Arrows In The Fog

“How much time do you have?” asked Bärger. Jürgen never had any time. Every telephone conversation ended with a promise that they really had to get together for a long uninterrupted conversation.

Against expectation, Jürgen didn’t look at his watch.

“It depends on what you have in mind – the day is almost over anyway.”

“If you want, I’ll paint your bamboo for you.”

Jürgen looked at him dubiously. “Now? How long will it take?”

Bärger shrugged his shoulders. “A half hour. Maybe not that long – if we don’t count the preparation of the paper and the ink.”

“Then why did you make your second-best friend wait for it for over a year?”

“Do you know the story of how a famous painter made the emperor of China wait for more than a year for a picture of a rooster?”

They went into the next room and, while Bärger began his preparations, he told the story of the painter who had made the emperor of China wait.

The emperor of China, they say, had heard of the master’s great skill. At that time, it was a special honor to receive a commission for a picture from the emperor. The emperor expected that his commission, which wasn’t very different from an imperial order, would be carried out immediately. That didn’t happen. After several weeks, the emperor sent one of his officials to demand the delivery of the picture, but the painter informed him that he needed more time.

When the painting hadn’t been completed after several months, the emperor sent one his ministers to emphasize the urgency of his imperial wishes. Once again, the painter said that he needed more time.

After half a year, the emperor was so angry with the painter that he ordered him to be brought before him to be executed.

This time, the painter invited the emperor’s messenger into his studio, placed a piece of rice paper on a table, prepared his ink, and right before the messenger’s eyes, painted a picture of a rooster in a few minutes that was so life-like, the messenger almost expected to hear it crow.

The emperor’s messenger rolled up the painting that the painter handed him and, as a few minutes no longer mattered, they drank a cup of tea together.

Then the messenger asked why the painter had made the emperor wait half a year for a painting that he could do in a couple of minutes.

The painter answered that he had never had so little time for a painting.

From morning to night, he had done nothing but watch roosters; how they moved when they crowed, when they ate and drank, when they fought, and when they slept.

He did this, he said, until he understood the essence of a rooster as thoroughly as if he had been one himself. Only then, and not one minute sooner, was he able to paint a picture of a rooster worthy of an emperor.

7

They went into the next room.

Bärger’s drawing table was directly in front of a north-facing window that reached from floor to ceiling. He picked up a pile of journals and project folders carelessly, placed then on the floor and then, pushed them under the bed in the corner of the room with his foot.

Jürgen grinned.

“A place for everything,” he said.

Bärger didn’t answer him. He pulled a rolled-up white felt mat out of a cupboard, placed it on the surface of the low drawing table and carefully flattened it. On closer inspection, the felt mat was more gray than white and showed irregular spots ranging from light gray to black. The spots were concentrated on the right side.

He took a flat covered dish from a mobile office cabinet behind him. The dish was black with a dull surface and fine even grain. It reminded Jürgen of a sharpening stone, but the round shape wasn’t right for that. Bärger put the round dish on the table at the place where the spots were thickest.

Next he produced a white porcelain plate with a broad, flat rim. Remnants of dried ink had formed streaky patterns on the bottom with deep black edges, which looked like a thin network of roots. A disorderly meshed pattern of intersecting brush strokes covered the rim of the plate. Bärger placed the plate on the felt mat next to the black abrasive dish.

Carefully, from the bookshelf behind him, he took a cup-shaped bamboo container in which rattled a good dozen brushes of different sizes. Even the brush handles were of bamboo, spotted black from use. The brush hair was either brownish or white, but mostly the color of the felt mat; light gray from long use. Some were short like watercolor brushes; some were thin and almost the length of a finger, others short and thick.

Now Bärger took a flat wooden case the size of a cigar box from the mobile cabinet. When he opened the lid, Jürgen saw a collection of black ink bars, some new, some used. Some were the size and shape of certain brands of granola bars, other were smaller. Most bore stamped labels in relief or gold colored letters. Jürgen thought that he detected a weak pine scent.

The large jam jar full of water, placed next to the plate on the right side of the table, seemed almost trivial amid all these exotic things.

Bärger inspected the working area spread out in front of him and seemed satisfied. He went to another cabinet with three shallow drawers in its lower section, opened the top drawer and, after brief consideration, took a sheet from one of two piles of different size paper.

The sheet seemed to be twice as long as it was wide, and when he placed it lengthwise on the felt mat, it reached all the way back to the top of the working space. He weighed down the top and bottom edges of the sheet with bronze castings of a bamboo shoot.

Unnoticed by Bärger, Jürgen had gone back into the living room. He poured himself another glass of wine and returned with one of the folding armchairs. He set it up behind Bärger, not too close, but where he could watch the sheet of paper spread out on the drawing table. He sat down silently with a feeling that he should no longer interrupt.

In the meantime, the evening twilight had grown darker and Bärger turned on the drawing lamp over the table. Both men blinked for a moment when the lamp threw a bright circle on the light surface and at the same time the pale traces of the last of the daylight vanished from the window, now an unrelieved black.

For a while, nothing happened.

Bärger seemed to be looking at the calligraphic inscription that hung above his working area. There were four large black symbols under each other, heavy black on coarse paper, painted very hastily with a broad brush; or so it seemed to Jürgen. But Bärger wasn’t really looking at the symbols, but at something else, something somewhere beyond them.

Jürgen cleared his throat carefully.

Then he asked, “Is that really rice paper?”

Bärger didn’t seem to hear him. He didn’t answer, but instead took one of the white brushes from the bamboo cup and used it to drip a little water into the round, black dish in front of him. He picked up a bar of ink and, holding it in his fist like a knife, began to rub the ink, applying considerable force. He rubbed it in steady circular motions, occasionally adding a little water. The bottom of the dish began to fill with a dark black, shiny ink, and a strong pine scent spread through the room.

Finally, Bärger seemed to have enough. He placed the ink bar to one side, carefully selected a brush with long brownish hair and dipped it deeply into the jar full of water. Then he squeezed out the water over the plate with his thumb and forefinger, and dipped the now almost dry brush into the ink dish and let a couple of drops fall onto the plate.

Slowly, carefully, and using only the point of the brush, he mixed the water and ink. The glistening grey color of a storm cloud spread across the bottom of the plate. He added a little water once, which lightened the gray unnoticeably. Finally, after drawing some quick lines on a small sample piece of rice paper, he seemed to be satisfied. Then he turned back to the piece of paper in front of him.

Jürgen watched him carefully.

Bärger seemed to be totally focused and at the same time completely relaxed. He projected a feeling of immense confidence as he sat, the right elbow supported on the table, the brush loose in his hand. It seemed as if he were waiting for a signal that would be given to him by the blank sheet of paper.

Abruptly, Bärger dipped the brush in the water jar and lightly drew it down a linen cloth, which had been folded several times, to remove excess water. Then he rolled the brush across the flat rim of the plate with a circular motion to pick up a little of the rain cloud gray ink mixture. Finally, he dipped the point of the brush into the shiny black in the rubbing dish.

Near the lower left corner, he angled his brush across the paper and, holding it this way, moved it perhaps a hand-breath toward the top.

Jürgen was fascinated. It was one brush stroke, painted in a fraction of a second. But even so, he now saw the stem of a strong bamboo stem, so clearly that he felt he could touch it. The clear line had a dark shadowy edge, fading gradually away, and was lightest in the middle of the brushstroke and a little darker on the opposite edge. The rapid stroke had left a couple of long white streaks, like streaks of light falling on the stem of the bamboo. At its beginning and end, the brush stroke that had become a bamboo shoot thickened slightly to show the places where there were knots.

Without hesitation, Bärger applied his brush a second time, a little above the knot, and without touching the first stroke. He repeated this rapid motion a second, third, and fourth time, interrupted by carefully refilling the brush point, until the fifth and last stroke came to an obvious end toward the top of the sheet of paper.

Only now did Jürgen see that the brush strokes were not the same, but each stage was longer than the one below it, while at the same time, they seemed to become narrower. The line was not straight but was inclined slightly toward the right.

Bärger filled his brush again: dip in water, squeeze, take thinned ink from the rim of the plate, concentrated ink from the rubbing dish. On the picture, a second bamboo shoot rapidly grew right next to the first; a little more slender, and bending a little more to the right. This one also appeared to growing upward through the top of the painting.

The third was even more slender, placed next to the other two but a hand breadth further to the left, bent so strongly that it was covered by the other two as their stems crossed in the upper third of the picture, and then it reappeared behind them.

Bärger sat back to examine the picture. Quite obviously, it wasn’t even partially finished and yet, even at this phase, it already seemed to be a harmonious picture, full of tension and life.

Bärger rinsed out the brush in the water jar, dried it with the linen cloth and dipped it once again in the black ink in the rubbing dish, which had noticeably diminished.

He began to draw heavy jagged broken lines from the center of the picture toward the lower right edge. The shape of a cliff, or rather a large slender stone, leaning into the picture toward the left, seeming to grow gradually from the ground. The side of the almost dry brush wiped rough scratches in a seemingly hard surface. Now the three bamboo shoots stood in front of a stone, which seemed to have emerged at their feet.

Once again Bärger washed out his brush and wiped it dry.

While he had been painting the stone, the brush strokes of the bamboo had dried and become a little lighter. He dipped the point of the brush into the unthinned ink and now painted the knots in the same sequence as he had drawn the segments of the stems. The point of the brush made a little hook downwards and then swung in a flat curve to the right, continued, and then finished in another little upwards hook.

Now the three bamboo stems appeared to be strongly joined, full of tension against the edged rock.

This time, Bärger laid the brush to one side after washing it out. He picked up the bar of ink, dropped some water on the rubbing dish, and began to scrape ink again. Jürgen sat silently next to him and watched. His glass of wine sat untouched on the bookcase.

Bärger began to paint the leaves. He had prepared a very dark mixture of thinned ink on the plate, in which he now dipped his brush. He painted the leaves from their base to the points with an accelerating stroke which ended in the air above the paper and which gave the leaves a needle sharp point. They were groups of three and five of the lanceolate leaves, all pointing in more or less the same direction; a flat angle toward the right.

Wind, thought Jürgen. There was a strong wind and he saw that the shoots all bent in the same direction that the leaves pointed. He could almost hear their dry rustling.

The groups of leaves grew variably thicker. Bärger thinned the ink several times, and the leaves he drew became lighter, seeming to sink back into the picture. Brush in hand, Bärger leaned back and stared at the picture in which three thickly leaved bamboo stems leaned against the wind in front of a rock. He hesitated then dipped the brush in the ink dish again and began to dab loose groups of points on the paper, which ran into fringing clumps of moss.

For the last time, he used the thinned ink on the plate. Short vertical strokes in front of the rock and in the area of the bamboo roots became clumps of grass, making the ground visible. Then he washed out his brush, dabbed it dry, put it back in the cup, and turned around slowly to Jürgen.

“Here’s your bamboo picture,” said Bärger.

“Fantastic,” said Jürgen, and shook his head slowly. “Just fantastic,” he said again.

Bärger laughed.

From the cabinet, he took a small round porcelain box with the picture of a dragon on the lid, and a small, cubical, polished stone on top.

There was a vermillion paste in the box, which seemed to have fibers running through it. The cubical stone was a seal with a simply cut inscription in Chinese script.

Bärger looked carefully at the picture, which still looked wet and a little wavy. Then he pushed the seal forcefully into the red color and set his stamp in a small opening at the lower left of the picture next to the foot of the rock and the roots of the three bamboo stems.

“If I were any good, I would also be able to write a line from a poem for you. It would go here!”

With his finger he traced a line from the upper right of the picture down to about the middle.

“Perhaps you can find a Japanese to do it.

I call it, Bamboos in the Morning Wind.”

8

“It won’t be ready for quite a while yet,” said Bärger as they went back into the living room.

The light from the streetlamps shone onto the ceiling through the huge, curtainless window and bathed the room in a milky half-light.

“Leave it off,” said Jürgen as Bärger reached for the light switch. So they sat for a while, until their eyes could make out the details around them again.

Jürgen still hadn’t said anything else.

“I can’t make a real scroll picture out of it for you,” began Bärger once again. “First of all, I have no picture silk and second, I could only guess at how they were made. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any literature covering the process. All I really know is that, in China, the creation of scroll pictures is a separate craft.”

He finished his glass, poured some more, and leaned forward to fill Jürgen’s glass as well. However, Jürgen held his hand over his glass and shook his head.

“It still has to dry,” Bärger continued, “and you’ll find that it gets a little lighter.”

Then he explained that the extremely thin paper had to be reinforced by bonding it to a second lamination of the same kind of paper.

When Jürgen began to talk, at first he seemed to be searching for words.

“All the time, I had the feeling that you saw the finished picture in front of you before you painted the first line.”

“That’s more or less so,” Bärger nodded in confirmation. “But when the first line is drawn, the process runs by itself and each additional step influences the next one. It is as if the picture has a life of its own, as if it grows by itself, and I’m just there to help it along.”

“Help it along,” repeated Jürgen. “I suppose you could call it that. Why ever did you become an architect?”

Bärger was surprised.

“Because I like geometry,” he said. “Maybe because in my home town I messed about too much as a child in brick Gothic churches and wanted to find out how they were built. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Chinese ink painting, if that’s what you mean.”

“You shouldn’t do anything else,” said Jürgen. “It’s absolutely perfect, and I believe that you enjoy it.”

“Oh, yes,” Bärger laughed softly. “Guess why I do something else.”

They looked at each other. Then they both laughed and said at the same time, “It doesn’t pay.”

The new catch phrase. A different catch phrase. Always the same catchphrase. It was clear that Jürgen wanted to know what Bärger was working on now.

He shrugged his shoulders in resignation.

“Not only does it not pay – all the rest doesn’t mean anything. I mean that what I do for a living doesn’t really matter. It’s enough to keep my head above water financially but it is nothing I really want to do. Maybe that’s too much to ask for.”

Jürgen pointed at the black mailing tube Bärger had brought up from his cellar four days earlier with the bow case.

“Is there a new project in there?” he asked.

“Not really. It’s a very old one,” laughed Bärger and shook the roll so the arrows in it rattled. He unscrewed the lid to let the dozen shiny arrows slide out into his hand, and a small amount of fine sand poured out onto the blue rug.

Bärger paused for a moment, struck by the memory it evoked. “Do you know where that comes from?” He pointed at the little mound next to his foot.

“It’s from an island, from Hiddensee. And if I’m right, then that’s the last time that I did something that mattered.”

He balanced the bundle of arrows in his hand. “Maybe I should go back there again.”

“When was the last time you were there?” asked Jürgen.

“A long time ago,” Bärger looked out the window. “Maybe ten, twelve years.”

“Leave it alone,” said Jürgen. “It would be better. I went there last year and I didn’t recognize it. If you want to go somewhere on the Baltic, you’re better off going to Sweden, or even easier, to Denmark. If you avoid the vacation spots, you can still find undisturbed nature without crowds of tourists.”

Bärger nodded thoughtfully and put the arrows back in their tube.

“Perhaps you’re right. I really shouldn’t wait much longer.”

He pointed out of the window. A milky veil had thickened around the poles of the street lamps, and patches of thin mist floated above the street.

The next day began with streaming sunshine. Bärger sat at his computer and sent an email to the Regional Construction Office, in which he requested the contest rules for the – he had to look it up again – juvenile detention facility. At the same time, he transferred the required registration fee. Maybe I would have been better off drinking up the money, he thought when he did it. It would have lasted quite a while.

He took the tram to the hospital to get his stitches taken out. Unexpectedly, it went quickly and painlessly. The antiseptic they put on it afterward only caused a slight burning sensation.

He went back outside as quickly as possible to get away from the smell of the hospital. On the way home, he stopped and picked up the photographs he had taken during the trip to the atomic power plant.

At the place where he had his film developed, the photographer asked if he wanted to take a look at them. Bärger tore open the envelope, leafed rapidly through the prints, and then held the last one in his hand for a bit.

“Interesting subject,” said the photographer, looking over Bärger’s shoulder.

It was the picture of the four cooling towers. The four towers stood like a pictogram, white against a blue background, sharply diagonal and greatly foreshortened by the steep perspective.

Something went “click” in Bärger’s head and he felt he ought to remember where he had seen something like that, but it didn’t come to him.

He paid, stuck the envelope in his jacket pocket and walked slowly home.

In his study, he looked carefully for a long time at the now thoroughly dry ink picture that he had called Bamboos in the Morning Wind.

Then he nodded, satisfied, rolled up the felt mat, and put ink, rubbing disk, and brush back in the mobile cabinet. He rolled up the picture loosely and put it on the bookcase where he could see it.

After clearing off the table, he put the magazine on it where he had found the description of the contest. Instead of reading it again, however, he first picked up the envelope with the photographs to go over them again in peace. Most of them he put quickly to one side. They were documentation for a professional job; they had no artistic merit, merely expressing his intent to show a real situation with as little distortion and misunderstanding as possible.

The last picture was quite different. It wasn’t any less real, but the choice of angle and the lighting gave it a monumental quality that didn’t just come from a lack of human dimension. This stark diagonal view of a group of four cooling towers seemed to merge into a threatening symbol.

The picture wasn’t necessary to document his description of the condition of the buildings, so he placed it in the open magazine as a bookmark.

In retrospect, it seemed to him that at that moment the wheels in his head started to turn. At first they mixed together a series of pictures from dream and reality, and gradually putting them in order, finally stopped at a new picture.

Bärger had had a vision.

Absurd, he thought, completely absurd, but the idea wouldn’t leave him alone. He picked up a stack of copy paper next to his printer, looked for a pencil with a soft lead and began to sketch.

First he tried to show the dimension of the towers in cross section on the paper. Then he remembered that he had measured the tower dimensions with his laser. He took out his notebook, entered the height on the vertical axis and drew a freehand hyperbola to approximate the line of the cooling tower’s outside surface.

As he brought the line of the cooling tower down to the ground, the idea of something like an arena really began to take shape.

Bärger tried to control the flood of images that threatened to overwhelm him.

He didn’t know the space requirements yet; surely they had specified a location, and it was questionable whether there was any mention of possibly reusing an existing structure. Quite apart from the fact that he knew nobody on the jury, it was much less likely that any of them had heard of him.

However, before he put down his pencil for the day, he had tested the workability of his spontaneous idea. He decided that he would participate in the contest, if he could just bring his idea into approximate agreement with the program requirements.

Of course he was a pure outsider, and given the composition of the jury, he had no chance of winning at all.

He would have to keep his costs low, just high enough to make the idea behind his proposal sufficiently clear.

By evening, the wastebasket was full of torn-up sheets but there was a cross-section and floor plan for a converted cooling tower in front of him. He had supplemented the bell shaped exterior, the outer wall, by closing off the top with a flat, lens-shaped glass dome, made up of a filigreed network of spherical triangles. It would let in sufficient daylight.

He had provided three interior stories of concentric rings connected by stairs, and set two circles of terraced cells with a broad passage in front of them around a sunken round surface – the “arena”.

Four stairs connected the two cell levels, but only a steel ladder led down to the “arena”. The ground floor had the only opening to the outside and was lit by the glazed intake ring. Bärger decided to glaze the band of supports in the intake area, as well, and placed a corridor behind it for supervision.

The bump above his ear throbbed all the while he was drawing and discarding sheet after sheet. From time to time Bärger wondered whether the anger at what had happened to him was really a good incentive. Yet that was the force powering his action. He wanted those who enjoyed force and destruction to experience a new, different form of punishment. He wanted to punish them by placing them in a completely inescapable gigantic room that would magnify their own insignificance.

He wanted to use it to punish them by giving them nothing but themselves to see and, if he had his way, they would retain all their tools for violence.

If he had his way, everything that they so willingly carried with them to use force on others would be piled in the center: knives, brass knuckles, and baseball bats. He would be delighted to watch and see if they were as ready to resort to violence when they no longer faced defenseless prey, but only had each other to assault.

Oh yes, within these boundaries, he would grant them the freedom to indulge in any sort of violence – but only against each other, not against women, nor against handicapped people, and not against those whose skin color displeased them.

He wasn’t sure whether any of these ideas were really feasible but, in the final analysis, other schemes to reeducate and resocialize these characters had been generally unsuccessful. Bärger threw his pencil onto the pile of paper that lay in front of him.

He leaned back, put his hands behind his neck and looked thoughtfully out of the window.

Then he spoke out loud to himself: “Proposal for a Juvenile Detention Facility.”

And, after a while, “Based on the Conversion of Cooling Towers for an Atomic Power Plant.”

The text of the contest rules arrived in the mail the next day. His expectations, really his fears, were correct. They wanted ideas for new construction; they made reference to several sheets of regulations, copies of extracts attached; and they provided a specific location. However, there was also a closing remark to the effect that they were looking for innovative suggestions for a penal system for young criminals.

Bärger decided to use that closing remark as the takeoff point for the presentation of his idea. He turned on his computer and was soon involved in playing with the blinking grid on the screen.

It took longest to enter the basic data. The solution seemed practical, even with progressively more detail. The apparent precision with which the computer displayed his fiction lent it a deceptive reality.

Bärger had to grin when he realized how little his final values were based on precise data.

The problem of required capacity was the simplest to solve: not one, but three of the available towers had to be converted identically in order to attain the necessary floor space. He decided to regard the fourth tower as a reserve without internal construction and to include it in the total concept.

He had originally intended to connect the midpoints of the four circular towers with straight lines, but eliminated this idea in his final version. He erased the square corners which this produced at the inside of the towers, and instead, ran a double line on the outside from tower to tower. As a connecting wall, it now enclosed an interior courtyard with the tower at each corner, creating the impression of a castle. The walls would have to be the height of the intake rings, which were about 9 meters. He thought of them as being made from roughcast concrete with an entrance gate in the middle. The mathematical symmetry of the installation, which he disliked in spontaneous designs, was unavoidable here.

After completing the ground plan, he let the computer build a picture. The straight edge at the top of the wall bothered him, as the flat glass domes nicely complemented the curved exterior lines of the towers. The obvious thing to do was to let the top line of the wall sag to form a shallow concave curve. More than five meters high at its lowest point, it seemed high enough. The question of cost could tilt the balance in the contest.

Certainly there was an enormous saving here as the entire exterior structure was already in place with the required security features. So, as things looked now, you could get it “for a song”. The only construction necessary was limited to the glass domes at the tops of the towers and the three story, interior construction in the former intake zones. He would have to emphasize the cost savings. Bärger saved his data and loaded it onto a CD for backup.

Before he turned off his computer, he looked at the strange, futuristic image on the large picture screen. Playfully he made the tower surfaces and the surrounding wall white, and selected blue as the background color. Then he took his photo from the atomic power plant and clipped it behind the keyboard for comparison. The similarity surprised him, but he resisted the desire to construct a three-dimensional picture on the computer corresponding to the perspective of his photo.

He let the screen go blank and then turned off his computer. His back hurt; he was thirsty; and he suddenly felt tired.

Bärger brewed himself a pot of tea and lay back on the sofa, where he stared unthinkingly at the scroll with the four symbols. Before the pot was empty, he had fallen into a dreamless sleep.