Arrows in the Fog

Or

The Hair of the Tortoise

By

Günther Bach

Günther Bach

Arrows in the Fog

© 2004 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

© quotation: Hans Magnus Enzensberger,

Vom Blätterteig der Zeit, aus:

Die Elixiere der Wissenschaft © Suhrkamp Verlag

Frankfurt am Main 2002

poem: Hans Magnus Enzensberger,

Das Einfache, das schwer zu erfinden ist, aus:

Die Elixiere der Wissenschaft

©Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2002

Thanks for the authorization.

Translation: Robert Dohrenwend

Cover design: Angelika Hörnig

according to a photo of Silke Lübbert

Lecturer: Mitch Cohen

© 2012 ebook

ISBN: 978-3-938921-26-5

Verlag Angelika Hörnig

Siebenpfeifferstr. 18

D-67071 Ludwigshafen

Germany

www.archery.de

Table of Contents

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

Author

The Beginning

Evidently the time is gone

when you could believe that

it was possible to live

your life in step with the times.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

For life doesn’t allow trial runs,

it’s happening – right now.

James Ogilvy

1

Bärger was packing up.

Even after four years with the company, he didn’t have a lot to pile into the two banana boxes. Really, Bärger thought, I shouldn’t lug all this stuff around with me anymore. Not after I finally figured out that domestic utilities were never my strong point. One more bit of misinformation passed on to me when I was a student, like statics. How did the professor put it: “As an architect, you need to understand only enough statics to make it clear to a construction engineer what you need from him.”

Right, Professor, but your exams looked a lot different!

That was a long time ago.

Bärger lifted the last pile of books from the shelves on the wall, building construction and building design texts; good old Neufert, the 33rd edition since 1936. The book had grown three times as thick since his days as a student in Dresden. Neufert, who had collaborated with Gropius on Measurements, Standards, and Codes, and then Bauhaus and the beginning of industrial construction.

How mixed all that was now, how easily blending ideas could become their exact opposite: the Gropius concept became the settlement in Dessau and the mass flats in Berlin, the capital of tacky buildings.

And now – the table lamps by Wagenfeld and the steel tube chairs by Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, and Mart Stam that were designed more than eighty years ago as economical purchases for everyday use by average people, were replicas offered as unique exquisite pieces at horrendous prices in today’s chic window displays.

Bärger unfolded a brochure printed on several pages of high gloss paper. The names of the inventors didn’t appear anywhere. It only referred to top creations of an international designer, as if this rubbish could be compared to the accomplishments of Mies and Mart Stam. The final sentence of the advertisement was a beautiful example of contemporary usage: “Ideal for raising your liquidity and for providing a quick tax shelter.” That sounded a lot better than Wagenfeld’s idea that the best features of the things around us should be the least obvious.

Through the open door, Bärger heard the noise of the elevator going down. Only now did he notice how quiet it was in the old corner house, which had been occupied by the Worker’s Council during the East German period. He looked at his watch; it was late. Glancing toward the window, he noticed that he had almost forgotten his small espresso coffeemaker. There was still enough black powder in the can, and as he shoved the small thick-walled mug under the spout and listened to the gurgling sound of the flowing coffee, he almost regretted that, once again, it was over.

He had had a very pleasant time here. He liked the large room with its ceiling as high as those in Italian Renaissance palaces.

The box with his business cards lay next to the drawing lamp. He picked it up and held it for a moment in his hand. Then, slowly, he let the whole pile slide into the wastebasket. A single card with the red company logo and the inscription “Chief Architect” fluttered to the floor. He picked it up, hesitated, then stuck it in his shirt pocket.

“That’s it then,” said Bärger aloud.

He was already at the door when the phone rang.

Bärger glanced at his watch. It was just before ten. He turned on the drawing lamp and reached for the receiver.

“Bärger,” he said. “I’m really not here anymore.”

But the caller didn’t pay any attention to him. “Are you still there? I’ve been looking for you at your house. What are you doing still at the office at this hour?”

It was Lothar, the representative of the Construction Committee, thorough and conscientious as usual. Had he forgotten anything else? Bärger pulled his desk calendar into the cone of light cast by the drawing lamp. Right, there it was. Tuesday, inspection of nuclear power plant. 8 o’clock.

“Hallo Lothar,” he said. “I’m doing what everyone in the office does, drinking coffee. No, no. I’m not kidding. I’ve just packed up the last of my stuff and I’m going straight home. Everything’s set. Tomorrow at eight in the parking lot. Yeah, see you tomorrow.” He hung up. The last telephone call, thought Bärger, perhaps even a gesture by fate, a glimpse of the future. Then he shoved both boxes over to the door, turned out the light, and shut the door.

How did that Spanish proverb go? When one door closes, another opens.

2

It was still summer.

But already the broad leaves of the lindens were turning yellow; the umbels of the mountain ash were a coral red color; and in the mornings, apples fell to the damp lawns with a dull thump.

Why am I doing this again, thought Bärger, as he walked toward the car just pulling in. I haven’t even finished drinking my tea, and besides, the whole thing is just a little senseless - as if I could evaluate a shutdown nuclear power plant.

He had requested materials, at least a construction plan, but there was nothing else available except for a site map provided by the prospective investor. It’s always this way, thought Bärger. I can only think about a building with a paper and pencil in hand.

The car door swung open and Bärger raised his hand in greeting as Lothar motioned for him to get in. He was correctly dressed as always in a light gray suit and freshly ironed shirt, the tie somewhat too loud, but tied with precision. Bärger looked down at himself. At least his jeans were clean, but he was wearing only an open shirt beneath his light blazer.

“Who did you dress up for today?” he asked.

Lothar grunted, annoyed, and drove the car out of the parking lot, turned on to the street and competently eased his way into the heavy traffic moving toward the outer ring road.

They had known each other long enough to be comfortable with silence.

The car passed over a bridge, and the man-high parapet reflected the traffic noise through the open window. The car began to climb a long hill. Bärger sat up in his seat when the sun began to shine in his eyes. He blinked, pushed the shoulder belt to one side and looked at the road, now straight as a die, which led up to the crest of the ridge.

“How far is it now?” he asked.

“A half hour or so,” growled Lothar, and shifted down to the lowest gear without using the clutch. I would never do that, thought Bärger. Once I would even have doubleclutched whenever I downshifted, the way I learned when I was driving trucks.

Halfway up the slope, it became evident that the road made a wide turn to the west at the top and followed the ridgeline for a while. From above, you could see green hill country with isolated patches of trees. A coniferous forest traced a dark line along the horizon in front of a chain of softly rounded mountains, which faded into different shades of blue in the distance.

He looked forward when Lothar turned abruptly onto a side road, and shortly thereafter the car dove into the shadows of a pine plantation.

“We’re almost there,” said Lothar. When they emerged from the wood, Bärger could see the dome of the atomic reactor in the distance behind a long, low building.

A group of four cooling towers, blinding white against the deep blue of the sky, stood off to one side, on a small hill.

“What are you going to do now?”

Bärger let himself sink more deeply into his seat and looked at Lothar, who was concentrating on the road. Light and shadow alternated rapidly in a rhythm imposed by the spacing of the large ash trees on each side of the road.

He had been asked repeatedly to stay with the firm as an independent consultant, even before the company manager had placed his termination notice on his desk. He knew why. They needed him because he was licensed in four of the German states, and his stamp was required for preliminary authorizations by those building authorities. None of his colleagues had a license yet from the Architects’ Council. But he had only grinned and shaken his head when they had offered him money for his stamp and signature. He told them that they would have no problem finding someone else to do it, then he had left.

What was he going to do now?

“First of all, I registered with the council as an independent architect. I’ll have to see how that works out. Then, I still have work on a rebuilding job over the next six months. After that, I can at least keep busy as a construction supervisor. It isn’t really what I want to do, but it’s a living. I made friends with a construction engineer who was happy to find someone to take some of his workload.”

They drove past the colorful targets of an archery range set on a meadow scattered with tall poplars at the edge of a new subdivision.

“Did you see that?” Lothar pointed at the archery range. It was somewhat overgrown, but the targets looked almost new and little used.

“Yes, I did,” said Bärger.

‘Weren’t you an archer once?” asked Lothar.

“Oh, yes,” said Bärger and nodded his head several times. “Oh, yes, that I was.”

“Why did you quit?”

Bärger was silent for a while. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it for a while.”

Once more the car turned, this time onto a concrete drive, the approach to the reactor.

Although it had been shut down for years, from a distance the entire installation looked to be in astonishingly good shape. It had a three-story administration building, with a large turbine shed behind it right next to the reactor dome. They were all overshadowed by the group of four gigantic cooling towers, which appeared to sway on a row of supports, of almost ornamental appearance, like a pleated ribbon. Almost as if they had to be tied down, not supported, thought Bärger. He felt an intense attraction, almost like a suction when he looked at the immeasurably huge curved surfaces, like the sensation he had felt when he first saw the Chapelle de La Ronchamp.

The car rolled forward silently and stopped in the shadow of a birch, but Bärger couldn’t take his eyes off those towers.

The town-councilor’s voice brought him back from a state of deep contemplation.

“Those are certainly not on our schedule.”

She walked over to them, elegant as always, a vision of freshness and energy. Her fiery red hair was carefully disarrayed, and her unsuitable, high-heeled red shoes tapped on the coarse concrete. Was she the reason Lothar had dressed up like that? Shut up, thought Bärger. He grinned in a friendly way and took the offered hand. “Black Robert,” Bärger’s name for the man from the PDS¹ faction because of his preference for black clothes and his black beard, came up behind her with a gloomy expression on his face.

Only now did he see their car parked behind the bushes, grown wild, which surrounded the parking lot.

There must have been a lot of people working here once, Bärger thought. He had always imagined that an atomic power plant would be run more or less automatically, or at least with a minimum number of personnel. That too seemed to have been an error. Evidently a far higher number of workers were required for its operation than would have been expected for general maintenance and supervision.

In any case, there was no one there now, and everything was still. The air above the roof of the administration building had already begun to shimmer in the increasing heat.

A door slammed, the sound echoing. Two men left the administration building, and approached them through the open gate next to the unoccupied gatehouse. Upon introduction they turned out to be the investor and the developer. The municipal councilor spoke their names in hushed tones. Their two Daimlers, naturally, stood in the shadow of the turbine building. They wore white shirts and ties, naturally, and the gold watches which appeared under their white cuffs when they picked up their black leather pilot’s bags, were Rolex watches, naturally. Why do I find all that natural, thought Bärger? It is entirely unnatural. Just the fact that I am aware of these status symbols, just because I know what a Rolex looks like, means that I am beginning to accept this absurd social game.

He watched a sparrow hawk, soaring over the meadow near the cooling towers. It hovered with fluttering wings, then closed them and stooped. Just above the short grass it spread its wings, leveled off from its dive, and then, its talons spread in front, pushed among the thick stems.

The group had almost reached the door when Lothar called to him. Bärger took a last glance at the sparrow hawk, which was skimming off toward the woods. Then, he turned and followed them.

It had been arranged that he would not participate in the conference but would use the time for an inspection tour of the turbine and administration buildings to evaluate their structural condition. He had explained that he could only make a very preliminary evaluation by merely taking a glance at them – no one had objected to his phrase. However, everyone agreed that a quick survey of possible existing damage would be entirely adequate at this phase of the negotiations. So, Bärger hung his camera and laser range finder on his belt, stuck his notebook in his shirt pocket and took off for an hour and a half.

As he was already in the administration building, he decided to begin there.

A two-level installation, he noted, with stories 2.80 meters high. Dimensions: 15 X 60 meters. Flat roof – I really have to inspect the roofing, he thought. Bärger made a rapid sketch, looked for and found reference points for his range finder, and noted down the exact dimensions. He was pleased with the accuracy of his initial estimate. He found the cellar stairs behind a closed steel door below the gable on the north side. Judging from the light shafts, the cellar extended under perhaps a quarter of the building. Space for utilities thought Bärger, service lines, heating, electric power, with high and low voltage. Well, thought Bärger glancing at the gigantic reactor, they must have had enough energy available here. He examined the foundation, and found no damage there either, except for rising damp. The plaster was dry and free of cracks. Thick clumps of yellow stonecrop grew in the clay embankment around the building.

The outside walls had originally been white but were now somewhat gray on the windward side. Stains had been formed by water running along both sides of the lower sills, but all that was to be expected and was within the limits of normal wear and tear. Gutters and down spouts were intact. There was only one small birch, motionless in the late summer sun, growing near the south gable. Seeing it reminded Bärger to examine the roofing, and he climbed the echoing stair shaft to the third floor to look for an exit onto the roof. As he reached for the guard rail without thinking, he stirred up a cloud of gray dust.

He found the exit at the end of the corridor, steel rungs set into the wall, leading to a hatch in the ceiling.

It wasn’t hard to lift the hatch, which was secured by a chain, and a moment later Bärger stood on the roof and looked around. The roofing was a light colored clay coating and bore astonishingly few plants, if you ignored the isolated clumps of stonecrop and the little birch on the gable.

As far as he could see, there were no defects in the seams along the outer walls, nor around the flashing for the ventilation pipes and shafts. He noted the observation in his notebook. Then he put the notebook back in his pocket, sat down on a metal hood over a ventilation shaft, and looked out over the surrounding country.

The sparrow hawk was long gone, but another larger raptor had appeared, cruising over the woods.

How quiet it is here, thought Bärger.

He looked over at the cooling towers. Even at this height, they soared far above their bases like mathematical curves made real. Bärger knew that he would have to go over there, even though he couldn’t have said why. But first, he still had to inspect the turbine building.

After a final glance around, Bärger climbed back into the shaft, secured the hatch behind him and continued on his tour.

As expected, the access door in the gigantic sliding door of the turbine building was unlocked. He closed the heavy door behind him. The noise was like a loud shot in the empty chamber. Two doves took off from a steel beam with fluttering wings and flew side-by-side out of one of the open windows below the support for the traveling crane. Dust flickered in the beams of light, which fell into the huge room from the skylights.

There was nothing left of the machinery which must have once stood here. It looked as if earlier someone had planned to convert the building to a different use, but nothing had come of it. The walls were freshly whitewashed, and the tiled floor also showed no significant damage. Bärger looked for traces of the machinery mountings, but found nothing except for a few irregularities in the fit of the tiles. Even the traveling crane in the eastern peak seemed to be still in place. But his curiosity didn’t extend that far, not even to see what condition it was in.

Bärger noted his observations and also the conclusion that some effort had already been made to convert the building to a different use. I’ll make myself a present of the roof, he thought after glancing at his watch. The cooling towers were drawing him to them.

¹ PDS = Partei des Demockratischen Socializmus, successor to the East German SED Communist party.

3

Shortly after, he left the building and stepped out into the glaring sunlight, blinking. He crossed the courtyard and then made his way through the tall grass to the cooling towers, as if they were the real goal of his trip. As he approached, it became apparent that they stood on a small rise inside company land still surrounded by a tall, unbroken, wire fence. The traces of a deeply rutted dirt road were visible beneath the grass.

Bärger followed them to the artificial plateau, apparently raised for the construction of the towers.

Here too, it was apparent that any equipment had been removed a long time ago. In any case, the sunlit grass on the other side was clearly visible through the supporting struts, which he estimated as three stories high. The angle formed by the struts seemed to extend the hyperbolic curve of the cooling towers down to the ground. He looked up at the top edge of the tower. He felt dizzy, because the gigantic curved surface rising in front of him offered no stopping point for his eyes.

Bärger went closer, climbed up onto the foundation ring, and then stepped between the struts into the interior of the cooling tower.

In spite of the immense size of the chamber, where he suddenly found himself, he felt hemmed in and uneasy. It was suddenly clear to him that it was not in spite of, but because of its enormous size. The inhumanity of this gigantic funnel really came from the lack of any human dimension. He looked up to where the bell shaped shaft was open to the blue sky. The sun shone at a steep angle through the circular opening, and the sharply restricted beam of light lit the opposite inside wall all the way down to the floor. Bärger tried to complete the outline of this gleaming surface, determined by the deformation of a circle of light falling on the inside of a concrete bell, as a geometrical construction, but he was unsuccessful. It defied the abilities of his imagination.

He picked up his camera to get at least a two-dimensional image of this shape, but the field of view wasn’t wide enough to capture the entire picture. The thought that the size of this space would be beyond his ability to estimate reminded him of his laser range finder. As the side opposite to him lay in bright sunlight, Bärger took a couple of steps to one side, until he thought that he could make out the red reference dot in the tower’s own shadow on the other side. He whistled through his teeth. The display showed what his eyes could not – an exact measurement of 42.35 meters. He tried several times to measure the height, and finally decided to believe his third measurement, which indicated exactly 53 meters.

The height to the lower edge of the bell shaped wall, borne by the slanting struts, was close to four meters, far more than the usual height of a single story. He realized, surprised, that there was nothing else to measure, and that those dimensions would do nothing to help him come to grips with this space.

Even though he wasn’t sure why, he wrote down the measurements in his notebook, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and began to pace around the edge of the cooling tower taking regular, equal strides. When he arrived back at his starting point, he had counted 220 paces, which roughly agreed with the measurement.

A small heap of gleaming, blue-black cinders, remnants from welding or more likely from cutting steel parts, lay in a small area of the smooth concrete, which formed a shallow basin inside the ring foundation. There were conspicuous places on the edges of the struts where they had been damaged by the removal of bulky pieces of cooling equipment. Aside from a broken wooden pallet and the mummified corpse of a rook, the gigantic space was empty.

Bärger walked slowly to the center, looked around in a circle and then up and suddenly had the feeling that the round hole up there leading into the sky was the real exit. A cloud passed over the edge of the tower and again he felt a slight dizziness, as he was unable to tell whether the cloud or the tower was moving. He positioned himself, standing where he thought the center point was, and lay down on his back staring up until his eyes hurt.

When he shut his eyes he heard the noise of the wind. He lay there long enough to become conscious of a new sensation. It seemed that he was becoming lighter and lighter, until he began to float. His body began to circle very slowly, while at the same time he rose higher and higher toward the opening into the light.

Bärger brought himself out of it. He shook his head vigorously and stood up bracing himself until the feeling of giddiness vanished. When he heard the sound of the car horn, repeated at short intervals, he realized what had brought him out of this peculiar waking dream. He had a feeling of relief as he walked slowly back toward the others already waiting by the cars, but just before the parking lot, he turned around again. The group of concrete giants stood against the blue sky so exactly angled from his position that the nearest tower completely concealed the one behind it, like an abstract symbol. What kind of symbol?

I’ll find out, said Bärger to himself, and raised the camera for the last time that day to find that he now could really capture all that he saw in the viewfinder. Then he walked quickly over to the group of four impatiently waiting for him.

“What was your name?” asked the investor with the Rolex when Bärger finally arrived at the group, sweaty and dirty.

“Bärger,” he said cheerfully, “Rolf Bärger.”

The investor said that he would be hearing from them and the two Daimlers drove off, one behind the other. Lothar said that they had still more to do, and the municipal councilor repeated that nobody, but really nobody, was interested in the cooling towers. That didn’t make a lot of sense, thought Bärger, but he preferred to keep that to himself.

He looked over at Lothar who shook his head unhappily, and then with a decisive “Well, let’s go!” settled himself behind the wheel and started the engine.

It would seem that the conference hadn’t been a real success, but Bärger wasn’t sure if Lothar’s bad mood was due to his unplanned detour to the cooling towers or to the result of the negotiations. He thought it best not to ask, and waited until Lothar himself began to talk about it.

“What did you think of that guy?” was Lothar’s first question after a while. He could only mean the investor.

“What should I think of a man I met today for the first time, and didn’t see for more than five minutes?” asked Bärger.

“But I suppose you’re right—somehow they’re all the same, developers as well as investors. You can never shake the feeling that they are playing poker and take great care never to reveal their real intentions. What is truly remarkable about them is that the clichés which describe them are mostly correct. What happened this time?”

“He is interested in the reactor chamber and the administration building, but naturally won’t say for what, and only wants a small piece of the land. He also wants a new evaluation of possible contamination where the reactor used to be. That’s really where the deal is going to fall through. I would like to know what it would cost to tear that down.”

“So, it’s another dud.”

Bärger looked out of the car window. The exit from the autobahn was already posted. This area was outside the usual ring development, but close to the autobahn – a strong plus.

How did that motto go that they used to recite? For real estate, there were three important things: first, - location; second – location; and third – location. What did they really have in mind here?

Bärger remembered his first job after the Berlin wall had come down, with a company which had emerged from one of the branches of the architectural institute and was looking for a leading architect. That had been a remarkably unstable and insecure period. You were foreign and felt foreign in what used to be familiar surroundings. Then he was introduced, to something that, against his will, he was forced to adopt as a principle of his professional life: mistrust, including the acceptance of the mistrust of others. That had been painful right from the start. Since he left school, he had regarded a trusting relationship between contractor and architect as an understood and unconditional basis for cooperation. He had believed that a building assignment could only be successfully carried out on such a basis. Things had been so different then, that often, words failed him in the company of his contractors.

As an architect, he found himself forced into the role of an unnecessary and far too expensive specialist, whose signature and stamp on various forms and papers were still required in order to obtain the necessary construction permits. He hadn’t been on a single job where he knew how his building would eventually look, not even the color of the glazed bricks nor the shape of the window latches.

After initial attempts to exercise influence on professional and site related questions, Bärger had given up trying to change impressions taken from magazines and catalogs.

It was tiresome enough to have to explain the relevant ordinances of the building code as requirements for a construction permit and to work them into the plans. It was especially costly when the role of the contractor became an object of contention between a married couple. He remembered the conversion of a small single-family house- one floor with an extended roof – for which he had finally prepared eight different plans, which really did differ substantially from one another. But except for this exploration of the possibilities for altering such a little house, the expenditure in relation to the pay had been remarkably high. Even after the agreement of his two contractors on the last version, they had changed it yet again, although he had already pointed out that doing so would void the already settled contract and the schedule. Bärger supposed that the head of construction had recognized this situation and made clever use of it.

No, it didn’t bother him anymore when someone accused him of – how nicely they phrased it – taking advantage of the situation. Once, as an aside during a conference, Bärger had joked to a colleague in the construction office that he was easily bribable, but unfortunately so far no one had taken advantage of it. But his colleague was taken aback, and evidently considered the subject as an unsuitable topic for conversation.

Mistrust, then, mistrust on both sides had become the basis for his conduct. But Bärger found that you had to mistrust that basis as well. Perhaps because you couldn’t exclude in advance the possibility that someone might honestly mean what he said.

While he was thinking, the car had gone a long way down the autobahn toward Berlin.

“Have you thought about it yet?” Lothar asked.

“Not yet,” said Bärger, who knew what he meant. But there was a connection between what had been going through his head and why he had given up archery.

“It’s just that I would like to try it again. I only worked as a designer those last years because I had had a snoot full of construction. Or no, not really construction – of planning construction with a colleague who was a ‘State Leader,’ who was always a comrade and, therefore, always knew infallibly what was right and what was wrong, regardless of the subject. But you know that just as well as I do!”

Lothar sat, relaxed behind the wheel and listened. Now he nodded in agreement but wouldn’t drop the subject.

“Didn’t you have time for it any more?”

Once more, Bärger thought for a while.

‘Well,” he finally confessed, “it took me a long time to learn the rules of the new game . Showing up at work every day with a tie was the least of it. To always keep my office door open to the corridor, to only run in the corridor and to work overtime on principle, was part of it. But I could never get used to the expressions: ‘It doesn’t pay!’ or ‘We’re working on it!’, and I rapidly grew to hate them. They’re the capitalist version of our, ‘It’s running its socialistic course’, which I found just as rotten.”

Suddenly he realized.

“You know what?” said Bärger, “I never saw even one of them again. For over ten years I never saw a single one of the people I used to train with.”

After a while, he added, “And the man I learned the most from disappeared a long time ago.”

Erhard, thought Bärger, and the memory of a Baltic island inseparably bound to the bow and arrow, struck him with painful clarity. But he hadn’t gotten rid of his bow, although some people had been very eager to buy it. He had taken it with him on two moves, carefully packed and securely stowed.

Why?

Could he still draw it to the anchor point?

What happens to a bow when it is no longer shot? Would it break, or he could he once again become one with that piece of enchanted wood which took on a life of its own in his hand?

The thought made him impatient to get home, and he looked at his watch to estimate how long it would take.

“Do you have something you have to do today?” asked Lothar.

“Oh, yes,” answered Bärger. “I have to study. I have the Japanese course at the high school again this evening.”

Lothar whistled through his teeth.

“Just for your trip?”

Bärger nodded.

“When do you leave?”

“The day after tomorrow,” said Bärger

4

There was enough time after his shower for more than just a quiet pot of green tea.

Bärger went down into his cellar, where the black case with his bow lay on a shelf under a stack of old professional journals. After a short search, he found the mailing tube with the arrows in a corner. He wiped off the dust with a damp cloth and placed both the bow case and the tube on the table in front of him.

He held the shallow tea bowl in both hands and stared at the black case, unable to decide whether to open it.

Why should I, thought Bärger, I have more important things to do. It’s been a long time since I quit, and I probably can’t even draw the bow any more. But the more he resisted, the more he became aware that he was fighting against something that clearly came from within the black case lying in front of him; from something that, in better times, had been almost a part of himself.

He set the tea dish down, opened the zipper with both hands, and pushed back the lid of the case. The reddish-brown wood of the bow had a dull shine as it lay in the crumbling foam padding, once green and now yellowed with age. It was complete with string and bow limbs, and there was even a beat-up finger tab in one of the recesses in the padding.

Bärger hesitated, then reached for the grip section, closed his left hand on the pistol grip, and raised it slowly to eye level. He aimed through the sight window at a point on the wall and tried to remember just how the colorful FITA target had looked. It still didn’t feel right, just to sit there with the bow riser in his hand, aiming over the shelf. Bärger stood up, installed the bow limbs, and tightened the screws. When he picked up the string, he realized that he had forgotten how to string the bow. He tried to remember, but it escaped him. His memory only began to work again when he saw the bow stringer in the case. He placed his left foot in the loop and bent the upper limb across his shoulder until he could string the bow.

Now what he held in his hand was a bow again. Slowly and carefully, he began to pull the string back. He let it down again, then drew it a little further, each time increasing the distance, until he finally dared to draw it all the way and hold it anchored at his chin for two or three seconds.

It’s not my head that remembers, thought Bärger. It is my body that recognizes the bow. He set the bow down on the table in front of him and sat down, looking wonderingly at his hands, as if he couldn’t believe what they had done. When he held the bow at full draw and felt the force flowing from his bow hand across his arms and shoulders to the hand holding the string, it had been like the closing of a circle, like the completion of a whole.

Tension, yes, a natural tension that would be released in the shot, giving an impulse to the arrow and sending it to the point that it should hit if he had done everything right.

There was no doubt that the bow was still in good shape. There was no doubt that he could still draw it. And there was no doubt at all that he wanted to draw it again. That was the important thing, thought Bärger.

He shook the tube with arrows, listening to their gentle clatter. It hadn’t gone away. It had waited for me. But I had almost forgotten it.

Bärger went into the kitchen, turned on the kettle and waited until the water began to boil. Then he turned off the heat and waited until the water in the kettle was still. Slowly he poured it into a small pot, the size and shape of an apple, until the water reached the rim. He glanced at his wristwatch and waited exactly eighty seconds, while he absentmindedly watched the simple reddish/brown pot, with its matt polish from long use. Then, just as slowly and carefully, he poured the tea through a bamboo sieve into the white, shallow bowl. Only then, the tea first took on color, a light, fragrant green fading into yellow at the edge of the bowl.

Bärger picked up the bowl with both hands and held it against the light from the window to look at its noble outline, and then closing his eyes, drank it all down in one swallow. It was time to pack up his books and the loose-leaf notebook. Bärger rinsed out his tea bowl and placed it carefully on a folded kitchen towel. Then he went back into the cellar, unstrung his bow, dismounted the limbs, and placed the pieces back in their case. Not for long, he resolved.

After a glance at his watch, he returned to his office and sat down at his desk to look over the chart with the Japanese syllabic script. He had pinned it to the wall in front of him at eye level so that he would always have it in view. It didn’t seem to work. Nothing did. It is really driving me crazy, thought Bärger. I can’t seem to impress them on my mind. The Japanese lady who taught the course had said that children in Japan begin to read hiragana when they’re five years old. He remembered that when he was a schoolboy, he and one of his schoolmates had learned the cuneiform alphabet in only one day. He still knew it. They had written notes to each other during class and let themselves be caught passing them back and forth, just for the fun of seeing the helpless expression on the face of their teacher, who had no idea what the mysterious symbols meant.

That was a long time ago, thought Bärger. Now he envied three high school girls who sat in front of the classroom and wrote the complicated symbols with ridiculous ease.

He had a good ear, which could detect even slight differences in speech so he could pronounce what he heard correctly, but he was almost ready to give up on the script. Again and again, he had tried to arrange the complicated system of symbols in some system, in some order he could remember, but without success. For him, hiragana was visual chaos. There must be something to the Japanese opinion, thought Bärger, that any European who learns perfect Japanese has to be crazy.

But it was time to go. He shoved the books, his vocabulary book, and his loose-leaf binder into his old, cowhide book bag, which got better looking each year as it aged. He closed the door behind him and made his way to the streetcar stop.

It was a very mixed bunch that came together every week to learn Japanese in the rooms at the old high school. At the beginning, they had all introduced themselves, giving their names, occupations, and reasons for learning the language.

One was a policeman, who wanted, or who had been assigned, to learn the language for professional reasons, and one was a fireman, who was interested in the samurai and especially in their swords. There was a married couple sitting next to Bärger who ran a martial arts school together. A retired man, who hadn’t really been able to explain why he was interested, had quit after the third lesson. As well as the three high school girls who sat in front, two students from another school also attended, explaining that they were preparing for a university language major. He was the only one who was preparing for a trip to Japan, and he was much envied by the others. It was very quickly clear to him that, in the short time he had for the course, he could not acquire enough real knowledge of the language to make himself understood in the country, even at a beginner’s level. The teacher had explained that there would be no problem using English in the cities, but that people in the country normally spoke only Japanese. Only one thing helped him to recover a bit from his disappointment. She explained that the Japanese were very pleased when a foreigner – a gaijin - not only mastered the usual manners, but was also able to express the most important courtesies in words.

After that, Bärger concentrated on correct pronunciation and the complicated rituals of introduction, greeting, and departure in combination with the appropriate bows for each occasion.

Today’s lesson concerned shopping in Japan but, like all the others, it began with a quiz. Its tempo and results reminded him unpleasantly of his schooldays from long ago. According to everything that he had heard and read, it was the same in Japan. Was he simply to old for this sort of class? But he had paid for the privilege of being treated as a schoolboy and presumably the method really was effective. Even so, he didn’t like it, and he cared even less for the superior attitude and mockery of the high school girls, who openly made fun of the awkward pronunciation of their older classmates.

What really gave him pause was his obvious inability to learn the twenty-three symbols of hiragana, the Japanese syllabic script. This bothered him particularly. He had always believed that he had a particularly good visual memory, but this task was simply too much for it. Bärger felt that he was even beginning to develop a dislike for the symbols. He found it absurd that a people who unconditionally recognized the value of a modern, technically oriented, and extremely rational working environment, would at the same time use three different scripts in parallel and mix them together.

When he asked about it, the teacher, Yoshiko-San, had answered that the origin of the hiragana symbols lay in a further development of the Chinese script symbols as a phonetic, syllabic script. That helped explain the shapes of the symbols, which had often seemed so bizarre to him, but it did nothing to make learning them any easier.

On the other hand, he found it remarkable that he had a much better grasp of the true Chinese script – the kanji. Although he had never really wanted to learn the thousands of graphic symbols that had originated as simplified pictures, it had been possible for him to learn a few of the basic forms quickly. However, that was long before his efforts with the Japanese language and was probably due to his intense interest in the spirit and technique of Chinese ink painting at that time. He took relaxed pleasure in adding the written symbols to his ink pictures, and he also considered it an agreeable calligraphic exercise. No, he liked the classic forms of kanji, but he wasn’t able to do anything with the simplified script derived, from it.

“Bärger-San.”

The teacher’s voice brought him back to the present. After a last glace at his exercise notebook, he stood up, went to the chalkboard, and without hesitation wrote the required sentence on the green surface. Even as he dusted off his hands and returned to his seat, he knew that by tomorrow he would have forgotten it all again.

The lesson continued at the rapid pace that Yoshiko-San thought proper. Bärger admitted to himself that he hadn’t quit only because he didn’t want to confess in front of the schoolgirls that this kind of instruction was beyond him.

The lesson ended precisely at the break. He made a note of the homework assignment in his loose-leaf binder, intending to deal with it the next morning.

“No more school work, Bärger-San!”

Yoshiko stood smiling in front of him and held out her hand. It was a minute before Bärger understood. Then he stood up, bowed, and grasped her hand.

“I wish you a pleasant trip to Japan,” said Yoshiko formally. “You will see the autumn leaves in the woods of Kyoto”. It sounded a little wistful. But then she said, smiling again, “Your bow was too deep for a simple teacher, Bärger-San. I wish you a safe return.” Then she quickly left the classroom.

On the way to the tram stop, Bärger thought about his approaching trip. He had studied the guidebook thoroughly, and had discovered that the proposed route hit every culturally significant spot in central and southern Japan. He was a little concerned whether he would have the time to see them properly.

He recalled a trip to Cyprus in November two years ago; the huge empty hotels along the beach, the dried vegetation, and the smell of the burning rubbish heaps at the edge of the city. In particular, he remembered the disaster of a side excursion to Cairo from Cyprus, a two-day tour by ship to Alexandria offered by a local shipping firm. The luxury liner sailed there and back at night, arriving in Alexandria in the morning. From there, they boarded the waiting buses for a non-stop, six-hour trip to Cairo along a four-lane highway through desolate country. Most of the way the route ran parallel to the Suez Canal, with only the superstructure or funnels of an occasional passing ship visible above the banks of the canal.

Cairo proved to be a large city with endless suburbs. They went right on through to Giza. It was a shock to him. He had seen a large number of pictures of the pyramids and the sphinx in various books and magazines. He had felt their majestic calm and impressive size and was captivated by the magic loneliness of these ancient monuments, but the reality proved to be quite different on their arrival in Giza. As soon as they had come to a halt in a cloud of yellow dust, a mob of clamoring Arabs surrounded the bus doors. Gesticulating wildly, they held out postcards, plastic camels, scarabs, and small plaster figurines in their hands. They ran after the people getting off, grabbed them by the sleeves, and tried to shove the souvenirs into their pockets in order to force a sale. A half dozen of them sat silently on arrogant-looking camels a few meters away and persistently edged their way in front of any tourist with a camera when he tried to take a picture of the pyramids. The base of Cheops’ Great Pyramid seemed to be surrounded by hundreds of these vendors on foot; some had climbed a third of the way up this gigantic ruin.

He swallowed, remembering his boundless disappointment at the time. At first he had stayed seated in the bus, unsure as to whether he should get out. But then when a turbaned salesman struck him energetically on the knee with a plastic camel, - he wanted “ten pound” for it - he was overpowered by the humor of the situation and laughed. He laughed until he had tears in his eyes.

That had been his unplanned trip to Egypt, which he recognized too late as an attempt by an idle shipping company to make money during the off-season. The real joke of the tour was that only twenty minutes was allotted to visit the pyramids and twenty for the Sphinx; then they were conducted into the souvenir shops, where considerably more time was devoted to ornaments and papyri.

At least I’ve been warned, thought Bärger. It can only be worse in Japan as far as the number of people are concerned. But then, he had also read that the Japanese were very different; polite, self-contained, gentle and, above all, full of respect for every aspect of their own cultural heritage. Perhaps it is the fault of that Cyprus trip, thought Bärger, that I can’t yet really look forward to this trip to Japan.

The lights of the tram came into sight beyond the crossroad at the end of the street. On time to the minute, thought Bärger, after glancing at his watch. He climbed into the last car, sat down next to the exit, and took his textbook out of his bag. The chart of hiragana symbols continued to irritate him. There had to be a trick to it, some hidden order that he hadn’t yet discovered.

When a group of noisy youngsters got on at the next stop, Bärger was so deeply involved in his problem that he didn’t even notice. He only looked up angrily when a black boot with white laces kicked the side of his foot. It was suddenly quiet in the tramcar and, without looking around, Bärger realized that he was alone with a grinning bunch which had surrounded him.

The young man with the black boots grinned at him, raised an open beer can and shook it so that foam spurted out.

“Chinaman,” he said, “Chinaman like to dlink beel!’ and then with a quick movement, he poured beer all over the book which still lay open on Bärger’s lap.

In the loud laughter that broke out, he heard the giggling of two girls. Then everything happened very fast. Furious, he tried to jump up to protect his book and he was hit. He was hit from behind, above his right ear and, because he was hit with a full beer bottle, the fun was quickly over for the bunch of young thugs. He sagged back onto the bench, and then slid to the floor of the car, where he lay motionless. As the tram then rolled shrieking around a curve, he rolled with his head beneath the bench and blood from the wound began to flow over his ear and down his neck.

Then they were at the next stop. There was no one on the street as the sobered bunch leaped off the tram and raced across the street, scattering in different directions.

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.

“How much time do you have?” asked Bärger. Jürgen never had any time. Every telephone conversation ended with a promise that they really had to get together for a long uninterrupted conversation.

Against expectation, Jürgen didn’t look at his watch.

“It depends on what you have in mind – the day is almost over anyway.”

“If you want, I’ll paint your bamboo for you.”

Jürgen looked at him dubiously. “Now? How long will it take?”

Bärger shrugged his shoulders. “A half hour. Maybe not that long – if we don’t count the preparation of the paper and the ink.”

“Then why did you make your second-best friend wait for it for over a year?”

“Do you know the story of how a famous painter made the emperor of China wait for more than a year for a picture of a rooster?”

They went into the next room and, while Bärger began his preparations, he told the story of the painter who had made the emperor of China wait.

The emperor of China, they say, had heard of the master’s great skill. At that time, it was a special honor to receive a commission for a picture from the emperor. The emperor expected that his commission, which wasn’t very different from an imperial order, would be carried out immediately. That didn’t happen. After several weeks, the emperor sent one of his officials to demand the delivery of the picture, but the painter informed him that he needed more time.

When the painting hadn’t been completed after several months, the emperor sent one his ministers to emphasize the urgency of his imperial wishes. Once again, the painter said that he needed more time.

After half a year, the emperor was so angry with the painter that he ordered him to be brought before him to be executed.

This time, the painter invited the emperor’s messenger into his studio, placed a piece of rice paper on a table, prepared his ink, and right before the messenger’s eyes, painted a picture of a rooster in a few minutes that was so life-like, the messenger almost expected to hear it crow.

The emperor’s messenger rolled up the painting that the painter handed him and, as a few minutes no longer mattered, they drank a cup of tea together.

Then the messenger asked why the painter had made the emperor wait half a year for a painting that he could do in a couple of minutes.

The painter answered that he had never had so little time for a painting.

From morning to night, he had done nothing but watch roosters; how they moved when they crowed, when they ate and drank, when they fought, and when they slept.

He did this, he said, until he understood the essence of a rooster as thoroughly as if he had been one himself. Only then, and not one minute sooner, was he able to paint a picture of a rooster worthy of an emperor.

7

They went into the next room.

Bärger’s drawing table was directly in front of a north-facing window that reached from floor to ceiling. He picked up a pile of journals and project folders carelessly, placed then on the floor and then, pushed them under the bed in the corner of the room with his foot.

Jürgen grinned.

“A place for everything,” he said.

Bärger didn’t answer him. He pulled a rolled-up white felt mat out of a cupboard, placed it on the surface of the low drawing table and carefully flattened it. On closer inspection, the felt mat was more gray than white and showed irregular spots ranging from light gray to black. The spots were concentrated on the right side.

He took a flat covered dish from a mobile office cabinet behind him. The dish was black with a dull surface and fine even grain. It reminded Jürgen of a sharpening stone, but the round shape wasn’t right for that. Bärger put the round dish on the table at the place where the spots were thickest.

Next he produced a white porcelain plate with a broad, flat rim. Remnants of dried ink had formed streaky patterns on the bottom with deep black edges, which looked like a thin network of roots. A disorderly meshed pattern of intersecting brush strokes covered the rim of the plate. Bärger placed the plate on the felt mat next to the black abrasive dish.

Carefully, from the bookshelf behind him, he took a cup-shaped bamboo container in which rattled a good dozen brushes of different sizes. Even the brush handles were of bamboo, spotted black from use. The brush hair was either brownish or white, but mostly the color of the felt mat; light gray from long use. Some were short like watercolor brushes; some were thin and almost the length of a finger, others short and thick.

Now Bärger took a flat wooden case the size of a cigar box from the mobile cabinet. When he opened the lid, Jürgen saw a collection of black ink bars, some new, some used. Some were the size and shape of certain brands of granola bars, other were smaller. Most bore stamped labels in relief or gold colored letters. Jürgen thought that he detected a weak pine scent.

The large jam jar full of water, placed next to the plate on the right side of the table, seemed almost trivial amid all these exotic things.

Bärger inspected the working area spread out in front of him and seemed satisfied. He went to another cabinet with three shallow drawers in its lower section, opened the top drawer and, after brief consideration, took a sheet from one of two piles of different size paper.

The sheet seemed to be twice as long as it was wide, and when he placed it lengthwise on the felt mat, it reached all the way back to the top of the working space. He weighed down the top and bottom edges of the sheet with bronze castings of a bamboo shoot.

Unnoticed by Bärger, Jürgen had gone back into the living room. He poured himself another glass of wine and returned with one of the folding armchairs. He set it up behind Bärger, not too close, but where he could watch the sheet of paper spread out on the drawing table. He sat down silently with a feeling that he should no longer interrupt.

In the meantime, the evening twilight had grown darker and Bärger turned on the drawing lamp over the table. Both men blinked for a moment when the lamp threw a bright circle on the light surface and at the same time the pale traces of the last of the daylight vanished from the window, now an unrelieved black.

For a while, nothing happened.

Bärger seemed to be looking at the calligraphic inscription that hung above his working area. There were four large black symbols under each other, heavy black on coarse paper, painted very hastily with a broad brush; or so it seemed to Jürgen. But Bärger wasn’t really looking at the symbols, but at something else, something somewhere beyond them.

Jürgen cleared his throat carefully.

Then he asked, “Is that really rice paper?”

Bärger didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t answer, but instead took one of the white brushes from the bamboo cup and used it to drip a little water into the round, black dish in front of him. He picked up a bar of ink and, holding it in his fist like a knife, began to rub the ink, applying considerable force. He rubbed it in steady circular motions, occasionally adding a little water. The bottom of the dish began to fill with a dark black, shiny ink, and a strong pine scent spread through the room.

Finally, Bärger seemed to have enough. He placed the ink bar to one side, carefully selected a brush with long brownish hair and dipped it deeply into the jar full of water. Then he squeezed out the water over the plate with his thumb and forefinger, and dipped the now almost dry brush into the ink dish and let a couple of drops fall onto the plate.

Slowly, carefully, and using only the point of the brush, he mixed the water and ink. The glistening grey color of a storm cloud spread across the bottom of the plate. He added a little water once, which lightened the gray unnoticeably. Finally, after drawing some quick lines on a small sample piece of rice paper, he seemed to be satisfied. Then he turned back to the piece of paper in front of him.

Jürgen watched him carefully.

Bärger seemed to be totally focused and at the same time completely relaxed. He projected a feeling of immense confidence as he sat, the right elbow supported on the table, the brush loose in his hand. It seemed as if he were waiting for a signal that would be given to him by the blank sheet of paper.

Abruptly, Bärger dipped the brush in the water jar and lightly drew it down a linen cloth, which had been folded several times, to remove excess water. Then he rolled the brush across the flat rim of the plate with a circular motion to pick up a little of the rain cloud gray ink mixture. Finally, he dipped the point of the brush into the shiny black in the rubbing dish.

Near the lower left corner, he angled his brush across the paper and, holding it this way, moved it perhaps a hand-breath toward the top.

Jürgen was fascinated. It was one brush stroke, painted in a fraction of a second. But even so, he now saw the stem of a strong bamboo stem, so clearly that he felt he could touch it. The clear line had a dark shadowy edge, fading gradually away, and was lightest in the middle of the brushstroke and a little darker on the opposite edge. The rapid stroke had left a couple of long white streaks, like streaks of light falling on the stem of the bamboo. At its beginning and end, the brush stroke that had become a bamboo shoot thickened slightly to show the places where there were knots.

Without hesitation, Bärger applied his brush a second time, a little above the knot, and without touching the first stroke. He repeated this rapid motion a second, third, and fourth time, interrupted by carefully refilling the brush point, until the fifth and last stroke came to an obvious end toward the top of the sheet of paper.

Only now did Jürgen see that the brush strokes were not the same, but each stage was longer than the one below it, while at the same time, they seemed to become narrower. The line was not straight but was inclined slightly toward the right.

Bärger filled his brush again: dip in water, squeeze, take thinned ink from the rim of the plate, concentrated ink from the rubbing dish. On the picture, a second bamboo shoot rapidly grew right next to the first; a little more slender, and bending a little more to the right. This one also appeared to growing upward through the top of the painting.

The third was even more slender, placed next to the other two but a hand breadth further to the left, bent so strongly that it was covered by the other two as their stems crossed in the upper third of the picture, and then it reappeared behind them.

Bärger sat back to examine the picture. Quite obviously, it wasn’t even partially finished and yet, even at this phase, it already seemed to be a harmonious picture, full of tension and life.

Bärger rinsed out the brush in the water jar, dried it with the linen cloth and dipped it once again in the black ink in the rubbing dish, which had noticeably diminished.

He began to draw heavy jagged broken lines from the center of the picture toward the lower right edge. The shape of a cliff, or rather a large slender stone, leaning into the picture toward the left, seeming to grow gradually from the ground. The side of the almost dry brush wiped rough scratches in a seemingly hard surface. Now the three bamboo shoots stood in front of a stone, which seemed to have emerged at their feet.

Once again Bärger washed out his brush and wiped it dry.

While he had been painting the stone, the brush strokes of the bamboo had dried and become a little lighter. He dipped the point of the brush into the unthinned ink and now painted the knots in the same sequence as he had drawn the segments of the stems. The point of the brush made a little hook downwards and then swung in a flat curve to the right, continued, and then finished in another little upwards hook.

Now the three bamboo stems appeared to be strongly joined, full of tension against the edged rock.

This time, Bärger laid the brush to one side after washing it out. He picked up the bar of ink, dropped some water on the rubbing dish, and began to scrape ink again. Jürgen sat silently next to him and watched. His glass of wine sat untouched on the bookcase.

Bärger began to paint the leaves. He had prepared a very dark mixture of thinned ink on the plate, in which he now dipped his brush. He painted the leaves from their base to the points with an accelerating stroke which ended in the air above the paper and which gave the leaves a needle sharp point. They were groups of three and five of the lanceolate leaves, all pointing in more or less the same direction; a flat angle toward the right.

Wind, thought Jürgen. There was a strong wind and he saw that the shoots all bent in the same direction that the leaves pointed. He could almost hear their dry rustling.

The groups of leaves grew variably thicker. Bärger thinned the ink several times, and the leaves he drew became lighter, seeming to sink back into the picture. Brush in hand, Bärger leaned back and stared at the picture in which three thickly leaved bamboo stems leaned against the wind in front of a rock. He hesitated then dipped the brush in the ink dish again and began to dab loose groups of points on the paper, which ran into fringing clumps of moss.

For the last time, he used the thinned ink on the plate. Short vertical strokes in front of the rock and in the area of the bamboo roots became clumps of grass, making the ground visible. Then he washed out his brush, dabbed it dry, put it back in the cup, and turned around slowly to Jürgen.

“Here’s your bamboo picture,” said Bärger.

“Fantastic,” said Jürgen, and shook his head slowly. “Just fantastic,” he said again.

Bärger laughed.

From the cabinet, he took a small round porcelain box with the picture of a dragon on the lid, and a small, cubical, polished stone on top.

There was a vermillion paste in the box, which seemed to have fibers running through it. The cubical stone was a seal with a simply cut inscription in Chinese script.

Bärger looked carefully at the picture, which still looked wet and a little wavy. Then he pushed the seal forcefully into the red color and set his stamp in a small opening at the lower left of the picture next to the foot of the rock and the roots of the three bamboo stems.

“If I were any good, I would also be able to write a line from a poem for you. It would go here!”

With his finger he traced a line from the upper right of the picture down to about the middle.

“Perhaps you can find a Japanese to do it.

I call it, Bamboos in the Morning Wind.”

8

“It won’t be ready for quite a while yet,” said Bärger as they went back into the living room.

The light from the streetlamps shone onto the ceiling through the huge, curtainless window and bathed the room in a milky half-light.

“Leave it off,” said Jürgen as Bärger reached for the light switch. So they sat for a while, until their eyes could make out the details around them again.

Jürgen still hadn’t said anything else.

“I can’t make a real scroll picture out of it for you,” began Bärger once again. “First of all, I have no picture silk and second, I could only guess at how they were made. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any literature covering the process. All I really know is that, in China, the creation of scroll pictures is a separate craft.”

He finished his glass, poured some more, and leaned forward to fill Jürgen’s glass as well. However, Jürgen held his hand over his glass and shook his head.

“It still has to dry,” Bärger continued, “and you’ll find that it gets a little lighter.”

Then he explained that the extremely thin paper had to be reinforced by bonding it to a second lamination of the same kind of paper.

When Jürgen began to talk, at first he seemed to be searching for words.

“All the time, I had the feeling that you saw the finished picture in front of you before you painted the first line.”

“That’s more or less so,” Bärger nodded in confirmation. “But when the first line is drawn, the process runs by itself and each additional step influences the next one. It is as if the picture has a life of its own, as if it grows by itself, and I’m just there to help it along.”

“Help it along,” repeated Jürgen. “I suppose you could call it that. Why ever did you become an architect?”

Bärger was surprised.

“Because I like geometry,” he said. “Maybe because in my home town I messed about too much as a child in brick Gothic churches and wanted to find out how they were built. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Chinese ink painting, if that’s what you mean.”

“You shouldn’t do anything else,” said Jürgen. “It’s absolutely perfect, and I believe that you enjoy it.”

“Oh, yes,” Bärger laughed softly. “Guess why I do something else.”

They looked at each other. Then they both laughed and said at the same time, “It doesn’t pay.”

The new catch phrase. A different catch phrase. Always the same catchphrase. It was clear that Jürgen wanted to know what Bärger was working on now.

He shrugged his shoulders in resignation.

“Not only does it not pay – all the rest doesn’t mean anything. I mean that what I do for a living doesn’t really matter. It’s enough to keep my head above water financially but it is nothing I really want to do. Maybe that’s too much to ask for.”

Jürgen pointed at the black mailing tube Bärger had brought up from his cellar four days earlier with the bow case.

“Is there a new project in there?” he asked.

“Not really. It’s a very old one,” laughed Bärger and shook the roll so the arrows in it rattled. He unscrewed the lid to let the dozen shiny arrows slide out into his hand, and a small amount of fine sand poured out onto the blue rug.

Bärger paused for a moment, struck by the memory it evoked. “Do you know where that comes from?” He pointed at the little mound next to his foot.

“It’s from an island, from Hiddensee. And if I’m right, then that’s the last time that I did something that mattered.”

He balanced the bundle of arrows in his hand. “Maybe I should go back there again.”

“When was the last time you were there?” asked Jürgen.

“A long time ago,” Bärger looked out the window. “Maybe ten, twelve years.”

“Leave it alone,” said Jürgen. “It would be better. I went there last year and I didn’t recognize it. If you want to go somewhere on the Baltic, you’re better off going to Sweden, or even easier, to Denmark. If you avoid the vacation spots, you can still find undisturbed nature without crowds of tourists.”

Bärger nodded thoughtfully and put the arrows back in their tube.

“Perhaps you’re right. I really shouldn’t wait much longer.”

He pointed out of the window. A milky veil had thickened around the poles of the street lamps, and patches of thin mist floated above the street.

The next day began with streaming sunshine. Bärger sat at his computer and sent an email to the Regional Construction Office, in which he requested the contest rules for the – he had to look it up again – juvenile detention facility. At the same time, he transferred the required registration fee. Maybe I would have been better off drinking up the money, he thought when he did it. It would have lasted quite a while.

He took the tram to the hospital to get his stitches taken out. Unexpectedly, it went quickly and painlessly. The antiseptic they put on it afterward only caused a slight burning sensation.

He went back outside as quickly as possible to get away from the smell of the hospital. On the way home, he stopped and picked up the photographs he had taken during the trip to the atomic power plant.

At the place where he had his film developed, the photographer asked if he wanted to take a look at them. Bärger tore open the envelope, leafed rapidly through the prints, and then held the last one in his hand for a bit.

“Interesting subject,” said the photographer, looking over Bärger’s shoulder.

It was the picture of the four cooling towers. The four towers stood like a pictogram, white against a blue background, sharply diagonal and greatly foreshortened by the steep perspective.

Something went “click” in Bärger’s head and he felt he ought to remember where he had seen something like that, but it didn’t come to him.

He paid, stuck the envelope in his jacket pocket and walked slowly home.

In his study, he looked carefully for a long time at the now thoroughly dry ink picture that he had called Bamboos in the Morning Wind.

Then he nodded, satisfied, rolled up the felt mat, and put ink, rubbing disk, and brush back in the mobile cabinet. He rolled up the picture loosely and put it on the bookcase where he could see it.

After clearing off the table, he put the magazine on it where he had found the description of the contest. Instead of reading it again, however, he first picked up the envelope with the photographs to go over them again in peace. Most of them he put quickly to one side. They were documentation for a professional job; they had no artistic merit, merely expressing his intent to show a real situation with as little distortion and misunderstanding as possible.

The last picture was quite different. It wasn’t any less real, but the choice of angle and the lighting gave it a monumental quality that didn’t just come from a lack of human dimension. This stark diagonal view of a group of four cooling towers seemed to merge into a threatening symbol.

The picture wasn’t necessary to document his description of the condition of the buildings, so he placed it in the open magazine as a bookmark.

In retrospect, it seemed to him that at that moment the wheels in his head started to turn. At first they mixed together a series of pictures from dream and reality, and gradually putting them in order, finally stopped at a new picture.

Bärger had had a vision.

Absurd, he thought, completely absurd, but the idea wouldn’t leave him alone. He picked up a stack of copy paper next to his printer, looked for a pencil with a soft lead and began to sketch.

First he tried to show the dimension of the towers in cross section on the paper. Then he remembered that he had measured the tower dimensions with his laser. He took out his notebook, entered the height on the vertical axis and drew a freehand hyperbola to approximate the line of the cooling tower’s outside surface.

As he brought the line of the cooling tower down to the ground, the idea of something like an arena really began to take shape.

Bärger tried to control the flood of images that threatened to overwhelm him.

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