ESSAY ON QUIET PLACES
Translated by Krishna Winston
Stilles Örtchen, “quiet little place,” a German euphemism = privy, outhouse, WC, restroom, bathroom, toilet, ladies’/men’s room, washroom, lavatory, comfort station …
Long, long ago I read a novel by the English writer A. J.—Archibald Joseph, if I’m not mistaken—Cronin, in a German translation, whose English title was The Stars Look Down. It was a fairly thick book, but it’s not the fault of the author or his story, which at the time captivated and filled me with enthusiasm, that I remember very few of the details. What has stayed with me, in addition to those stars, always looking down: an English mining district and the chronicle of a hard-up miner’s family, juxtaposed with the story of the well-heeled mine owners (“if I’m not mistaken”). Much later, when I saw John Ford’s film How Green Was My Valley, the faces and landscapes fooled me, in a good sense, into thinking, though I knew better, that I was seeing the film version not of the novel by Richard Llewellyn but of Cronin’s The Stars Look Down. Yet I did retain one detail from the tale of the stars that look down, and this detail haunts me to this day and provides the starting point for my almost lifelong circling and encircling of the Quiet Place and quiet places, and accordingly that’s where I mean to begin my essay on the subject.
The detail to which I’m referring conveys the following, whether in my memory or in my imagination: one of the heroes in The Stars Look Down—I think there are two, children who grow up as the story progresses, one from the wealthy family, the other from the poor family—anyway, one of them makes a habit of taking refuge in the toilet, lavatory, privy, not when he needs to go but whenever the company of others—adults, family members—gets on his nerves and becomes too much for him, a burden and a torment. He locks himself in the water closet (“as the name suggests”) so as not to have to listen to the incessant jabber, and stays there longer than usual.
The story—or is this now my version?—says it has to be the scion of the wealthy family who feels driven to the Quiet Place, and it wants this place to be located far from the parlors and chambers in the manor house, and decrees that the boy does nothing there but listen to the silence. And I’m fairly sure it’s not so much the original story, the novel, as my own version that wants it to be in that out-of-the-way place, away from the family, that the youthful hero conceives the idea and the sensation to which the book owes its title: that when he’s there, the stars look down on him. His Quiet Place had no roof, was open to the heavens.
For me, too, the Quiet Place has a story, different in some ways, but analogous to the one I’ve just summarized, and a lively and varied one, too, considering the place itself, which is really not “monotonous.” Now I’d like to try to trace the outlines of that story, not filling in the specifics, but parallel and in counterpoint to suggestions for stories and images that several people have sent my way.
It was on the threshold between childhood and adolescence that the Quiet Place began to take on a meaning for me over and above the ordinary and customary. As I sit here at my writing table, far from the sites of my childhood and from childhood itself, and try to remember what toilets were like after the Second World War in East Berlin—in Niederschönhausen, part of Pankow, and later the privy on my grandfather’s farm in southern Carinthia, only sketchy images come to me—not a single one from the city—and besides, and above all, I don’t figure in them, not as a child and not as a living being; those images lack any subject that could say “I,” are disembodied.
Just the usual: thick or less thick packets of newspaper cut into conveniently sized pieces, with a hole punched through them so they could be hung on a string from a nail driven into the board wall, the variant being that the words on most of the pieces were in Slovenian, from the newspaper my grandfather subscribed to, the weekly Vestnik (The Courier). The vertical shaft under the drain hole ran down toward the manure pile outside the cow stalls, or didn’t it continue on to a kind of dry well?—the distinguishing feature being that the shaft was unusually long, or at least seemed so to me as a child, because the privy was located on the second floor of a farmhouse built into a steep slope in the middle of the village, at the end of a long wooden gallery, where the house and barn came together, and it formed a part or corner of the barn as well as of the gallery, completely unobtrusive, its board walls the same weathered gray as the planks of the gallery and the siding of the hayloft, easy to miss, hardly recognizable as a distinct place, even as a shed, let alone as a privy, since the heart shape traditionally cut into privy doors throughout the region was absent, and the door not even recognizable as such—all you saw was a slight bump-out in the wall where the gallery met the hayloft, which a stranger to the village might well have mistaken for a cubby where my grandfather kept his carpentry tools. Visitors rarely came to the house, however, and the regional agent for the insurance company, Assicurazioni Generale, stopped by at most once a year, and to him, should damage caused by fire or lightning have occurred, a room that small would hardly have counted. What I find striking in any case is the distance between that peasant privy and the main part of the house, whether for everyday use or special occasions; hard to picture, in the Slovenian village of Stara Vas, unlike in the more middle-class market towns down on the plain, someone peeing in a public place as portrayed in a number of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings.
But now another special thing about that Quiet Place comes back to me: the light in that little enclosure, which had two sources (without electricity, of course, and I wonder now how the members of the extended family found their way there at night along the dark gallery: with a kerosene lantern? a flashlight? a candle? by feel?). The first kind of light came from above, in the place itself, so to speak—shining through cracks in the board walls? No, my grandfather was competent enough as a carpenter not to have left a single crack—rather the light came through the wooden walls, through the boards themselves, as if filtered, also through dot-sized holes, hardly as big as the eye of a needle, in the knots, more or less round, where branches had once grown out of the tree trunk; over time these knots had perhaps shrunk more than the rest of the sawn trunk. A strange indirect lighting, found nowhere else in the house; indirect meaning without windows, but all the more substantial; light that surrounded one, by which one found oneself surrounded in the privy—one?—me; so there was already an “I” there after all?
And the second source of light? The light that shone into the long vertical shaft from the open-air manure pile below, in the depths, as it were. That light comes up the shaft—please don’t expect me to say “along with the stench”; having no memory of that, I won’t mention it. This light doesn’t reach the person, “me,” peering down through the hole, but at most comes halfway up the shaft, no, not even that, hardly a wrist-to-elbow’s length up, and remaining pooled down below, a substantial shimmer completely different from the one surrounding the person peering down from above, a shimmering probably reinforced by all the yellow from the straw mixed with the cow manure way down there, which makes the inner walls of the shaft visible by following its form, the circle: living geometry, entirely natural. And why does a local anecdote I heard from my mother come back to me now, in which a child presents a basket of well-shaped, gleaming pears to the local clergyman, announcing, “Pastor, I’m supposed to bring you greetings from my parents and these pears from the shithouse tree!”?
Copyright © 1989, 1990, 1991, 2012, 2013 by Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin
Translations of “Essay on Tiredness,” “Essay on the Jukebox,” and “Essay on the Successful Day” copyright © 1994 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Translations of “Essay on Quiet Places” and “Essay on a Mushroom Maniac” copyright © 2022 by Krishna Winston
