The Search for Heinrich Schlögel Read online

  Truth is a pathless land. . . . In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind. . . . It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. . . . Knowledge is always in the shadow of ignorance. . . . Meditation is freedom from thought and a movement in the ecstasy of truth. Meditation is the explosion of intelligence.

  In these ideas she found strength and comfort, as she did in the fragrant yet unruly lupins and foxgloves, common poppies, field speedwell and bush vetch of her unbridled “English” garden—her horticultural act of rebellion, her discreet refusal to succumb to the carefully arranged narrowness of Tettnang.

  Though Inge claimed to be skilled at ignoring what did not interest her, she could feel everyone’s eyes watching her.

  Her mother’s eyes asked: From where have you acquired such independence and discipline? Why Hungarian? How is it your brother so adores you? How does it feel to be truly loved?

  Her father’s reprimanding gaze inquired: What use do you intend to make of your intelligence? How do you plan to cure a society given over to mental rot and flatulent ethics? Are you aware that the future is yours to determine?

  To Heinrich she confessed, “Sometimes, if I pass Papa’s study, I can hear the tapping sound he makes with his pencil on his desk when he’s frustrated. It gets louder and louder. At school I hear the sound of chalk—how easily it snaps when pressed too hard. In the garden I hear the hedgehogs scuttling away, in fear. And I can’t stop any of these sounds. Everyone wants something from me.”

  To Heinrich she confided, “If Mama asks one more time if I’m all right . . . You don’t know how lucky you are. She follows me around. She watches me. I start scratching at my skin. I can’t help it.”

  Heinrich continued to read about animals.

  The whale does not use its ears for most of its hearing but its lower lip, which is tapered and allows a more focused collection of information in the form of sound waves. This data travels from the back of the lip to the inner ear by means of a string. The sound waves that enter by the ear are too diffuse to allow the whale to form the precise pictures that constitute its principal source of vision. In matters of seeing, the whale relies even less on its eyes than its ears, and would be ostensibly blind were it not for its lower lip.

  —Amazing Mammals of the Deep

  A classmate showed Heinrich a book filled with X-rays. They were of women’s breasts. The classmate, whose father was a doctor, explained how these pictures had been taken.6 A woman, when instructed to do so, placed her breast on a metal shelf while a second shelf was lowered from above until it pressed the woman’s flesh flat as a pancake so the camera could make a good image. Some women cried out in pain. Others made no sound. Heinrich wondered how long these breasts retained their flatness. He wanted to know how long the hurting continued. And was it more or less painful than having your arm twisted behind your back? But his friend was unable to answer his questions. While Heinrich stared at the photos of squashed gray breasts full of white roots and pale blotches, he felt a curious light-headedness. He imagined his penis resting on a metal shelf and a second shelf descending from above, coming closer and closer. “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested. “Let’s ride to Friedrichshafen.”

  At fifteen, what was Heinrich’s relationship to time? Did he think that, if he rode fast enough on his bicycle, he might escape, and from what?

  The breasts of the girl who worked on Tuesdays and Saturdays at the Urbach Bakery pressed roundly, eagerly against the white cloth of her blouse. Her breasts filled Heinrich’s vision, as if he were at the movies and seated in the front row. No one else having come to see the film, he was alone, except for her breasts, which pushed forward, mute yet hopeful. He did not know her name but she had a pretty smile. What interested him was the secret life that her breasts lived inside the confines of her blouse, a life of soft heaviness, of curved smoothness and pliancy. He could not reach out and touch them. He could only watch them rise and fall to the rhythm of her breathing while she handed him his change.

  Heinrich continued to read about animals, and the only trouble with reading about animals was that it didn’t take much intelligence, or so Heinrich believed. It was pleasurable, reassuring, and therefore suspect. He couldn’t stop himself. He read about animals indiscriminately and in secret, ashamed of his uncontrollable fascination:

  The skeletons you see before you were removed from mummified animals collected by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, one of 150 scientists and other learned men to accompany Bonaparte on his Egyptian campaign. A cat, dog, falcon, ibis, gazelle, and bull—these two-thousand- to three-thousand-year-old skeletons, brought back to Paris by Saint-Hilaire, bore such perfect resemblance to the skeletons of contemporary cats, dogs, falcons, gazelles, ibis, and bulls that they fanned the debate between Cuvier, who believed in fixity, and Lamarck, who defended transformation.

  —An Illustrated Tour of the Paris Museum of Natural History

  There were moments when Heinrich imagined that he was being supported by a huge hand, and that from his perch on the broad palm of this enormous and benign hand he could see in all directions, so that time no longer frightened him. Were a great gust of wind to blow him over the edge, he’d fall willingly, feeling content to have gazed in all directions at once.

  One thousand three hundred and sixteen acres of potato fields to be destroyed, and a hole to be dug deeper than Niagara Falls. Streams running dry, trucks hauling gravel to market, to market, to market. To free my mind of these images I am allowing Heinrich Schlögel to occupy an increasingly large portion of my thoughts.7

  Almost daily, I take Inge’s letter from my archive and examine it.

  “Heinrich, my younger brother, had a different temperament from mine, yet we were very close. Should I use the past tense when I speak of him? Will any of us ever see him again? I am choosing the present tense: he has a different temperament from mine, yet we are very close.”

  I should not subject such a delicate document as Inge’s letter to too much handling. I ought to scan it, render it eternal. I could create an e-archive. Tomorrow I’ll bring her letter to work and scan it. Nearly two years of effort and still I can neither make sense of nor dismiss Heinrich’s extraordinary experiences. If he and I were to meet, tomorrow, on the corner of College and University, right where I emerge most mornings from the subway to wait for the streetcar that eventually drops me at the door of Sterling and Schubert: Architects, I expect he himself would be incapable of explaining what really happened to him.

  But it’s absurd of me to feel that Heinrich is mine, to fantasize that if we met he might reciprocate my feelings of affection and admiration. I am a stranger.

  Tomorrow, I’ll take Inge’s letter to work and scan it. Perhaps I’ll even post it on some social media site. So far I’ve not come across anyone else who is visibly searching for Heinrich; no Schlögel blogs or Facebook page appear to exist.

  4 In his journal Heinrich mentions an article on honeybees losing their memories when exposed to pesticides—every nerve in my fingertips told me that this was the correct article, as I lifted it from the pile of papers I’d just purchased.

  5 During the worst years of tension between my own father and me, when I urgently questioned him about the war and, like Heinrich, collided with silence, my mother suffered from a virulent rash, which spread the length of her arms. Would my influence over my mother have been less, and my responsibility less, had I had a brother or sister? I often think how different my life would have been, had I had a sibling.

  6 My own father was a doctor, his specialty the human bowel. A spry man with a gracious sense of humor, he spent his working hours bending to probe and to stare into the anuses of men and women alike. My mother was an urban transport engineer. In the institutions where they worked, both were known for their energy and skill. Liquor, fine food, social chatter, and cards—to these they also brought talent and fluidity. A flawless duo, they frustrated and exhausted me. I inherited no
ne of their ease.

  7 Just as Heinrich did, I came to Canada hoping to discover a pristine wilderness. Having arrived in Toronto, I caught a bus north, and spent three days wandering about the mining town of Kirkland Lake. Beyond the town, forest spread in all directions. I caught a bus back to Toronto.

  3

  A Language of Uncertainty

  Cycling thrilled Heinrich. When sailing down a long hill on a bicycle little else mattered. Cycling convinced him that his father was wrong. Freedom could be experienced by other means than thought.

  For his sixteenth birthday, Heinrich received money. Every weekend, without fail, he cycled ten to fifteen kilometers out of Tettnang into a rolling landscape of carefully arranged fields and paths, of sharp steeples and blossoming orchards, and the same distance back. One brilliant afternoon as he was leaving town, a camera, displayed in the window of a store, caught his eye. He brought his bicycle to a halt. A small sign hanging above the camera asked, WHO ARE YOU? And below the camera a second sign answered, A PHOTOGRAPHER!

  He went into the store and bought the camera. He’d intended to spend his birthday money on a new set of panniers for his bicycle, a better air pump, an adjustable wrench, and other important items. He took the camera home and hid it.

  A week later, his first attempts included the following:

  1.Urinal (public but clean)

  2.Pair of tennis shoes tossed into the naked branches of a tree

  3.Elongated potato resting in a metal bowl

  4.Two tractors facing each other on a road

  5.Self-portrait, eyes closed

  Over time, Heinrich noticed that his photographs were becoming beautiful, and this frightened him, so again he put his camera away. Certain scenes, however, demanded his attention. He brought out his camera, once more moved it an inch to the left, or to the right, tipped it the tiniest bit, and waited for the light’s perfect utterance. He took more and more pictures. He could not stop himself. Their beauty fascinated and repelled him. He could not bear too much beauty. Beauty brought his mother into the picture. She slipped herself between the lens and the object poised to express itself. The object went silent, replaced by his mother’s lips. Lips that offered a suggestion of a smile, a hint that he might be the cause of something.

  Inge’s journals from the 1970s, those that I’ve managed to obtain, contain mostly blank pages. In a rare entry, dated April 15, 1976, she wrote:

  “I don’t think Heinrich entirely believes me when I explain to him that I don’t want a reputation, that I don’t like to feel people’s opinions stuck to my skin.”

  Below this she inscribed a fragment of conversation, likely between herself and Heinrich:

  “They don’t know me. Nothing entitles them to plan my future. I won’t become a diplomat, and I won’t become an interpreter.”

  “Who doesn’t know you? Who are they?”

  “They are they.”

  Inge couldn’t bear their fingerprints on her passion. She could feel their hot, inquisitive breath all over her ability. Their whimpering, envious admiration disgusted her. They could have done as she did, shut themselves in a room and studied and studied and studied, but they were unwilling to pay the price. Heinrich, she knew, also coveted her focus and discipline. Unlike them, however, he loved her. When he spoke to her, when he looked at her, she almost believed in her own existence, that she was perhaps a worthwhile experiment. Heinrich and the rules of various grammars—these protected her. She was nearly safe from herself.

  One afternoon, Helene asked, “Are you hurt?”

  “I fell,” Inge answered, counting on the anger in her voice to silence her mother, which it did.

  When Helene left the room, Heinrich stepped forward.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  She told him: animals. When she thought of animals—of hens crammed into coops, dogs used as ashtrays, cats and rabbits put to the test—her body became obscene. She dug out the obscenity using a razor or a broken bit of glass. Skin, after all, was just another lie, a veneer of continuity, a clever bit of packaging. She had so much blood inside her. When she cut through her skin, her blood flowed unobstructed. It tasted of salt, like the sea, and belonged to a larger rhythm. To no longer be sewn into a sausage casing of tight-fitting lies.

  If she ceased to exist, Heinrich would remain. He could comfort and satisfy them. She was not interested in their silly notions of success. He could do the talking, the traveling, send reports to those who worried and needed to know and felt they had a right to know. Could she count on Heinrich to satisfy them? Was he willing?

  Several weeks after learning the source of the scars on his sister’s arms, Heinrich asked to take a picture of her. Inge refused. He snapped her anyway. She turned her back on him. He snapped her again. He cycled out of town, photographed a hedgehog, and was overcome by remorse.

  In the gymnasium library, without warning, Inge came upon a language learning kit, or rather it came upon her: a rectangular, transparent plastic bag, containing six cassette tapes, a dictionary, a grammar and exercise book, all succinctly titled in English: Inuktitut for Beginners. How had she never seen this before?

  From that day onward, the kit claimed all her spare time. She stopped carving marks in her skin. Inuktitut did not feature in the gymnasium’s curriculum, and, needless to say, in Tettnang not one single person spoke Inuktitut. There was no reason for the gymnasium’s library to possess such a language learning kit, and Inge did not intend to return it.

  She played the cassettes repeatedly. Her room became a throat. Inuktitut was a language held in, uttered not from the front of the mouth but the back of the throat, a speech that used up as little air as possible. She added a place, a person, a question—each additional affix stretched a word longer and longer until it broke off and a new word began:

  Qangatasuukkuuimmuuriaqalaaqtunga: I’ll have to go to the airport.

  Root, morpheme, suffix. Taking words apart delighted her. She snapped words into units so small they could not be broken any smaller. She collected lexemes, separating out the lemmas.

  The affix -qatau-

  This simple affix indicates that someone is going along or accompanying someone on an activity:

  Umiaqtuqtuq: She goes boating.

  Umiaqtuqataujunga: I am going along on the boat ride.

  tuttu + liaq + qatau + juq = tuttuliaqataujuq: He goes along on the caribou hunting trip.

  One morpheme drawing another to it, a lexical stickiness, an agglutination that could pass for inevitability, a form of desire she needn’t fear.

  It was also a language of uncertainty: If it snows, if we survive, if there is food, if the fishing, if the caribou herds, then we will meet again.

  If: In this lesson we look at affixes that are used in Inuktitut for the idea of “if.”

  Uqaalaguvit, qailangajunga: If you call, I will come.

  Heinrich stood in the hallway and listened to the tape playing its meaningless sounds over and over. He heard Inge’s chair scrape. He watched the light escaping from under her door and wished he could stop himself from envying her. He couldn’t. What he desired most, in those moments when he stood outside her door, was to please her or else to be free of her. He did not want to save her. He did not want her to become like other people.

  “Here,” said Inge, handing Heinrich a voluminous book wrapped in a blue dust jacket. “You should read this.”

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and she’d come down the hall to find him, bringing with her Samuel Hearne’s Reise vom Fort Prinz Wallis in der Hudsonsbay nach dem nordlichen Weltmeer (A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean).8 Heinrich closed his door, sat down on the floor beside his bed, opened the book, and read:

  On the fifth [July 5, 1771], as the weather was so bad, with constant snow, sleet, and rain, that we could not see our way, we did not offer to move: but the sixth proving moderate, and quite fair till toward noon, we set out in the morning and walked abou
t eleven miles to the North West; when perceiving bad weather at hand, we began to look out for shelter among the rocks, as we had done the four preceding nights, having neither tents nor tentpoles with us. . . . We had no sooner entered our places of retreat, than we regaled ourselves with some raw venison which the Indians had killed that morning; the small stock of dried provisions we took with us when we left the women being now all expended.

  The journal of a twenty-four-year-old Englishman, a sailor who left the sea and walked for months on end across harsh and desolate tracts of land, heading farther and farther north, hired by the Hudson’s Bay Company to search for copper and also to prove the nonexistence of a navigable Northwest passage—this is what Inge had brought him. Did Inge want him to go there? Did she believe that he possessed courage comparable to that of Samuel Hearne? The weather would be fierce but there would be an abundance of animals. How many of them would he have to kill, and how often? Could he bring himself to eat the raw flesh of a deer? Inge would not want to go with him. She would have no desire whatsoever to set foot in the Far North of Canada, detesting as she did the cold.

  Who, Heinrich asked, turning the pages of Samuel Hearne’s diary, is Heinrich Schlögel?

  8 As soon as I realized its influence upon Heinrich, I borrowed and devoured Hearne’s journal in English (the Toronto Public Library owns three circulating copies), but later, wanting to read the exact German words that had gotten under Heinrich’s skin, I sat in the Baldwin Room of the main branch and pored over the two German editions owned by the library. Both were published in 1779, one in Berlin and the other in Halle, and contain only extracts. I turned the pages slowly, carefully.