LOW WATER 0.68 m
On that morning in April, when all of a sudden the skies over London were absolutely quiet, I walked to Trafalgar Square. Shadows still covered the square; only high up on his column, in unattainable solitude, did sunlight strike Lord Nelson. His tricorn appeared black against a blue sky, making it seem improbable that an ash cloud from the small island of Iceland could have crippled air traffic across Europe. All the sounds of the awakened city surged unhindered and almost triumphantly into the void. The moisture of the dew glistened on the red buses. England was once again an island kingdom. As people streamed toward Embankment Underground Station, I hurried down to the Thames and thought I saw someone in the crowd in front of the station wave to me, but I crossed the concourse without hesitation. Out to the quay, to the river! The clear spring sky even created the illusion that the normally murky brown river was blue. It was low tide with hardly a ripple, and the crushed rock on the shore smelled unmistakably of the sea.
With my head cocked back, I looked up curiously at the sky in which the tiny particles of ash were now visibly floating: some were like particles of dust, without shape and structure; others sometimes sharp like needles and sometimes rounded off, frayed or jagged like crystals. And suddenly I once again saw us children standing on the main square on Ash Wednesday, after we had left church, looking at each other just as perplexed as I was now, gazing toward the sky in which only birds were flying. Usually, it was still the depths of winter—a sparkling, ghostlike landscape embraced the snow-covered mountains of the valley basin and the snowflakes on our woolen gloves would turn into pellets of ice; only occasionally did melted snow gurgle in the gutters of the church—and instead of making our way to school, we would remain standing in the middle of the main square and, bewildered, take note of our sudden extreme aging. We had walked across the sanctuary in long columns, and the endless mumbling of the pastor grew increasingly audible as he dusted our hair with the consecrated ashes—remember that you are dust and you will return to dust, remember that you are dust . . . The younger boys in particular soon began to shake their heads as if they had been victimized by a horrific itch or attacked by fleas. But we girls stood on the main square under the blue winter sky and saw ourselves growing older at an unimaginable rate. It made no difference if some of us bent forward and vigorously shook our heads and, laughing, brushed the ashes from our hair; it nevertheless remained gray. In the evening, as we stood in front of the mirror, the ashes were still there. I slept in an upright position so that the ashes would not fall onto the white pillow. It was frightening to see how quickly our future, thrilling yet uncertain, could have passed by. For days, the roots of our hair would remain ashen.
I had taken a seat on the quay wall of the Thames near the two sphinxes. These mythical, bronze-poured creatures shimmered softly and evenly as if they were made of black ebony. Their full lips formed a smile, and they extended their paws to one another calmly, although, as a plaque revealed, one of them had suffered scrapes and scars, having been hit during the first airstrike on London by the German bombers just a few minutes before midnight on September 4, 1917. Sphinxes also occupied the nearby quay benches in smaller form; they divided the benches into individual seats. To allow for undisturbed privacy or to prevent the homeless from sleeping there? The tide rose nearly imperceptibly, washed over the stones, drove off the pigeons that were fluttering about, and erased the traces left by people and animals. One flip-flop, baked into the sand, offered considerable resistance, but then it too was swept away. The smell of the sea had disappeared. The sphinxes dreamed with open eyes looking up and down to the Thames, but they could no longer see the chaos of the bobbing schooners and other ships with their exotic cargo. Even before they arrived, the East and West India docks had been operating in the eastern part of the city, and the Britannia that had once been completely covered with vast oak forests had already become part of a distant past.
I had never been so confused by a river as I was by the Thames. The changing of the tides gave way to a stagnant swirling. Was the mass of water working its way inland or out to sea? I kept looking at the currents as they did battle with one another. Before my eyes, everything began to spin and move in circles. Indeed, once again, as in millennia past, oak trees floated upright in the river! Flushed out by the tides, they were ripped away from the shore, even as they clutched the earth with their roots before finally taking the soil along with them. The crowns of the oak trees towered above, exposed to the wind; floating in the middle of the current at night, they terrified the Roman legions who mistook the monstrous rigging of the branches for enemy ships and, dazed or drunk, waged battle against the trees. In actuality, it was rather the oaks that appeared to be in flight, headed for the open sea, as if they had intuited the impending destruction, the burning, and the felling for the construction of ships and settlements, as well as for the enclosure of whole hillsides and plains for hunting, for surveillance and executions—but the forest really belongs to madmen, and to childhood.
In my memory, the most mysterious room is the forest room. Its wallpaper was of a linden-green color. The trees imprinted on it were certainly supposed to represent linden trees, but they had been depicted as a forest, and into this sea of leaves were added the leaves of beech and oak trees. However, this room was not located in a remote clearing, but rather in the vicarage of our uncle, the town clergyman. During the summer weeks my father slept there. Last night, I was once again in the wide hallway of the old house; the light faded so quickly that the various doors were hardly recognizable. Suddenly, I felt a powerful embrace go through me like a firestorm, and then I saw tears, tears! on the face that was fading in the darkness. Now, in the morning, I was standing at the Thames observing the shimmering of the waves, their restlessness, the way that they overtook or counterposed one another. It was no longer the islands of oaks that circled on the river but rather the linden-green forest room along with the whole vicarage: the red hall, the small blue room, the summer cottage, the July heat, and the long days. Alone in one of the most densely populated cities of the world, I suddenly felt as if this house, like no other, rented as always for the summer, might provide me with the greatest sense of security from the threat of the implacable passage of time.
2
HIGH WATER 6.77 m
In the roar of the traffic that resounded under the span of the bridge over the Thames, I returned to the Underground. Had someone really waved to me? Somewhat distracted, I looked around. The tulip buds in the narrow gardens were blossoming in such dazzling colors! Brilliant ribbons, they wound their way through the dark boxwood, snow white, flickering orange, violet, canary yellow. Someone, who was unidentifiably rolled up in a black plastic bag, was sleeping behind the memorial to the terror attacks of July 2005. The area smelled of spilled beer and hyacinths. On the plaque, for all Londoners of our great city to see, one was told that the city will survive, that it is the future of our world. Showers of the most delicate green traced the shrubbery and trees of the parks; the as-yet-unoccupied deck chairs waited like butterflies whose wings had been swelled by the wind. But even today the young woman, whose face is covered by a white gauze bandage, is walking with the aid of a fireman, without stumbling, as if she were a living mummy, through the underground station on Edgware Road. She walks steadily, surrounded by smoke, blood, and screams. There are half-rounded slits in the gauze bandage around her eye sockets; there are cut-outs for her mouth and nose, and the young woman repeats that she must get to work right away and that during the long commute from the East End, squished between the passengers of the Circle Line, she had tried to think about what she had to do at work that day, but, yes, there really was an enormous explosion and to her left a ball of fire that quickly darted to the right before dying out. But why did the people recoil from her in such horror? The arm of the fireman still supports the young woman with the white gauze bandage. Please, she says, pushing him away, I really have to get to work. I’m already quite late.
Translucent veils of clouds hastened across the sky. I went back to the East End; from Whitechapel Market the shouting of the Bengalis and Pakistanis grew ever more audible as they touted their wares, shrill and monotonous, a hypnotizing litany. The plastic tarps on the stands were flapping. The mountains of coriander, still fresh in the morning, lay around like slack pillows and green mattresses. The red mailbox around the corner from where I live had not been emptied in days, likely owing to the volcanic eruption. Behind it, a wild scrawny rosebush grew out of the asphalt; perhaps in the fall it would bear a few rosehips. The sirens of the ambulances from the nearby Royal London Hospital wailed, and the musical ice cream truck, occasionally halting its tune, was making its final rounds despite the cold. In the apartments across the way, the lights went on here and there. And later there was nothing to be heard from the Bengali neighbors, who usually continued to gesticulate into their cell phones all the way up to their door, while behind the kitchen window of the only non-Asian family one could detect the growing vehemence of the bickering and shouting. This family consisted of two mothers, both sickly pale, an evidently unemployed man, and two children: the small dark boy was a whirlwind with black frizzy hair and the overweight girl had light blond hair and every day wore striped socks that didn’t match.
The wild cherry trees, lavishly blooming even in the narrow rear gardens, radiated against the night sky. It now seemed to me nearly incomprehensible that a unique fear had taken hold of me when I wandered about this neighborhood for the first time one evening. I had come into a wide but poorly lit street. It was getting on near midnight; iron gates shuttered the small shops, and even the late-night bars were beginning to close. An icy wind blew the trash from one side of the street to the other, and at a certain point I had the undeniable feeling that the darkness around me represented a threat. I was standing at the spot where Commercial Road empties into Whitechapel High Street. Only later did I learn that it was exactly here, on October 4, 1936, that, a half hour before the march of Sir Mosley’s black shirts into Cable Street, the Irish dockworkers, joined by the Jewish population of the East End, had succeeded in barricading the street despite the deployment of the mounted police, who had gone after them with truncheons. Having just arrived, open-minded and hyper-alert, something of the violence and capacity for resistance of this place had unwittingly been imparted to me.
Outside, below my window, the black London taxi had disappeared. I had never seen the driver, who was probably only on duty at night and worked into the early morning. During the day, I usually found the taxi parked near my door. Sticky buds, a sign of spring, collected on its roof. It was gone now, and the driver was likely chauffeuring the restless, the loud-mouthed, the drunk and the sleep-deprived through some blindingly well-lit streets as well as some dark streets, which at night began to resemble the subterranean tracts of the underground. I looked up into the night sky, in which the twinkling pathways of the stars were never visible, and tried to envision the face that had so quickly and closely popped up in my dream and that I nevertheless could not recognize. Had my father stepped out of the forest room, or had my uncle come out from his small blue room across opposite? Why did the embrace produce this fervent feeling of happiness, whence the tears? The linden and oak trees of the wall covering grew into the forest room and anchored it in a gigantic root system that had taken the whole house out onto the Thames with it. There it floated and circled once more before my very eyes! And I had to make an effort to identify our summer cottage in the waters, to seize it, and to ponder it in calm attentiveness, and, at the banks of this foreign river, once again situate myself in that previous horizon. Was this a possible response, an acknowledgment of the face that was vanishing in the dark?
3
LOW WATER 0.70 m
From the street, I peeked into a Pakistani diner where, on the small television set that had recently been placed on a microwave and nearly touched the ceiling, I saw the volcano vehemently spewing forth ashes. Above a sooty black wave of clouds towered a lighter-colored mountain of cumulus clouds that was rapidly changing its shape. You got the impression that at any second the small television set might explode. The reporter got bogged down as she tried to pronounce the name, Eyjafjallajökull, eya, eya, the old nursery rhyme occurred to me, eya, eya, a child, whom I have chosen, I want him to be my own, and how my mother passionately exclaimed, no, I never understood that, this infanticide in Bethlehem! And how all the innocent newborns were massacred for the sake of God’s child. And if you were to think of the wailing mothers, Christmas Eve could drive you mad. As the diners in the Pakistani eatery ate their meal, they looked up at the turbulent volcano from time to time but showed no interest. The expelled ashes gradually took on the appearance of a mushroom cloud, and yet outside the spring sky was clear and bright. And I too felt something of that peculiar cheerfulness that sometimes takes hold of people when they hear of a catastrophe, as long as it is far enough away.
I was still following the relentless volcano on television when a persistent sound worked its way to my ears through the noise of the traffic and the Whitechapel Market. It came closer and closer, an inexorable metronome. Finally, I turned my head and saw a few meters ahead of me one of the many completely veiled women in her black niqab. She was tapping her white cane on the sidewalk. She did so vigorously and evenly. It seemed doubtful that the narrow eye slits of her niqab, which was held together by a thick, plaited thread across her nose, were of any use to her. Without slowing down in the least, she passed by me in close proximity. Nothing about her revealed her age. She tapped her cane ceaselessly; I heard the tapping for some time until it faded away in the crowd, dreadful in its echo, like the passing seconds of time. And suddenly it was rather quiet in the diner. On the TV screen, the eruption of the ashes grew ever denser, climbed ever higher, a gigantic black-brown cauliflower. Day was transformed into night. An immense, dark curtain of ashes hung over the farmsteads at the foot of the Icelandic volcano. Visibility was at best a couple of paces. You could vaguely make out the disaster crew, who wore white dust masks as they tried to prevent a desperate farmer from chasing down his runaway horse. An old Pakistani who had stopped eating at the sight of the all-blackening ash cloud left his half-eaten meal on the plate and went out onto the street.
Later I crossed London Bridge. Even in the late morning hours throngs of people streamed across the bridge from the southern side; in the early evening they would return in the opposite direction. I struggled against the harsh wind; I loved London Bridge like no other, the most unspectacular of all the bridges over the Thames. Gray, unsightly, functional as it was, nothing pointed to the fact that here, only a hundred feet to the east, the old London Bridge had stood for over six centuries. With densely constructed gates, towers, houses, and shops, which time and again went up in flames and then crashed into the Thames, the bridge was rocked by riots and rebel attacks, and witnessed triumphant returns from the battlefield as well as many frost fairs. The past had dissipated into thin air, which was blue and of rare purity even on this day without airplanes. Only the people streamed endlessly across the bridge. From the dock at the riverside, they appeared very small and seemed to move along as if on a conveyor belt. Legs, briefcases, bags with thermos bottles and lunch boxes were all obscured by the railing; only the heads glided by the top of the rail like swarms of the spawn of an ineradicable amphibious species.
Just before the southern end of the bridge, I was struck by the profile of a young man who, motionless, stood out among the crowd that was surging toward me. The man must have been standing near the steps that led down to the Thames. He was tall, slender and wore a black leather jacket. I first noticed his finely contoured nose, like that in a Renaissance painting, since the side of his face that was turned toward me remained hidden due to the thick, dark-blond hair that shimmered in a conspicuous red tone in the sunlight. I went straight up to him as he stood in front of a bundle of newspapers. Under his arm he held a rolled-up newspaper, which he gave no sign of wanting to sell. Standing in front of him, I looked down at the bundle of papers and noticed that it was the newspaper for the homeless. The young man must have bent over at the same time as I did. Only when I raised my head did I see his face.
My horror was all the greater because the profile of the young man, who seemed to come from a different age, had instinctively attracted me. One cheek, which had been hidden by his full head of hair, appeared swollen and afflicted by some kind of rot, as if it had been eaten away from the inside by an animal. Frantically, I once again tried hard to fix my eyes on the newspapers that lay at the young man’s feet. He seemed to be accustomed to letting those interested in the paper take their time. Determined to will myself to see beyond the disfigurement, I looked up again. Two eyes of a light dove-gray color were looking me over. I remember you, said the young man. And now a smile came over his face, at least over the non-disfigured half; it was clear that he had no control over the other half, where the corner of his mouth was deformed and could only twitch.
I’ve never met you here before, I said, having composed myself in the meantime. I can be found at various locations, said the young man with great politeness, but London Bridge, on the south side, is my usual place. I prefer the south side! He laughed. Puzzled, I looked into his eyes, whose gray had suddenly turned darker and shinier. I was still standing in front of him but had not bought a newspaper. Brakes screeched, buses approached, pedestrians dashed across the street when the light was red. Even the bridgeheads vibrated from the traffic. One of the few remaining container-laden barges moved along the Thames, a clipper raced past it, and both were overtaken by a small, speeding police boat. With unmistakable shyness and yet also with a touch of gruff pride, the young man asked: are you coming back tomorrow?
Hardly had I walked down the steps to the Thames when it was again so quiet that I could hear the splashing of the waves. The harsh wind had suddenly stopped, blocked by the tall, old storage facilities. There was an expansive glass dome that arched over an open square leading down to the river, where the steamships once unloaded their freight of rum, sugar, tobacco, tea, and coffee. I entered the arcade amazed at the piercing, high-pitched twittering of the birds from above. Tilting my head back, I was only able to make out a few of the birds, who, sufficiently forewarned about crashing into the glass by the filigreed construction of the steel ribs, moved back and forth in secure flight, occasionally accelerating frenetically as if intoxicated by their own twittering. This brought about such an intricate echo under the cylindrical glass dome that I suddenly felt that I was no longer in the middle of a city but rather had awakened in an early morning forest. I tilted my head back further and closed my eyes. Delicate whistling, urgent responses, cascades of sounds, jubilant trilling rose from the night-shade trees, and it was the first morning of the world.
4
HIGH WATER 6.55 m
At sunset, I was sitting at the old fish market on the Thames. I had sat down on the top step of the stairway that led down to the water. The piles that supported the abandoned market building were barely visible; at low tide, they carried the building, which resembled a Venetian palace, as if on tall stilts, and they also seemed to be a continuation of the underwater colonnade. The rays of light fell obliquely across London Bridge onto the waves and ignited a sudden glistening. The weathervanes on the two corner towers of the fish market, each in the form of a spiked blowfish, sparkled. The newspapers reported that the ashes of the volcanic eruption had reached 8,000 meters. I tried to identify the people at the south end of London Bridge, but against the light they only appeared as silhouettes. The contours of their bodies toppled into the water and merged with the shadows of those who had hastily passed by in earlier centuries, dazed by the foul stench of the river, into which all the sewage of London had been pumped, and who became nauseous at the piercing smell of fish. Even the silk handkerchiefs, with which the Members of Parliament covered their noses on their way to Westminster, were of no use.
Like flat stones, sparks of light skipped across the Thames. They had the scaley sheen of my child in that dream, long before it had come into the world, on the night of my mother’s birthday in her darkening house. A fish child! In amazement, I held it close to my face. The left side was covered with green to blue phosphorescent scales—such a vivid shimmering that I was blinded by it. But then suddenly I felt the fish scales trickle onto my hands, more and more, ever more vigorously, until finally the small creature was completely free of them. I had just given birth to it, but it was already laughing; it laughed in such a contented way that the last silver scales fell from its bristly black hair, and I woke up from its laughter. Later, it was given the same name as the child in the marble crib in the side nave of Westminster Abbey who was lightly wrapped to its chin. For a mere three days, the little daughter of the king saw the beginning of the century that was to bring London the plague, the Great Fire, and the Glorious Revolution. It is unlikely that I would ever see the child so still in its marble crib as I did yesterday afternoon at vespers. Perhaps because of the interruption of the air traffic, Westminster Abbey was eerily empty, and illuminated only by the spring sunset. Only in a mirror can you see the marble face of the child, since the face is turned away from the observer, but if you have been in dialogue with the child, there is no longer any escape from the pain that has remained present over centuries. The precision with which the child was wrapped makes the pain worse. The tiny face did not appear to me to be of marble, but rather of wax, and nearly pulsating with life. Just as if it were of freshly warmed wax, fine-featured and without visible veins—I had said to the child in the mirror—are the hands of another girl, who also bears your name, but she survived the death threats of her youth, she was able to grow up. But now she has thrown herself into the dangers of becoming an adult; the rainforests of the Amazon have swallowed her, and only occasionally does she send out signals!
I looked down at my own hands, and suddenly they no longer appeared to be my own. The blue veins on the back of my hands struck me as unnatural. Like mountain ranges, they left behind shadowed valleys. Plowed and furrowed, these hands seemed foreign, uncannily foreign, and yet so familiar. They were my mother’s hands. Unnoticeably, they had grown out of my own hands, with mineral hardness. I can no longer recall my father’s hands. In the fading light I wanted to observe the people at the southern end of London Bridge one more time. But everything was flickering before my eyes. As I approached the Underground Station, a loud voice over the speakers urgently reminded everyone that all air traffic had been shut down. Humid air spiraled up from the depths of the escalators.
