Understories. Tim Horvath

arrived in Delagotha, how I longed for those distances, their quaint assimilations of glass. Immediately past her gates, I was accosted by stacks of marketplaces where smaller marketplaces were for sale, themselves selling nothing other than still-smaller marketplaces. This regress wasn’t infinite—sure, it took many purchases, but eventually you’d arrive at the “atoms”—the goods—and you’d tremble at the prospect of dropping one and losing it forever.

      All the while, getters, the closest thing the city had to beggars, moved hither and thither with the compulsive synchronicity of zebra finches or a crew team at break of day. They bounded off one another’s shoulders in a choreography of beguilingsignals. Finally, I just asked one what it all meant. It was not what was said, he insisted, turning his stubble-ridden face aside as if speaking to someone beyond me. No, it was what was on their breath when they spoke that delineated meaning. That depended largely on what they’d eaten most recently, which hinged, in turn, on what had tumbled their way—thrice-scorched crescent breads, globules of the sweet balm gondoliers slather on their cankers, the cankers themselves, and, for the luckiest only, the city’s famed tomatoes, in which succulent pulp and ceramic likeness lie spooning like lovers.

      Like a kid with a new decoder ring, I boarded one of Delagotha’s octens of rails, which plunge, capillarylike, improvising their routes as they go, bearing passengers to destinations that they’ll be convinced in retrospect they’ve chosen. So it was breath and odors I should attend to. I sniffed, hoping for caramel but bracing for something fetid. Nothing—smell reduced to a nullity. Instead, socketed into a sheer mesh of interlocking elbows, I felt the skin of my fellow commuters, a blind man’s brothel of textures that mocked endings and beginnings like objects of a misplaced nostalgia.

      It was then that I first noticed the assembly of musicians who’d begun to jostle the crowd at its fringes. I tried to observe them. Their musical extrusions acted like they were sentient, jostling for attention and dominance. Some performers spewed their notes into the fray, as if trying to edge out those emanating from their fellow musicians. Others stacked chords and arpeggios, forging walls and stairways for other notes to climb on. Still others dispatched castanet shoes that tripped notes but somehow left passengers standing. I wanted to plug my ears. I worked my hand upward through the thicket of limbs, but a G7 chord slapped it away, taking down my glasses, too. I groped, but I couldn’t even get near the floor, where, unless a getter had snagged them in midair, they must have tumbled.

      I was mystified, as I would be those early weeks. How was it that no one in Delagotha complained about these suffocating crowds, this steady bombardment, this all-at-onceness? How could a place persist under such conditions? Why didn’t its citizens unite their voices and demand respites—parks, plazas, sound-swallowing walls? And yet I was stunned at how easily and smoothly I was able to get along without the glasses, girded by the flesh of those around me. Slowly, eventually, it started to dawn on me: five senses was madness, four mild insanity, three delusion, two wrongheadedness, and one, quite simply, ideal. In Delagotha, they’d learned to burrow into a single sense at a time, dwelling utterly there, and thus treading calmly and rationally amidst pandemonium.

The Understory

      Anyone but Lear, Schöner thinks. He hobbles across the pebbled path, toward the periphery of the woods, where he can still plant the walker almost flat. On he goes, “Let not . . . to true mind’s marriages . . . admit . . . impediments.” Even as he pitches himself forward on hard end consonants, he senses the quote is off: the right author but the wrong words, the right words, the wrong play, maybe not even a play. Not only wrong but ironically wrong. Anyone but Lear, he has vowed for a long time, and he is none other.

      As he pauses to survey the woods, he feels them staring back, judging, rejecting his desire for entrance. Like he is some illegal, trying to cross a border without the proper papers. The sun catches him as he curses the wood that he wants to be in. This is the most devastating part of age, he thinks. He can laugh at slipshod memory along with the others, the misplaced glasses and pills. The hearing aid is no picnic, but he does not miss the birds nearly as much as the trees they sit in. Aches and pains are jarring, but there are medication and sleep for such things.

      He can even deal with the way objects double and then vanish like sea lions bobbing at the ocean’s surface—all of these are compromises he can come to terms with and has. But to be repudiated by the woods, his woods—this is intolerable. Of course, he must recognize that the walker (an overly optimistic name, he thinks) cannot possibly commandeer the undergrowth, the splay of fallen wood overgrown with moss and fungus, the tip-up mounds with sideways roots that permeate the plot. From here, he can almost enter in memory. Every inch of the plot is stored somewhere in his brain. Even now, he can taste rampant leaf litter, inhale the ground’s rank riches. Mosquitoes left him alone. Maybe he scrambled their signals. Whatever the reason for their aloofness, their indifference to him afforded him many hours in the woods alone.

      But he won’t be alone for long now. In a matter of hours, he will see the blue Subaru hatchback pull up, carrying his daughter and Alan. That assortment alone makes it radically different from Lear’s situation—not three sisters vying for land, and affection in the form of land, but merely one daughter and her husband. He breathes relief at the divergence. They will try to convince him, again, as they used to do every few years, as they now do more insistently, less obliquely, to clear out the fallen debris, to clean up that forest. They love the woods, they insist, but the plot is a mess. “A rain forest,” his daughter, Sabine, calls it, “in the middle of Peterborough, New Hampshire.”

      He jokes that if they can find an anaconda there, they can have the woods, do with them what they will. Raise cattle. Put in a roller coaster. Sell the land to the “developers” who wait like pitcher plants for their prey to stumble in.

      Sabine insists that developing the land is not what they want. “We want to be able to walk to the lake on the property. Imagine if we could do that. We could hire someone to carve a trail through there. I’ve already gotten an estimate—a local guy who loves this area, not some tree-hating jerk. And then we could walk to sit by the lake. Our kids could, and your great-grandkids, whenever they arrive. And we won’t have to exploit the McElroys from Rhode Island and wait for invitations to go out on their boat.”

      He is familiar with the arguments. And not necessarily opposed, at least not to the principle behind them. He has nothing against boats and lakes to cool down in in midsummer heat, and trails to access those lakes.

      But he will wait it out until they drag out that anaconda. Will not submit to the desire to clean up the woods, to haul away the degenerating matter that trips one up at every turn. It is not purity that he is after; on the contrary, it is precisely the lack of purity on which he insists.

      In the spring of 1930, he is honored with the venia legendi, followed swiftly by an appointment as Privatdozent on the faculty of Botanical Sciences at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. He is twenty-four. He is euphoric upon learning of his position. Suddenly he is a peer of his own teachers. But more importantly, Freiburg abuts the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald, and yet it is a big city, too, so much more colorful and stately than the small village in which he was raised. He is further honored with an office in a building dating from the 1700s. Then again, in this university, which goes back to medieval times, this does not even qualify as the Alte Universität.

      But it would be more accurate to call the woods both his office and his classroom. Though he is expected to do research, and it is clear that he had better be seen hunched over his library carrel from time to time, the head of his department supports his idea to take the students out into the woods, their notebooks poised to sketch out the leaves, trunks. He makes them draw, damnit, makes them see. Some drop out, and that is precisely the way he wants it. For soon he makes them learn a good deal of Latin, insistent that they not only know everyday German terms. “That’s Fagus sylvatica. Over there, Picas abies,” he says. “You must be able to speak of the trees in