A Stranger to Myself by Willy Peter Reese

Author:Willy Peter Reese
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE GHOST WOOD

Sand slowly slipped through the hourglass, and every grain rested in God’s hands. We had no sense of that.

We experienced the beginning30 of the New Year still in the fairy-tale forest, celebrated New Year’s Eve with brandy and bold talk, and at midnight put on a fireworks display from all our weapons at once. 1943! A drunken walk followed, a sleigh ride, and we slept in late. But at the sight of the beheaded trees, the bare shrubs, that not even the hoarfrost, the visible soul of delicacy, was able to touch with life, amid all the wreckage of beauty and peace, we were regularly overcome by the feeling that all this was leading just such an unreal, spectral life as we ourselves. Then, out of nowhere, the name ghost wood cropped up, and before long it was everywhere.

We were like ghosts ourselves. Shelling and fighting had passed over our heads and uprooted us like the fir trees. Our masks of needles and leaves had been stripped off us by the war. Spiritually we were just as torn and disfigured as the foliage after the battle. We were incapable of thinking anything beyond: shells, detonations, explosions, black snow, blood, death. Later on, that black snow would symbolize for us the ravages the war had wrought in our young souls. Only a sheer hoarfrost veneer of toughness and danger and the fresh snow of silence concealed these wounds, till the last of us fell in the frost, piece by piece of our being broke off, and we became shadows of our former selves.

We wanted to forget the past and bury it, yet we couldn’t. We started rootling about in it once more, and freighted the urns of our dreams with what we had seen.

An iron frost set in, as though a polar wind were blowing down from the stars. The white moon glowed more harshly down from the whirl of the clouds. Our hands and feet couldn’t get warm. We suffered from persecution mania. Surrounded by death, we passed through these days, taking our leave. In the midst of death, we lived; we turned the commonplace on its head. We learned to hate our time and to curse the war. But within we still resisted the idea that all sacrifice was futile, so as not to fall into the despair of the soldier in an exposed, hopeless position.

The fighting was over. But it was only now that everything became real. Only now did we see how inhuman all our experience had been and try to give it some meaning and value. But reality compelled us to put away our cherished illusions. A spiritual struggle against reality began. But we found no magic word, no new illusion. Pitilessly, the war fitted into the microcosm of our world picture.

The snow lasted; the nights remained full of silence, as though everything were just a dream. If we discovered any human feeling in our hearts, God’s smile seemed to blow about our brows.

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