Dressel’s Garden

You can be sure: a picture postcard is not enough
to disentangle the background to the image
for a visitor, perhaps, who looks beyond the staircase
for a few motifs. After all, it’s not yet
a completed process (and no one who exposed the green
of unripe apples works in the neighbourhood),
just a little distance back, along the road,
to the south of Erfurt. Yet what comes next? A front

door standing open, and sunlight falls across
the tiles, up the steps, rising into the darkened
hallway. The visitor is in motion, but
the angle of vision is not; it has been
fixed for half a century (for an hour
it has not rained, and when I went out to look
for you, you spilled streams of water here and there
in the garden, annoyed at my disconnected
questions and my yelling suddenly, so loudly that I
was startled and shrank back into myself like a snail
touched by a shoe; then I had to return to
the phone call). Everything else has changed, perhaps
not the windowsill, on which a dog sits . . . but
the dog’s at rest in that endless series
of lost creatures, has long been in the cardboard box
there, under Dressel’s fence, with its loose-hanging pales . . . :
first, a plan, then the implementation
for this, for the next, for the final bid to escape. But
then where to? The customer in the corner
of the restaurant looks out onto the street. October
has begun warm, and out of the sunshine
the Number 3 appears. The seams in the bunting
are still visible, but it doesn’t matter, the women are
all wearing new dresses. A few odd flak-helpers,
standing skinny in the schoolyard and asking
where are the vocabulary books. There’s still straw
in the sports hall, and the scent of perfume
where the painted girls from the Rhineland lay. Bikes

set out west; there are a few dirt roads open
between the border villages; only later are they
no longer marked on the road maps, and so
the counterfeiting of the country proceeds. But then
the row of plum trees comes into view,
the embankment below the gardens, and a boy
hauling a cartload of wood (you never stop to explain
why you didn’t throw the lath scraps, the bits
of frame, the hacked off branch into the waste bin . . .
well, okay, I’ll say no more). The plums
are small and sour and the windows are closed when
the visitor stops to take a look around. The streets
are empty, almost empty, where the wind leaves
odours hanging round the shopfronts. A diminished
vitality; everyone’s got something to say, but they all
shrug their shoulders when questioned again.
At least, they all have their names to hand, even if

the name plates have been taken down? At night, not
on the timetable, there were darkened trains
standing at the end of the platforms, and when dusk
fell, they rolled slowly out east, headed north;
then also the flashlights winked out. In the meantime,

winter; on ice skates to school, to Langemarck, into
the Skagerrak, through starry nights to sunrise; drumming
of the Baltic, the echoing of the Alps. Vast, then
shrinking geography that, for a few months,
allowed the corner shop, the summerhouses, the hermitage,
some peace. The customer wanted to pay long ago, but

the waiter’s only responsible up to the next table. Where
does the Number 3 run now? From the Saale’s bright shore
the first picture postcards arrived; the emplacement
near Leuna. Xenophon in green-painted barracks,
keeping the home place together: “Senftleben in
goal, on the right, Winne Herz”; otherwise, an empty theatre,
the Central German Stadium, where ghosts
run their laps, and Ilse Werner’s foxtrot whistles from
speakers above the ice rink. Corner kicks
dropped into obscurity beyond the thistles; women
in headscarves emerged from somewhere when
the sack of potatoes fell from a lorry as it rounded
one of the bends, and the patrol stopped a wheelbarrow

(but there’s still not sufficient time to unravel
all the details, to recover the contexts in which each
individual has a voice again. The talking
begins only when we have come to an agreement
about this or that meaning). At last, the customer
has found his way out onto a street which has
changed its name as many times as every system
switches its cigarette brands and medals. In the dark,
the station . . . what exactly does darkening mean around here?
Here is where we’d go to bed and were no longer
frozen stiff between the warm bricks
of peace; back then, winter meant nothing but the start

of the coming, fearful fur hat time. Whether rightly
or wrongly told . . . nobody gets by so easily,
even if you were writing your own chapter
in the history of aberration which, in turn, was
unrecognisable in the midst of all these flags, slogans,
under the smoke of rhetoric, which at some stage
drifted westwards, where it was believed that, only here
and now, did the hopeful heaven shine. What
was the weather like on the afternoon of the arrest,
when the Red Army, on a requisitioned bicycle,
circled the handcart? A few émigrés, whose names
nobody could remember, came back,
and those who did not wish to join them simply

disappeared; it was an autumn in which we returned
in the evening with baskets of tomatoes. You see,
there again, a jumble of motifs, difficult to make out
down in the cellar with the torchlight flickering
over the labels of jars of preserve. Some things
are just too late (just too young, those grandfathers
in Tuscany who returned at some stage
with their hair cut short; in sweaters and jeans
that no longer fitted them), particularly when,
if need be, reality lies in the rule of law, though someone
had to come up with that first . . . The hallway’s
too dark in which the visitor stands, the one who only
dreamed for decades, before this October, that he stood
there in the stairwell of his childhood again. Perhaps
it’s also that he doesn't really want to see the details,
the letters of unfamiliar names, the rotten timbers
at the back of the yard; perhaps, a few old rifles
still behind the fence in Dressel’s garden. In the end,
a sentry squatted on the stairway and smoked, or
was it the unshaven fugitive, Rose and
Ruth, the girl they shot . . . it happened much too

quickly, then too slowly, and when the stink of
light gasoline faded, the odour of straw and the steppe
soon followed. Not a word to demand the return
of a scrap of furniture, a suitcase; there are too many
lists in progress, in which one claim’s set against
another. At last, if you bear the seasons in mind,
a few welcoming autumn days left: lengthening
shadows among gnarled, old apple trees; a tram
kicks up leaves, and debris from the chestnut trees
litters the stadium entrance. It’s still as it once
might have been and what you can be sure of is
that you touched the rosehips along the sunken path,
just before dusk, when they all began to glow.