Translated by Vyt Bakaitis

 

1.

It was already summer, when we left Flensburg.

Sailboats filled the bay, and

out on the shoreline piers, over open water and the fishing boats

there was a shimmer of heat.

And once we'd made our way

out to Gluecksburg,

the children there were noisily splashing

in a thick-grown forest of reeds.

 

We felt the pull of distance.

War was just over, with its last

shells, its last bomb blasts

still echoing off the slopes. Past stations in rubble,

and gutted, charred little towns,

we kept moving on, pushing our way in

among women and children,

war prisoners and miserable soldiers

squatted down in muggy heat, slumped together

with the swarms of refugees

on grimy floors, with hunger and thirst

to stretch our hands out toward any well

or cup of water,

and snatch up tiny, under-ripe green apples

gritty and battered off railroad embankments,

or out of ditches below the tracks.

 

So, slowly, we pushed on that summer, laying in

at every train stop, beside each bridge,

trudging down blackened knolls and

out along narrow fieldpaths,

spending the nights on burned-out platforms

and charred tracks.

 

You remember. That time we were in Hanover,

sprawled out where the station had burned to the ground,

looking up at the bright nightsky that June,

hearing those heavy wornout ravings,

freightyard hoisting-cranes, the wrenching

sad city noises filled with uncertain steps,

with death and grief:

 

staring at a pale moonlit night

that felt so worn out, worked over, scorched

and shattered from what not long before had been the proud

the core and center of Europe.

 

With eyelids dropping, the feeling gone

from each nerve-end, we kept on pushing south that summer

through heavy rumblings, beyond exhaustion,

and each town, each horizon,

each trainstop along the way

gave off a lingering stench of death and smoke,

now with brokendown, burned-out tanks and fortified trenches,

highways blown up

and bomb craters midfield – deep hollows

staring back black death –

the only scrawny vague

surviving witnesses

under the first flowers of spring.

 

On and on we kept pushing

through towns in rubble, past wrecked horizons

with villages razed, acres of cannon and truck,

whole graveyards of steel,

and squads of an occupying army,

their painted guardrails around town squares glaring white.

 

So we pushed on

and saw people starved down to nothing

come out from under the broken brickwork, in clusters

up from the dust, in vivid stripes of concentration-camp inmates,

death-like, their hands shrunk to nothing,

the women and children surfacing in swarms.

 

And the war prisoners. Ringed in by shabby, grimy barracks

they sang in a pale haze under the sun, played cards

while waiting for the last trucks, freedom

bound, to take them home.

 

There was one young German soldier, still a child,

all of a child standing there

inside the burned-out Hanau station, staring at

the heaped up brick and stone, the skeletal steel,

treetrunk, smokestack and dirt charred the same overall black,

windows wrenched out of their frames, a meshwork

of iron and steel sagging down –

his childhood in shreds, all that was left of it.

Tears ran like water down his face,

just like water.

 

We had crossed salt-marshes up north, desolate fields,

black Ruhr Valley skylines,

to push farther south, through dense

midGerman towns. So that

now it was August, maybe only

the end of July – time went and faded out –

we found ourselves in Würzburg.

 

It was still morning, yet the air

flared a real summer flame.

All tired out, we stood on a platform

and stared at the stubs of masonry left,

the rolling hills, the gold

summer shimmer:

 

and felt this sudden urge

to go out in the fields!

It was the pull of summer, the burning Bavarian sky

and sunlight –

and taking what was left of our memories with us,

our pitifew packings for the trip (the towel

mother made us take, a scarf from our sister,

some snapshots now faded), we were

suddenly high up inside the orchards.

 

Now here we were months later, after all that death,

eyeing orchard slopes, trees,

and villas that hugged the hillsides,

not believing any of it yet,

still full of the road we'd gone, the swarm

of pounding noises.

And yet these apples, ripe and full, were not the charred

green apples from the railroad tracks.

This was Bavaria we were in.

 

Look, my brother was saying: how green

the fields and trees all around!

As we climbed on up to the top of the orchards

and walked the fields

half crazed, drinking in the smell of wild roses,

the shade of the orchards.

 

This was life reviving, in every

apple bough and vineslope.

And the people,

the grown girls, women in gaudy summer kerchiefs,

with wicker baskets full, ripe as orchards

alongside the men, making their way down into town.

 

Dizzy with summer blossoming,

all that vitality, that vineland fragrance,

we sat there on a hillside, looking down

the deep track the stream of the Neckar had carved, and out

past the ruins of Würzburg, reflecting

on the years of suffering, death and despair,

 

and marveled at the life coming back – each sign we saw of it –

and the earth's strength.

 

Under a burning Australian sky

lies my Regina's grave. Burned by the sun,

with hot sands and cool nights like hands

caressing, keeping it safe.

 

Sleep, and go on sleeping, under your skyblue eyes; not that

I'll get to see them again, any more than they'll ever see

our faraway childhood sky.

Still, I do keep them like two

tiny dew-beaded pearls.

 

That time we went together, one last time

across a flower-crested field, scanning

the hillsides for approaching rain,

then stopped in the doorway to a bokendown old house

and watched a bright green, rain-

washed field,

shiny with beads of rain, and listened

to the thunder rumbling, the rain hissing in

over the hills.

 

Your eyes of rain-washed field,

two beads of rain.

Maybe I really

should not have taken your hand that time.

Maybe not, after all. Hands join like roots,

and not just to uncover lives.

 

Sleep, under the wide span of a silk horizon,

and go on listening to that strange balmy wind

gusting in through forests, level sands and laketops,

all that way across briny high seas

and faraway islands --

still listening for that faraway echo of childhood,

the one voice your friends had in common --

while I keep on going, growing more and more remote.

 

And where, with your eyes open wide, so clear and child-like,

are you now, Marcele -- left behind as you were

in some small nameless town in central Germany --

and you, Vladas?

 

The time I met you two, that spring,

sunk in the teeming green at Wilhelmshöhe,

guiding each other along past the falls

on your way down a gushing hillside in spring,

watching the high water, branches on trees,

you held hands all the while.

 

And it never crossed my mind, not once,

not even the time a whole bunch of us went singing

through flowering midsummer fields,

along the pale Wiesbaden streets --

I never once even happened to think...

 

the gray Hessen sky,

all the pale little towns, would stay so entranced, listening

for the approaching laughter, those sweet

friendships...

 

that it was all one woven into you all beauty

and love and suffering sleep little one sleep

while I keep going on to make my rounds complete

 

Again I see that powerful broad stream, one non-

stop shimmer of colors

 

It was summer, that last time, I saw you

awash in sunlight, with bright rowboats

crawling slowly, singing and playing, past the islands,

bridges, castles hugging the slopes,

and everything shining back sunlit.

 

Now it's September, showing other colors.

The islands transparent, with leaves washed far out to sea,

cold foam breaks from the slow-plowing

dark tugboats,

their black shingled cabins spattered with rain,

smoke trailing into a cold, black streak

overhead.

 

With you the same old Rhine as ever, the wine

makes men sing up and down both shores, still the same

with long-haul sailors yelling down at grimy

toyboats, your birds

the same white hens perched on wooden

bridge-posts.

 

No matter that the bridges gave out

under the crush of marching feet, or that the city chimneys

turned solitary rigid scarecrows,

you stay the same, as dark, as powerful,

carrying timber and white blood.

 

Without our gazing at the Rhine that summer,

or crossing the bridge at Mainz, or letting ourselves go

in a fragrance of sunlight and roses down those vineslopes,

or making the Mainz-Kastel run on that tiny little train

with the basketloads of cherries and apples, white grapes

and yellow gold apricots;

somehow, without our being there, there'd be no trace of either

that summer or those days.

 

Still it is strange how happy a summer that one was for us.

Even its bleak phases, for all our standing around with food parcels

or soup tins, had a shining

off the slopes and orchards and townships;

even while hanging out wash in the yards, or scanning 

bulletins for the names of lost ones,

or grimly pacing the small squares

to track down each scrap of fresh news,

we kept a child's feeling for white Wiesbaden.

 

In going off to sit out a spell on some sun-drenched slope,

or down the banks to the Rhine to watch

the barges, down in that deep-carved track,

plod by under full loads of coal and timber

along the floodlit banks,

vinyards, bridges in rubble under water,

with the last war blasts

echoing off the slopes.

 

Even while sitting in some low, cool beerhall off the marketplace,

scanning notices posted on walls, taking the cool summer air

with a pale green Rhine wine -- hearing the farmhorses

and girls in clogs clop by over the cobbles

down narrow alleyways -- all the while drinking in 

a chestnut-and-apple smell.

 

Early that fall, midSeptember already,

with the rains just starting, we left Wiesbaden.

 

Mud was waiting for us, when we got to Kassel,

along with the white-washed wooden barracks, that autumn.

Trudging cold water, while the wind and rain

blew right through us, 

we patched cracks in the barrack walls,

gathered up rain-soaked alder sticks, 

and talked cold weather, mud, 

on-coming winter.

 

And it was not much later

the snow arrived,

fuming in over the Wilhelmshohe ridges and treelines.

 

Yet winter, even that one, passed; 

soon it was summer, then one more fall

coming on, as we watched the woods go under, out on the slopes,

while we stood by the trolleys, 

or with our skimpy pouches

waited in long lines for bread,

milk and vegetables, 

or tugged at carts the coal and alder-logs 

loaded down.

 

Past thrashing and screeching from a pond inside our compound,

where children splashed unsettled black water on each other,

we'd stroll the schoolhouse path

hand in hand, in pairs or clusters,

and passing the commissary along the way we'd hear

strokes from constant, on-going ping-pong inside,

the voices of Sipas and Tony,

old records, an accordion wheezing.

 

Sundays, we'd go roam the fields,

or just stand around, down by the gameyard,

to watch the men tossing a basketball

get worked up over each point,

or sit back inside our low-slung shed of a moviehall

to watch some cheap slapstick, and then

pour out shouting, the whole slew of us

flooding one hillside,

 

while down below in the Yugoslav hall

harmonicas played and the dancing went on, with

frog-croaks drifting above the fields and on through 

gardens where people wandered the hedgerows and bushes

as solitary dreamers

to look off toward a blazing shimmer of lights

in faraway Kassel and hear 

the trains go pounding by,

 

until one day, toward spring, the departures started.

Saying our good-byes, kissing each other

as old friends down the years, having shared the long haul,

one room, one fate,

we carried out our pitiful belongings,

our bits and relics,

and climbed up into the trucks to look back

from under the canvas top at friends who were to stay behind,

eyeing their small cluster,

the few faces there, people standing

lined up by the edge of the lot, already starting to fade back:

 

and listened for the last time

to the noises of the compound, and looked at the barracks,

that cloud of dust off the road a last cover

hanging back there, obscuring the years, 

the friends and the past, our shared memories: 

looked out from under the canvas, 

eyes steady, fixed on the road.

Reminiszenzen

Translated by Claudia Sinnig