And suddenly this heaven was over the forest.
Photo: dpa
They had appeared drunk. In order not to be seen, he looked out of the window. Young men to shye a car, laughed, push themselves, had bottles in their hands. The next town was five kilometers away. “Nobody would come to help me. Nobody would even know where I was looking for because I hadn’t told anyone about this place, not even my wife … «
This woman: she remains outside the text. But you can see her how she lets her arms hang. Since the cancer diagnosis, her husband has not been himself. After the first operation, it was said that he only had a year to live. With the second a sigh of relief: “I was surprisingly acquitted like a defendant who had expected the death penalty.” But instead of being happy, he was like hollowed out. One night he looked out of the bathroom window into the dark: “I had to get out of that. Something great, exciting, infinitely adventurous waited for me … ”The woman didn’t prevent him when he left the house on a November evening.
On his back he wore »a small backpack with a little provisions and replacement clothing. “I got out of the open country. The black tar road shimmered damp as if it were coated with brilliant lacquer. Dark meadows stretched on both sides, from which the black silhouettes of trees or pieces of forest towered here and there. ”And then the street in the forest disappeared.
Reading you will enjoy wonderful nature descriptions, be amazed and scare. Language power meets elementary power. Fear should be driven out by fear – and that actually succeeds. Rudolf von Waldenfels, born in 1965, once a writer at the Vienna Burgtheater, experienced everything himself. We don’t want to exchange with him, fever fever with him how he survives. And are always over the magic of the night.
The abandoned building with the broken windows becomes a “house of forgotten dreams” for him. Memories flare up: to the violent father, against whom the boy hid to the beloved sister, who found a mysterious death, the war experiences of the grandfather, to his own past in a radical environmental group, former hikes and strange experiences. “To see the original horror in the eye was important, that was essential.”
Mysterious and wonderful. His faith was broken in the hospital, “somehow protected, but somehow lifted.” Now the forest appears to him like a cathedral and a sky, “which at the moment was still hidden behind billions of snowflakes, but which would soon reveal himself in all its glory.” Authentic experience, so stirring from the first person, so stirring, excitingly described that the book is not set aside. Also because it can inspire you how someone finds yourself.
Rudolf von Waldenfels: into the night. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 148 p., Br., € 20.