Tribute from Jacek Gutorow

Jacek Gutorow

 

My memories of Martin are minimal: a few hours on an April afternoon and a windy evening, almost one year ago. I still have a sense that the time was somehow unique. I felt its exceptionality when we were strolling around Neukölln (my only association of the place was with an instrumental piece by David Bowie) and sitting over black coffee and beer. Nothing serious. It was nice. Later, surprisingly, you lack words. You simply miss them.

            It is difficult for me to write a decent tribute. The memory is so fresh, unsettled, unwritable. I find I cannot cope with words, sitting here in front of an empty sheet of paper. Here are some journal entries I’ve put together. For the time being these must suffice.

 

            April, 2014

I met Esther and Martin at their Friedelstrasse flat. I knew that Martin (whom I saw for the first time) was seriously ill. What I immediately noticed was that he was discreet without being reserved and distant. I must say I was quite impressed by this combination. We talked about architecture, painters, Berlin galleries. I already appreciated the integrity and originality of Martin’s views and tastes. His intellectual independence was immediate and spontaneous, or at least this was how I perceived it. What a freshness of mind, I thought.

Later we took a rather long and meandering walk towards Landwehrkanal and Görlitzer Park. It was beautiful, the weather was perfect, the air transparent. Martin talked slowly, almost cautiously, and you instantaneously recognized a unique presence. We talked about poetry. Again, I found his tastes quite autonomous. Surprisingly, he mentioned Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (who reads Arnold these days?). I told him this was one of my favourite poems. I realized I would remember Martin by this poem:

 

the world, which seems

                        To lie before us like a land of dreams,

                        So various, so beautiful, so new…

 

            It was Berlin. It was April 2014. But things don’t change that much.

October, 2014.

An email from Esther. Martin died yesterday. My first thought was: it’s unfair. But afterwards I lacked words, as if a part of my brain, the one responsible for using language, was blocked. In situations like this one feels like having to refer to someone else’s formulations, hoping that they would resonate and undo (unfreeze, rather) buried words.

As a matter of fact, I’d just been reading Ernst Weiss’s The Aristocrat in Martin’s translation. A most beautiful translation. Some startling parallels came to my mind, a few images centered around a premonition of death (this is a novel about death). Boёtius von Orlamünde, the story’s main character, has an unusual passion for the minutiae of the natural world. The English translation was crystal-clear and I realized not every translator would be capable of describing reality with such precision and care: “I see reflected the lake or the foliage, half blue, half green, only an illusion, only a moment, a gleam. My horse begins to sweat, and the skin darkens first at the edges of the harness, then the little hairs stick together, stand up in rows, as if they had been groomed with a wide-toothed comb. Now there’s a smell, heavy and aromatic, of sweat, of firs, rain and dust.”

The most moving passage comes a few pages later, though. I’d underlined it some weeks earlier, put a small sign next to it, a kind of five-pointed star. It was with those words that I addressed the sad fact of Martin’s death: “I told of the night, of my sleeping badly. It is not the dreams of youth, sick with longing, which wake me, which make me press my ear against the door of the neighbouring dormitory… what excite me is something quite different. Something else makes me get up and, my shoulders hunched, press myself first against one then against the other useless, tall lectern. It is a feeling that one will not suspect in a seventeen years old. But will one believe that this feeling, which I must name only too soon, has been active in my soul since it was a soul, for as long as I can remember at all? I must name it – but I am afraid even of the words. It is fear of death.”

 

            January, 2015.

It was an early morning in Berlin, the first thing I did was checking the internet and reading some tributes addressed to Martin. People who’d known him well and managed to evoke his presence as if he was still alive. Memory in language, memory of language. Words soothe but first one has to find them, I thought.

After breakfast we visited the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof cemetery. In my journal I wrote: “The grave is situated in the shadow of a tall tree and I suddenly find myself trying to recall the name of the species of tree. It is bare, no leaves, just black bark. Stands there like a small cathedral. We light a candle. There is no wind. Just a quiet noon with grey clouds, a coal light. We are surrounded by graves with colourful decorations. A Jewish grave with white pebbles in a jar. A child’s grave with toys and little pumpkins. So many objects for the eye. Martin was telling me of Dutch painters and those miniature still lifes they rendered so wonderfully. So I guess he would love this place here.”

 

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