The Rings of Saturn Read online

  The afternoon was well advanced when I reached Michael's house in the meadows on the outskirts of Middleton. I was grateful of the opportunity to rest in the peaceful garden after my wanderings on the heat, which now, in the telling, assumed an air of unreality. Michael had brought out a pot of tea from which there came the occasional puff of steam as from a toy engine. Otherwise, there was not the slightest movement, not even among the grey leaves of the willows in the field beyond the garden. We talked about the deserted, soundless month of August. For weeks, said Michael, there is not a bird to seen. It is as if everything was somehow hollowed out. Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavours to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. For days and weeks on end one racks one's brain to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life. Does one follow in Hölderlin's footsteps, simply because one's birthday happened to fall two days after his? Is that why one is tempted time and again to cast reason aside like an old coat, to sign one's poems and letters "your humble servant Scardanelli", and to keep unwelcome guests who come to stare at one at arm's length by addressing them as Your Excellency or Majesty? Does one begin to translate elegies at the age of fifteen or sixteen because one has been exiled from one's homeland? Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin's birth? For when I heard that one of the near islands was Patmos, I greatly desired there to be lodged, and there to approach the dark grotto. And did Hölderlin not dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one's own precursor? The fact that I first passed through British customs thirty-three years after Michael, that I am now thinking of giving up teaching as he did, that I am bent over my writing in Norfolk and he in Suffolk, that we both are distrustful of our work and both suffer from an allergy to alcohol—none of these things are particularly strange. But why it was that on my first visit to Michael's house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain. All I know is that I stood spellbound in his high-ceilinged studio room with its northfacing windows in front of the heavy mahogany bureau at which Michael said he no longer worked because the room was so cold, even in midsummer; and that, while we talked of the difficulty of

  heating old houses, a strange feeling came upon me, as if it were not he who had abandoned that place of work but I, as if the spectacles cases, letters and writing materials that had evidently lain untouched for months in the soft north light had once been my spectacle cases, my letters and my writing materials. In the porch that led to the garden, I felt again as if I or someone akin to me had long gone about his business there. The wicker baskets full of small twigs for kindling the fire, the polished white and pale grey stones, shells and other seashore finds mutely foregathered on the chest of drawers against the pale blue wall, the jiffy bags and packages stacked in a corner by the pantry door awaiting reuse, all seemed as if they were still-lifes created by my own hand. Peering into the pantry, which held a particular fascination for me, my eye

  was caught by several jars of preserved fruit that stood on the otherwise empty shelves and by a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of the window darkened by the yew tree outside. And as I looked on these apples which shone through the half-light much as the golden apples likened in Proverbs to a word fitly spoken, the quite outlandish thought crossed my mind that these things, the kindling, the jiffy bags, the fruit preserves, the seashells and the sound of the sea within them had all outlasted me, and that Michael was taking me round a house in which I myself had lived a long time ago. But thoughts of this kind are dispelled as speedily as they appear. At all events, I did not pursue them in the years that have passed since then, perhaps because it is not possible to pursue them without losing one's sanity. In view of this, I was all the more astonished, when recently I read Michael's memoirs again, to come across a name familiar to me from my time in Manchester, that of Stanley Kerry, which on first reading had eluded me for some reason. Michael relates at this point in his account how, in April 1944, nine months after he joined the Queen's Own Royal West Kent Regiment, he was transferred from Maidstone to Blackburn, Lancashire, where his battalion was quartered in a disused cotton mill. Not long after he arrived in Blackburn he was invited by a fellow soldier to spend Easter Monday at his home in Burnley, a town whose black cobbled streets, derelict factories, and zigzag rooftops of back-to-back houses outlined against the sky like dragons' teeth, made a more forlorn impression on him than anything he had so far seen in England. Curiously enough, twenty-two years later, when in the autumn of 1966 I came from Switzerland to England, my first outing, on All Souls' Day, together with a prospective secondary school teacher, was also to Burnley, or rather to the moors above Burnley. I can see us still, driving back down from the moor in the teacher's little red van, via Burnley and Blackburn to Manchester, as dusk was falling at about four in the afternoon. And not only did my first excursion from Manchester take me to Burnley, where Michael had been in 1944, but, moreover, the very Stanley Kerry with whom Michael made his trip was one of my first acquaintances in Manchester also. At the time when I took up my teaching post at Manchester university, Stanley Kerry must have been one of the longest-serving lecturers in the German department. He had something of a reputation for eccentricity, owing to his habit of keeping a distance from his colleagues and devoting most of his spare time to the study of the Japanese language. In this he was making astounding progress. When I arrived in Manchester, he had already begun practising his writing skills with brush and pen and would spend many hours in deep concentration drawing one character after another on immense sheets of paper. I recall now how he once said to me that one of the chief difficulties of writing consisted in thinking, with the tip of the pen, solely of the word to be written, whilst banishing from one's mind the reality of what one intends to describe. I remember also that when he made this observation, which applies to poets as well as to pupils in primary school, we were standing in the Japanese garden he had created at the back of his bungalow in Wythenshaw. Evening was drawing in. The banks of moss and the stones were beginning to grow darker, but in the last rays of the sunlight that fell through the leaves of the acers I could still see the lines left by a rake in the fine pebbles at our feet. Stanley, as always, was wearing a somewhat crumpled grey suit and brown suede shoes, and, as always when we talked to each other, he inclined as far as he could toward me with his whole body, not only in order to show his interest but also out of a punctilious courtesy. The leaning posture which he adopted recalled that of a man walking into the wind, or a ski jumper who has launched himself into the air. Talking to Stanley, one not uncommonly had the feeling that he came gliding down from on high. When he was listening, he would tilt his head to one side, smiling blissfully, but when he himself was speaking it was as though he were desperately struggling for breath. Often his face would contort into a grimace, the effort bringing beads of perspiration to his brow, and the words came from him in a spasmodic,
precipitate manner that betrayed severe inner turmoil and presaged, even then, that all too soon his heart would cease to beat. When I now think back to Stanley kerry, it seems incomprehensible that the paths of Michael's life and mine should have intersected in the person of that extraordinarily shy man, and that at the time we met him, in 1944 and in 1966 respectively, we were both twenty-two. No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of this kind occur far more than we suspect, since we all move, one after the other, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrases and gestures. The physical sensation closest to this feeling of repetition, which sometimes lasts for several minutes and can be quite disconcerting, is that of the peculiar numbness brought on by a heavy loss of blood, often resulting in a temporary inability to think, to speak or to move one's limbs, as though, without being aware of it, one had suffered a stroke. Perhaps there is in this as yet unexplained phenomenon of apparent duplication some kind of anticipation of the end, a venture into the void, a sort of disengagement, which, like a gramophone repeatedly playing the same sequence of notes, has less to do with damage to the machine itself than with an irreparable defect in its programme. Be that as it may, on that August afternoon at Michael's house I felt several times, either through exhaustion or for some other reason, that I was losing the ground from under my feet. When at last the time came for me to take my leave, Anne, who had been resting for an hour or so, entered my room and sat down with us. I cannot remember whether it was she who turned the conversation to the fact that nobody wears mourning any more, not even a black band on the sleeve or a black stud in the lapel. At all events, in that connection she told the story of a certain Mr Squirrel from Middleton who was almost of retirement age and who, as far as anyone knew, had never worn anything but mourning, not even as a young man before he was apprenticed to the undertaker in Westleton. Contrary to what his name suggests, said Anne, Mr Squirrel was not particularly spry or nimble. In fact he was a swarthy, ponderous giant of a man whom the undertaker presumably employed as pallbearer more for his physical strength than his propensity to mourn. In the village, Anne went on it was thought that Squirrel had no memory at all, and was quite unable to recall what had happened in his childhood, last year, last month or even last week. How he could therefore grieve for the dead was a puzzle to which no one knew the answer. Another foible of Squirrel's was that, despite his lack of a memory, he had always wanted to be an actor, ever since he was a boy, and had so persistently pestered the people in Middleton and other nearby villages who occasionally put on a play that in the end, when there was to be an open-air production of King Lear on Westleton Heath, he was given the part of the gentleman in the seventh scene of act four who, except for a line or two, remains silent throughout. Squirrel laboured a whole year at learning by heart those few lines, said Anne, which on the night he did indeed deliver most movingly, and to this day he repeats the one or other, whether the occasion suits or not, as I once discovered for myself when I said good morning to him and he replied in sonorous tones across the street: They say Edgar, his banish'd son, is with the Earl of kent in Germany. Shortly after Anne had finished her story, I asked her to call a taxi for me. When she returned from making the call, she said that, as she replaced the receiver, the dream she had had just before she awoke from her afternoon nap came back to her. We were all three in Norwich, she said, and, because Michael still had appointments to keep, I had ordered a taxi for her. When it drove up it proved to be a large, gleaming limousine. I held the door open for her and she climbed into the back. Without a sound the limousine began to move, and, before she had settled herself, she was out of the town and surrounded by an immense forest, shot through by rays of sunlight, which extended over many miles all the way down to the Middleton house. At an even speed that could neither be said to be fast nor slow we travelled along a soft, gently curving track. The atmosphere through which the car moved was denser than air and somewhat resembled streaming currents of deep, silent water. She saw the forest, Anne said, with absolute clarity and in meticulous detail impossible to put into words, as it slid past outside: the tiny fruit capsules on stems protruding from patches and cushions of moss, the hair-thin grass stalks, the quivering ferns and the upright grey and brown, smooth or rough-barked trunks of trees that were lost a few yards up amidst the impenetrable leafage of the evergreens growing amongst them. Higher still were clusters of mistletoe, mimosa and lobelia, and cascading down into them from the next level of this luxuriant forest realm, in clouds of snow-white or pink, were hundreds of flowering plants and lianas from branches that reached out like the yard arms of great sailing ships, festooned with bromeliads and orchids. And above these, at a height the eye could hardly attain, the tops of palms swayed to and fro, their delicate, feathery, fan-shaped fronds of that unfathomable green which seems underlaid with burnished brass and which Leonardo used for the crowns of his trees, in the Annunciation, for instance, or the portrait of Ginevra de Benci. I have only an indistinct notion of how beautiful it all was, said Anne, nor can I properly describe now the feeling of being driven in that limousine that appeared to have no one at the wheel. It was not really like driving at all, it was more like floating, in a way I have not experience since my childhood, when I was able to hover a few inches above the ground. As Anne was talking, we had walked out together into the garden, where night had already fallen. We waited for the taxi beside the Hölderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.