Lanceheim Read online

  My family and I lived in a forest glade that had been cleared many generations ago just for us, for our profession, and for our kind. On soil that was soft as moss, fertile from humus, and carefully tended by expert and sensitive paws, five timbered two-story houses had been built in a perfect circle: large buildings that seemed to be growing up under their straw roofs. These were dwellings of dark, hewn lumber, just as broad as they were tall. The houses surrounded a round lawn where I played ball for the first time, where I split a seam for the first time, and where I fell in love for the first time.

  Every beaver that is delivered to Mollisan Town is invited, when he or she reaches that age, to become one of the forest guards in Das Vorschutz. Many are thereby called, but few are chosen. At the time when I was growing up, the tamers of the great forest were named Hans Beaver, Jonas Beaver, Anders Beaver, Sven Beaver, and Karl Beaver. Each one of them had taken a bird as a wife, and to this day I do not know whether that was only by chance.

  My father, Karl, was responsible for the trees. He was a hard gnawer who would rather punish than woo and who sought companionship with his colleagues rather than with his family. My mother was a dreamer, a nightingale, the charming Carolyn. She lived in a world of her own; I think it became more wonderful with each passing year. When she was not at the school or in the kitchen, she spent most of her time in a small room on the upper floor where she sewed curtains and coverings for the couch and armchair from the same rough, white cotton cloth where pink hollyhocks grew and blossomed. She sat at her desk and looked out the window at the massive trees that, ancient and wise, rose up around the glade and protected us from the sun and rain. During the Evening Storm their dense crowns sang to us, and in the breeze during the day the leaves whispered a song whose melody Mother knew.

  When Father showed up down in the glade, Mother quickly got up and hurried down to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I kept to the lower floor, in the living room or at the kitchen table, where I sat reading my books. In passing, Mother mumbled the same thing every day.

  “Today I know that Papa is going to like the food.”

  But not one single time did I hear Father comment on Mother’s cooking.

  I loved Mother’s fragile smile and her beautiful voice, and there was nothing I wanted more than to protect and take care of her. She might look at me with a questioning expression, as if she wondered for a moment who I was, before her gaze was veiled again and she withdrew back into her own, inner life. She taught me not to exaggerate the significance of the gestures, words, and expressions that a female shows the world; it is what goes on in her soul that is decisive.

  And what did I really think of my father?

  I realize that in the above description observant readers may detect a certain antipathy between the lines. The reply to the question just posed is that there were occasions when Father’s impulsiveness and aggression coincided in the perfect, cross-ruled system of coordinates that was his spiritual life, and then he was a stuffed animal that you were compelled to fear. Nonetheless I loved him and admired him as if he were the wisest, most remarkable stuffed animal in all of Mollisan Town. For to get an appreciative glance from Father, I was prepared to climb up in the beech tree at Heimat without a ladder or run naked through the thistle field east of Pal’s Ravine. Naturally Father would have punished me severely if I had done either of these foolish pranks. He was an animal who set scientific reason and religious veneration above all; he viewed everything else with skepticism.

  That the trees fell to my father Karl Beaver’s lot was completely natural to all who knew him. His character was easy to compare to a tree’s: tough and ancient, but strong and confident of victory. The few times when I was growing up that Father showed a sensitive, verging on raw, side were when he was forced to fell any of his stately friends, for he knew them all as individuals. If he had shown me or Mother the same consideration, he would have—according to Father’s way of seeing things—betrayed himself and revealed a weakness that a model father ought not to show an impressionable son.

  He would leave us early in the morning, along with the other beavers, and did not come home until dinnertime. He participated in all the ceremonies and activities that were part of our isolated miniature society in Das Vorschutz, and he defended us all. I am certain that he would have sacrificed his life to save me or Mother if it had been needed. But at the same time—if a paradox may be permitted—he would have saved us for his own sake.

  Does this make him a better or a worse stuffed animal?

  I would prefer to leave that unsaid.

  My father, the daring Karl Beaver, if he had had the opportunity to consider and judge my life, would have brooded a great deal. Now it will soon be five years since the red pickup fetched him, and in many respects he remains a mystery to me, just as I would grow up to be a mystery to him.

  Oh well, genuine love allows mysteries to remain unsolved. This I have learned from Maximilian, and this I have learned from love itself.

  The first six years of my life I spent in Das Vorschutz. I never left our securely staked-out part of the massive forest; there was no reason to. Hans Beaver and his Olga Woodpecker and Anders Beaver and Bluebird Niklasson had each had a cub of their own delivered the same year I myself arrived with the green pickup. Together with my same-age companions Weasel Tukovsky and Buzzard Jones, I kept myself occupied from early in the morning until late in the evening.

  This self-imposed isolation, encouraged and upheld by the grown-ups in Das Vorschutz, may seem strange to an outsider. Early in the morning or in the middle of the afternoon, it took less than an hour to get to the Star, the roundabout where the four avenues—rectilinear parade streets in each direction—meet in the middle of Mollisan Town, but we pretended not to notice. Without wanting to, we were part of a city that in every detail made claims to be more complete than our beloved forest. What was called civilization was, according to our way of seeing it, a single, gigantic life lie. How could stuffed animals close their eyes to the most fundamental of truths: that their ability to develop creation—I mean all the technical, medical, and psychological advances made during the last hundred years—could not be considered more than a youthful attempt in relation to Magnus’s own creation?

  The authorities left us alone.

  The forest guards were managed by a division of the Environmental Ministry that was also responsible for roads and road maintenance. The ministry officials encouraged, even stirred up, our rebellious isolation. Perhaps this was simpler than the opposite? However it was, we were allowed to provide our own schooling as long as we adhered to the prevailing curriculum; a doctor came out to the forest glade once a month and attended to our physical health; and over and above grocery shopping and more infrequent clothes shopping, there was no real reason to set our claws and paws on the colorful asphalt of Mollisan Town.

  When I was little, of course I didn’t think about this. I lived the only life I knew, and I loved every second and minute of it. How could it be anything other than an idyll? Buzzard, Weasel, and I took care to develop our personalities in different directions: We were laying the groundwork for our adult lives. Buzzard, aggressive and demanding, a challenger and a leader. Weasel, an admirer who accepted Buzzard’s challenges and survived them, thanks to his unpredictable imagination. And finally me, the silent wolf, the observer whom the other two needed to be able to perform and accomplish, show off and go further.

  The year we turned seven, our days of play and voyages of discovery were almost imperceptibly transformed into school days. It was my mother, Carolyn Nightingale, who in her evasive, cautious manner shifted our youthful curiosity from Weasel’s imaginary worlds to the subjects she chose. Our schoolhouse was at our home, in a room next to the first-floor dining room that I had hardly noticed until then. This room, we now discovered, had served through the decades as the Forest Cubs’ classroom. A corresponding room in the home of Hans Beaver and Olga Woodpecker was used as the doctor’s consultation roo
m, while in the house where Jonas Beaver lived with his family, the same room was used for the weekly meetings of the forest guards.

  My mother lured us to the classroom in the morning with apple tartlets she had made famous far up in north Lanceheim. The slightly salty dough in combination with the sweetness of the cinnamon and the acid fructose of the apples was a perfect taste experience, impossible to resist. In that way I always came to associate learning with the most obvious sort of physical satisfaction.

  During the following three years, Mother began every school day by reading selected passages from the great classics to us. My memory is distinct. The odor of tar that came in through the open window—it always smelled of tar from the wooden houses—and the aromas from my classmates’ cotton bodies where they sat on the inherited benches. The taste of the tartlet on my tongue, Mother up at the lectern, and the massive blackboard behind her, which made her look smaller than she was. And the words that came out of her mouth. Some were too difficult for us, the plots of the books might fly high over our heads, but even then I enjoyed the sounds and the rhythm of Mother’s voice.

  Mother was in charge of the lessons in language, social studies, and mathematics. We did not devote ourselves to any other subjects those first years.

  In third grade we got two new teachers. Mother remained our main teacher and spent most of her time with us, but in addition Weasel’s mother, Bluebird Niklasson, started teaching chemistry, physics, and biology. Eva Whippoorwill came to the classroom once a week to give us lessons in something that was called Physical Improvement. I was unexpectedly on the verge of a decisive awakening.

  It happened during Eva Whippoorwill’s first minutes in the classroom. She had told us to stand up, and with inquisitive looks she complained about our poor posture and substandard stuffing. In my whole body, along my back and down through my hind legs, along my upper arms in toward the armpits and above all in my chest, in my heart, a form of shaking began to take shape.

  Of course I got scared. What was happening to me?

  I looked down at my body and confirmed that, despite the fact that it felt as if all of me was a jackhammer in use, I stood steady and unmoving by my bench. How was this possible? The sweat broke out on my forehead at the same time as I felt dry in the mouth. I observed, without daring to turn my head, Eva Whippoorwill’s slender, beautiful legs, heard her admonitions, and blushed when I admired her ample chest area.

  For the first time in my young life I was on the way to falling in love.

  That the object of this storm of emotions—whose symptoms were mostly reminiscent of a serious case of stomach flu—was my almost thirty-years-older teacher meant that I was following in the footsteps of many young students. But this I knew nothing about, because I had not made it that far in the luxuriant flora of epic literature.

  When Miss Whippoorwill was through with her inspection, we sat down again, and she then spent the hour expounding at the blackboard on the various groups of muscles that she promised to develop in us during the coming year. I read scarcely a word of what she wrote. All I saw was her graceful neck and the shimmering red nuances of her beautiful, slender beak.

  The lump in my stomach sank deeper down in my body in a way that made me both nervous and jubilantly happy. The feeling was inexplicable, but when the lesson was over and Miss Whippoorwill left, I knew that I wanted to experience it again. I glanced furtively at Buzzard and Weasel to see if they realized what had happened—had they too been afflicted by this strange influenza? But they were on their way out the door as if this day was only another little cog in the perpetual motion machine that we still imagined life to be.

  I took my time. My friends were not unaccustomed to Mother keeping me behind in the classroom a few hours after the end of school. She had no natural aptitude for doing dishes or cleaning, and I gladly helped out.

  But not this day. I waited until I no longer heard my classmates, and then headed directly to the second floor. I knew exactly where I should go. From the windows in Mother and Father’s bedroom you could see right into the upper floor of Sven Beaver and Eva Whippoorwill’s house; I had known that for a long time. Sven Beaver liked watching TV in the evening; Father despised the bluish glow from the neighbor’s house. It disturbed him even when he closed the curtains.

  I was breathing heavily and dry in the mouth when I came into the bedroom. I had a single thought in my head: Eva Whippoorwill. Despite the fact that I had seen Miss Whippoorwill almost every day since I was little, despite the fact that she and her husband ate dinner at our house once a month, she had been transformed during a few magic moments into someone else. I too was changed beyond recognition. It was only when Mother amiably asked what I wanted that I realized I was not alone in the room. Blushing with shame, I fled. The marvelous, painful fever of being in love had taken possession of me, and—it was wonderful.

  Many years later I can imagine that my first, earthshaking passion must have taken nourishment from the mysterious shimmer that surrounded Eva Whippoorwill at that time. She was different from the other females in Das Vorschutz, and there were several reasons. She had a dialect that placed her in Mollisan Town’s southwest sections, somewhere in south Amberville, and the manner in which she pronounced the soft vowels had always fascinated me. She dressed in a more modern—and youthful—style than anyone else, and it even happened that she wore lipstick. But above all, in contrast to Buzzard’s, Weasel’s, and my own mother, Eva Whippoorwill was not anyone’s mom.

  The maturity and knowledge that experience grants to us stuffed animals with the years unfortunately replaces the razor-sharp intuition with which we are equipped when little. Without really understanding how or why, I had—despite my mere ten years—noticed the tragic aura that surrounded Eva Whippoorwill. I perceived the melancholy that was concealed in the corners of her eyes and heard the echoing desolation of her words, so unlike my own mother’s satisfied voice.

  Just as clear but unexpressed was how differently Eva Whippoorwill and her husband, Sven Beaver, lived compared to the other couples in Das Vorschutz. This had to do with the way in which they communicated, low and intensively, as if they held each other’s secrets close by and protected them. Jealousy burned in my chest. The other grown-ups in the forest always spoke about Eva and Sven in a special tone of voice. There was no envy, but perhaps a kind of reserved consideration that I could not properly interpret, despite the fact that I heard it.

  I was too little to understand that all this had to do with Eva Whippoorwill and Sven Beaver’s cublessness. In solidarity, the other forest guard families had supported Eva and Sven’s more and more resigned struggle against the authorities. Testimonials had been sent and references given, meetings had been arranged and Jonas Beaver had even been up at the Environmental Ministry—the authority that was responsible for the Cub List—to discuss the matter with the official in charge. But nothing sufficed.

  In time the rumors were born. That the ministry denied Eva Whippoorwill a cub, certain parties in the forest glade reasoned, must be due to something. What did we really know about Eva? Spiteful slander, of course, but I could even hear my own mother hint at how dark secrets from the female neighbor’s past had something to do with the matter.

  For a young, newly in love whippersnapper the thought of Eva Whippoorwill’s doubtful past was naturally a kind of icing on the cake. These fantasies occupied me while I waited for hours to catch a glimpse of her through the windows opposite. During the weeks that followed, I learned things about myself that would prove to be just as true twenty, thirty, and forty years later. I understand that the reader who is inclined in a more rational direction may think this confession a bit woeful. I am just as certain that the individual romantics who read me are nodding in concurrence. Besides, if I was not so fixated on Eva Whippoorwill, if I had not sought every occasion to see her and talk with her, I would never have stumbled across the preludes to the event that would come to change my life forever.

  Heimat
, the large lake in Das Vorschutz, was ten minutes northeast of the forest glade where we lived. Every morning my Eva Whippoorwill made her way there.

  Eva was an animal of habit; after a few weeks of reconnaissance I could affirm that she had constructed an entire life of routines. This suited me fine. I learned when I should slip up to Mother and Father’s bedroom to be able to see Eva sit down with a cup of tea and a book in her living room in the house opposite. I knew when she jogged in the evenings, and what route she took. And if I climbed up in one of the aspens behind the house where Buzzard Jones lived, I could see her fixing dinner in the kitchen.

  In the mornings I got up earlier than I ever had, dressed quickly, and, by the time it was getting cloudy, sneaked down the stairs and ran the whole way to Heimat. I made myself comfortable behind a large stone and awaited my beloved. Alongside the stone was an overturned majestic tree; judging by the moss, it must have fallen many years ago. The roots of the tree were perfect for spying through without being seen. I was ten years old, and neither understood nor cared about what drove me to this.

  Eva came walking on one of the larger paths. She walked almost the entire way up to the lake, but turned off right before the shoreline. For a few moments she disappeared out of my sight, then I saw how she was climbing up into the old willow tree. The branches extended longingly out over the glassy water of the lake, and when Eva had reached the forked branch where she would sit, she started to sing. Every morning for twenty-three days she followed the same routine, and at a distance of about fifty meters I lay listening to her. I could not hear what she sang, but it was the same song every morning. I have never in my adult life heard it again.