All Souls' Day by Cees Nooteboom

Author:Cees Nooteboom [Nooteboom, Cees]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447207436
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

We interrupt. Once again. But our interruptions are going to get shorter and shorter—we promise. Yes, of course we’ve been following her: the jolting bus ride, the bus stops, the endless stops where nobody gets in or out but the bus stops anyway because it has to stick to its schedule, with or without passengers. This is an orderly country, where time is thought of as dutiful, rather than temperamental. Not exactly a dignified farewell, she thought in the bus. She’d walked off and left him behind like a sinking ship. She crosses over a large square: Falkplatz. He could have told her something about that spot too, the man who knows too much and finds it so hard to express himself. He’s taken pictures here as well. A desolate clearing, 1990. East Berlin. They had come from all sides—men and women of good will, innocent children, even VOPOs—and planted trees. An amateurish attempt, tender saplings stuck haphazardly in the ground, in hopes that they would eventually grow into a park or forest. A new forest in an old, derelict city. The people living on the square hadn’t joined in the idiocy, but had looked down from the windows of their paintless, pockmarked apartments. With a devastating but inexplicable certainty, they knew that what was happening down there was not the future. Her clicking heels are taking her past row upon row of abandoned trees: a randomly spaced, ragged bunch of orphans, a sad reflection of bankrupt hopes. And since he isn’t here to explain it, to tell what happened that day, it too has become part of the formless, invisible history of the things we always see because we forget nothing. We look with complete objectivity at the totality of events—something you will luckily never have to do. We have no choice, we follow the labyrinth of egos, fate, chance, design, order, natural phenomena, and death wishes you call history. You are inextricably tied to your own time, which means that what you hear are echoes, what you see are reflections. You never have to shoulder the unbearable burden of the whole picture. Yet all these things have actually happened. Nothing—no act, no nameless traceless event—is ever omitted. And because we know all of these things we hold up the structure you live in. You describe that structure in different ways, depending on the age you live in and the language you use—you who can never detach yourselves from your own time and place, no matter how hard you try. Every book you write is a gross distortion of the book that we read. Whether you call it art, scholarship, satire, or irony, it’s still a mirror in which you see only a fraction of what we see. Your greatness lies in the fact that you will keep on trying to the end. You are the true heroes. We haven’t got an ounce of heroism.

She’s asleep now. As always, we are the only ones awake. Her book is at her side.

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