again would he be able to use a streetcar without this uneasy feeling. The bump over his ear throbbed and Bärger rubbed the hard lump on his head with the flat of his hand.

When he arrived home, he took the mail from his mailbox and opened the window. Then he took a long shower, soaping himself twice and sniffing his wrist suspiciously, as he thought he could still smell the hospital on his skin. Finally he turned the water off, put on his Japanese robe, the yakuta with the bamboo pattern, and sat out on the balcony in the sun.

He could hear the shouts of the school children playing ball in the high school yard across the street.

The school possessed two large gymnasiums. Sometimes in the evening from his balcony, he watched the various sport teams while they trained.

Training, thought Bärger. In the winter, we always trained with the bow in a gymnasium. Where could I really train now, if I wanted to begin again?

Interesting question, he admitted to himself.

Through the open door, he heard the telephone ring.

He waited until after his message, recognized the voice of the caller, hesitated a moment, and then finally went back inside to pick up the receiver.

“Hallo Jürgen,” said Bärger, “Still snowed under with work?”

“I’m glad you’re there,” said the voice on the telephone.

“Right now I’m on my way home from the construction site, and I thought I might drop by and see you. Weren’t you supposed to be somewhere in Japan now?”

Bärger looked out the window. That question was going to be around for a while: Weren’t you supposed to be in Japan? Did you have an accident? What are you going to do now?

I don’t want to deal with those questions, thought Bärger, in any case, not now. But then he said aloud, “Come on over, and I’ll tell you all abut it.” He hesitated a moment, “I missed the flight”.

They sat together and he made a pot of the Frisian tea mixture, which was also Jürgen’s favorite. They took the cups out onto the balcony and Bärger told him what had happened.

“You ought to get away for a while,” said Jürgen after a bit.

“Go somewhere where there is no cultural program to attend, no hotel, and no tourist group. Somewhere where you like it, I mean where you used to like it. Feel the fresh sea breeze in your face until your head is clear again. Right now, you’re good for nothing.”

“What do you mean?” Bärger was surprised by the urgency he detected in Jürgen’s words.

You’ve changed completely,” said Jürgen. “I don’t really know you any more. In the shape you’re in, you’re not going to be able to finish anything properly no matter what you start. I tell you again. Pack a suitcase and get out. Disappear for a couple of weeks, and leave your cell-phone at home.”

“But I don’t have a cell-phone,” said Bärger.

“So much the better,” replied Jürgen, and they grinned at each other.

“Is it too early for red wine?” asked Bärger.

“It’s never too early for red wine,” replied Jürgen. “Well, let’s say that depends on what kind.”

It was a light California red wine that he took out of the drawer under the refrigerator. It tasted of vanilla and black currants. At first, they thought that it was a little too warm, but they agreed that that only intensified the bouquet. After the second glass, neither had anything against either the temperature or the bouquet.

Instead they talked about holidays.

Bärger recalled vacations in Spain and Provence. Jürgen talked about Sweden, Norway, and Brittany.

The sun had dropped low in the hazy sky. Bärger leaned back with his hands on his neck and stared into the deepening twilight. No cloud reflected the shining evening red on the skyline. Instead, the straight contrails of two crossing jets began to shine brightly as intersecting straight lines.

“Technology inscribes its symbols over the city,” said Bärger. “Even in the heavens.”

Jürgen looked at him uncomprehendingly. Bärger pointed at the slowly blurring light streaks and they watched them a while in silence.

“I wonder why no one ever got the idea of making clouds rectangular for advertisements?”

“I can tell you,” Jürgen grinned and held his wine glass up in the last rays of the dying sun. “It wouldn’t pay.”

They both laughed.

“I just recalled something,” said Jürgen after a while and looked at the row of four scroll paintings that Bärger had hung close together over his slip-covered sofa bed.

“A good contractor shouldn’t have a problem with recalls,” said Bärger earnestly.

“You used to be funnier. Do you remember that you promised me an ink painting a long time ago? How long ago was that?”

“A long time,” said Bärger, “far too long. Do you have some idea of what you want?”

He looked at the narrow paintings, each the same size, mounted on silver-gray, matt silk, displaying the classical theme of the “four nobles”, along with the plants that represented the four seasons in China. The sequence began with a twig of flowering winter plum. Spring was represented by an orchid next to a bizarrely shaped stone. Bamboo represented summer, with needle sharp leaves motionless and stiff in the midday heat. The last picture in the series, which stood for autumn, was of chrysanthemum blossoms, heavy and full among irregularly shaped leaves.

“Aside from the fact that we don’t have any flowering winter plum trees here in the winter, I really think it’s right to begin the year with winter,” said Jürgen.

Bärger nodded. Spring, summer, fall, and winter – this series of seasons was the biological sequence of birth and death. But was it really necessary to impose a beginning and end on an eternal cycle?

“Bamboo,” said Jürgen. “ I would really like to have a picture of bamboo.”

Bärger emptied his glass.

He looked at Jürgen for a while, who seemed to be sunk in a reverie looking at the scroll painting of the bamboo and stone.

They had known each other for a long time.

They had been students at the same university at the same time, but they hadn’t met there. They both liked early jazz from the twenties –Jürgen played the trumpet, Bärger the banjo and drums. They had both been active in the martial arts, karate for Jürgen and Judo for him. Jürgen had a black belt, but Bärger had never taken it that far.

That was long ago.

Long ago once again? Why did things keep occurring to him that were over? Gone, over, never again – was that it? Were his thoughts beginning to run backwards? If so, then the pictures of his past would become stronger than promises for the future. Bärger was startled. Was this what happened when you got old?

Jürgen leaned back. Seated there with his left leg over the arm of the chair with his shock of graying hair, disheveled as usual, and his large nose, he always reminded Bärger of the famous photo of Einstein sticking out his tongue.