seeing things

I.
I went back to Wannsee yesterday in the company of friends.  We blew off work and brought our bikes and joined the crowds streaming onto south-bound trains.  I'd felt I hadn't seen enough of the town on my previous visit, when the threat of rain and the lack of a bicycle had limited me to what I could see and do within dashing distance of shelter or a bus stop.

But I can never just see what is there, anymore, anyway.  Sometimes I see what I had imagined should be there, and everything that is disappoints me, as during my ill-fated trip to Dresden earlier this week.  I had imagined it to be a place of horror and profundity and contemplation of the past, and I found the city center to be, unsurprisingly, a baking-hot Disneyland full of sweaty tourist flesh.  The curving pink-and-peach interior of the reconstructed Frauenkirche felt like the inside of an ice-cream cone.

II.
In Wannsee, I biked with two friends and an entourage of ghosts, and I felt myself corresponding with the latter as much as the former.  It all began when we returned to the Liebermann Villa, when I saw myself sitting with friends upon a rounded white bench that I'd not noticed before, holding a drink on a summer evening in a Brooklyn backyard where I've never been.

I split off from my friends for a bit, and found in the hills above the beach an old brick church, its leafy cemetery enclosed behind high walls.  A sign reminded me to please close the gate behind myself, to prevent wild boars from rooting around the graves. Inside, a sprinkler flicked lazily in the sun, watched by a white-haired man sitting on a bench.  The surface of a water pump glistened with hundreds of wasps.  I walked up and down the paths, pursued by unseen mosquitos that hummed at my ears.

There is little so formalized and yet so personal as a grave.  The fundamentals of name and dates and stone are constant: thus we learn who the deceased was, and perhaps how things ended.  It is in the shape and the accoutrements, if you will, that we may learn about what the deceased was like, how he or she lived, whose family still mourns (and, who perhaps, has young grandchildren), and who really is dead.

As I passed back through the inner gates toward the entrance of the church, I found what I'd all along known should have been there.  The long allee of trees led to a memorial, soberly commemorating those men and women who died in the very last days of the war, and I realized that the small black squares which marched at intervals alongside, and which I had mistaken for landscaping lights, in fact were gravestones.  Most were marked with the names of young men, though some simply were labelled "Unknown Man" or "Unknown Woman," so that what we can know about the whole of their lives is reduced to the circumstances of their deaths in "April-May 1945."

I was standing over the plaque dedicated to Helmut Sanger (b. 4/1/28, d. 5/6/45, probably a member of one of the Youth Divisions) when the caretaker put down his chain saw and called out to me.  Did I want to see inside the church? he asked.  I duly entered and immediately found myself inside every Episcopal church I'd ever known: white-walled, wood-beamed, decorous carved pews.  This church reminds me so much of that hillside church in Locust that we biked to one summer, I said to my father, who had accompanied me on that trip but not on this one; - it even somehow smells the same.  I exited to find the caretaker waiting expectantly at a table next to a revolving carrel of postcards, and so, thinking of my grandfather, I paid €1.30 for a card I cannot send him.

I returned to meet my friends, and as we cycled along shady paths, I admired the view across cattails to the lake - silently, to all of you.  Here is a perfect biergarten across from the beach for us to stop and drink a Radler in the shade, I called out to M. and N., who were not there.  In fact, I did not really tell them, we have our pick of biergartens; we could stop for a drink every 10 minutes if we wanted.  D. and P. and I crossed the fifty yards to Pfaueninsel on a ferry, a trip so short it could only be amusing, and I remembered a January day when I had crossed from Shelter Island to Greenport; and I spoke to my friends of reading Tony Judt, who had remembered a longer crossing, from from Dover to France; and they smiled politely. We wandered around Pfaueninsel, and across a golden field that was just like that scene from that movie we love where he kisses her, I told A., who is no longer with us.  As we crossed an open pasture, P. stopped and pointed: in a watering hole a hundred yards away, large black boulders stirred and yawned and revealed themselves to be water buffalos dozing in the cool mud; the sight surprised me, and though I strained to find precedents, I had known nothing like this before, could not tell it to other than those who were there.  But otherwise, Wannsee was like a scrim behind which I could see your shapes moving.  Don't this weird little barn and these thatched-roofed outbuildings remind you of the Cotswolds, of that trip that we took with Mom and Dad? I asked my sisters, who were absent.  Eventually we found the peacocks for which the island is named, their tails somewhat stripped of plumage, as though they had encountered marauding groups of schoolboys before us.  Do you remember that hotel in Ireland where the peacocks roamed freely in front of the large lake?, I asked my mother, who did not come with me to Pfaueninsel.  (I worked at that hotel!, said D., who did.) The three of us returned to Wannsee and again parted ways, and I biked slowly through the forests and past lake houses. Doesn't that glass-walled house on Groβer Wannsee, the one where a barefoot man reads the paper, a dog at his feet - doesn't that remind you of California?, I asked, though I was by then alone; and wouldn't you like to sail out to that tiny island in the middle of the lake? 

III.

What I mean when I say that I see things is that I see you, I see all of you, I cannot help but see you.