The following is an excerpt from the opening of Jan Wilm’s debut novel Winterjahrbuch (A Year of Winter), published last year in German and presented here in the author’s English translation.
january hymn • the decemberists
Winterjahrbuch
by Jan Wilm
(Schöffling & Co., Aug. 2019)
The dreams are dead, there’s only yesterday. And yet, the snow lies before me, and you lie behind me. In my deserted city, like a fiction you lie behind me. Before me, ahead of me, in an airport-sized edifice on a hill in Los Angeles, on paper, there lies the snow. Without wanting to be there, I’m there, and there is now here. Without wanting to be here, I’m here, punished under the sky-high palm trees, my home at home in ruins, shattered, driven into the ashes. Having to go to summer camp on Monday morning when your parents yelled at each other on Sunday night.
On the plane, over the Californian mountain cluster corralling the city; as usual the heavy turbulence, as ever the familiar fear of crashing. Then, an air pocket and the new thought that it wouldn’t matter now. I land at LAX around noon on January 2nd and, following a brief interview by a gloomy blue-gloved immigration officer, I’m escorted to a depressingly glass-walled air-conditioned office-coffin, where I pass my passport to a receptionist only to see it arrayed with a dozen other passports, while I’m arrayed in a row of chairs with the corresponding dozen jagged jetlagged souls. Without knowing why I’m here, I’m here.
Midday in LA, midnight at home. Like a sigh the black hours have seeped into the rooms, the rooms where I was known as we. We is a snow-word now, fleeting, forgetful, like the transitory blossom of snow itself. The word unfurls, unflakes, unflocculates here, it softly falls and flees from me, but lodges in my throat with the thick, constricted sensation that comes before crying. Would I be fit to speak this word now, if I were allowed to speak here, if I were permitted my own language here, our language? Even if it were daytime now at home, a cold clear January day, a Janus day, half day half done, a day of chalk-bright sunshine, there wouldn’t be anyone there to speak to.
I learn there’s a problem with an old visa from the time we were here together, from the time we were together here. The symbolism in the stars. In defense, I say I’m a professor and give myself the translational upgrade, which I hope will give me some reprieve. That I haven’t been employed by any university for three months and that only the DAAD money (God love it) protects me from post-academic limbo, where the lost souls stave off starvation by turning their liberal arts degrees into shrill BuzzFeed pieces or by proofreading books about horticulture, I keep to myself.
Here I am, here in the transit area of Los Angeles International, where to the drumbeat of my pounding heart I heartily explain that I’m researching a book on snow and that the papers I seek may only be studied on site. An eyebrow arches upward: Snow? There ain’t no snow around here, you know? I give a sheepish laugh, but the officer’s words seem meant less as a joke than an expression of disbelief. While he transfers his attention to his screen, one of his colleagues abruptly closes his counter and, at a small refreshment station on a filing cabinet behind the workstations, pours himself an instant coffee, whereupon a murmur meanders through the room. With the thoughtless jerkiness of a deer in the forest suddenly looking up at the snap of a twig, my immigration officer says, though without looking up: Mh. Did somebody say coffee? Muted laughter is emitted from the faceless staff.
Without a word of explanation, I finally get my entry stamp. Welcome to the United States, the mask of a face says, a face almost masking something like despair. What does Officer J. Morana look forward to over the course of his workday? To the instant coffee with its corn-syruped powder-milk falling from a can the size of a pneumatic tube (who says there’s no snow around here?), or is he looking forward to the successful turning away of people whose origins, whose faraway homes, pose a threat to Homeland Security? Probably only to that one thing: the end of the workday.
As I descend the long escalator to baggage claim and my adrenaline subsides along with my body, as I spot my suitcase circling on the carousel like a final piece of flotsam floating in some desolate sea, I am overcome with a great rush of sadness for the first time on foreign soil. Thinking of you becomes more probable the further I withdraw from you, and the further I go, the more painful it becomes, the more painful you become. You’re with me because you’re gone, you’re here because you’re there. Like a ghost that haunts me uncannily, in an unfamiliar place.
snowy atlas mountains • fionn regan
Since the beginning of the photographic age, Los Angeles has had only one severe snowfall, in January 1948, and in all the archives of the angelic city, only two photos of this singular event have survived. They were taken by the Robinson Crusoe of snow, Gabriel Gordon Blackshaw, a California-born photographer who devoted his life to collecting the snows of North America both photographically and linguistically. His insular epithet was inspired by his secluded existence in a log cabin far up in the Selkirk Mountains on the Canadian border, where he probably perished in an avalanche on one of the first days of 1950.
Blackshaw’s Nachlass, his pictures and papers, are available for study to researchers like myself—though they’re studiously unresearched—at the Getty Institute, under the searing January sun in the warm wind of the Golden State winter, above the viscous metal-trail on the ten-laned 405. It’s a positive cornucopia of material: negatives and prints, letters and books and a peculiar bundle of loose pages, a journal of his last year. It’s titled My Diary of the Plague Year. It’s what I’m here for, at least that’s what it says on the application. But last week, when I was allowed to browse the papers for the first time in my air-conditioned nightmare that is the Special Collections Reading Room, each page wrapped in a reflective plastic pocket, I was startled for a second, thinking I was looking into a terrible mirror. And immediately a feeling of unease spread inside me, as if a fist of black dust had clenched around my heart.
I have been terrified of this snow diary ever since, terrified to find out what it was that Blackshaw lost in his plague year, terrified to find you in it, terrified of the world folding away as if something had been bitten out of it, terrified that reading of loss I would have to lose you anew and, losing you, I would have to lose all the people I’ve lost all over again. Terrified above all of death coming home, once again only cypresses and oleander. I should never have come here. Now it feels like I will never leave. For what if, after my return and against all probability, you nevertheless came back to me but no longer recognized me, because here had turned me into someone else?
Everything new that I see here, I see without you, and because you don’t see it with me, I see it against you. With every experience I force distance between us, and with distance I drive you home inside me more deeply. The eyes cling harder to what is departing. Sometimes the leaving gaze is the longest. Orpheus looked back on purpose. I’m losing you with every new sight and every new word, so painfully that sometimes I think this loss must surely be productive, must surely get me something in the end (you). It doesn’t even get me writing, because I don’t want to write a text that isn’t a text about you. And to think that I wanted to write an aesthetic theory about snow. All I can do now is sing the echo of myself inside me, when all I want to speak of is you. Will you diminish when I write about you or speak about you? Even my written words about you only sound like me. I’m writing you and it isn’t you.
I will have to turn you into a blank, a gap, the lilywhite space between the words, I will not scream your voice into the depths of my voice, I will not destroy you into language. You don’t belong in an academic text. I can’t lose you in theory, too. Maybe you is a word best left without any letters at all. If I write about you I will lose you, but if I don’t write about you, you’ll be lost to the whole world.
I’m on a Big Blue Bus, bumping along the potholed boulevards, as if I were being carted through a war zone. This sunbleached city, the squat houses, the vacant skies, the droves of cars, the deserted sidewalks. Like an expat, my past, my expast, seems folded over my present. Reverse living. But does it really matter where you lose your memories? City of Quartz. A city for forgetting, isn’t that what they say, a city without memory.
Though the city is noisy with the fitful blare of seagulls and cars, the pedestrian’s impression is a silent one, as if walking through snow country, a colorless and featureless world. I return to my casita behind a family home in Santa Monica, a converted pool house that I rent for the equivalent of far too much money on Airbnb. It does include, however, an iron, a water purifier, and a juicer. Adrian, my landlord, is crushing bulbous plastic bottles in front of the recycling container in the garbage-alley behind the casita. He greets me with the words: Bad luck you got here during the heatwave. If there weren’t any weather, perhaps evolution wouldn’t have needed to give us language. Tell you what though, Adrian says, soon it’s gonna cool down. Mostly around the third week of January. Sometimes there’s even some snow up on the mountains by then. I’m surprised how little I care, the key already poised in my hand. I unlock the door, it’s always hard to open at first, but I wouldn’t find it easy to raise the issue with Adrian. I strain to get where I don’t want to go. As if he had to catch his breath, Adrian rests his hands on his hips, his little gut puts a strain on his shirt. Tell me, are you writing a book here? he asks, and something tightens inside me, as if I’d been found out. I say, I’m trying to, and quickly slip into my Airbnabode. The dismal indoor darkness on sunny days, as if you’d been called inside for punishment from playing in the light. From the alley outside I can still hear the dry crack of the crushing plastic.
I’m told it takes a year to forget someone. Once all four seasons alone. I wonder, when they tell you this is it a solace or a menace?
Perhaps the jot of snow I shared with you, perhaps that’s all I’ll ever keep of you. Wanting to write a book about snow and experiencing the snow days with you more fully than they really were. Balking at writing the book because you would disappear beneath the snow, beneath the washed-out white world of the book, reduced to a trace, demoted to a sign.
Back home, in the apartment, I left everything unchanged, out of a childish belief that you might come back at any moment and find everything as it was. The year of magical thinking. A month later, a glass of water was still standing on the kitchen table in the approaching light of the sun, a ring of limescale like a dusty sediment, in which I was convinced I could read our time away from one another. And then suddenly, the glass was just gone, like I’d betrayed myself.
winter prayers • iron & wine
I haven’t been to the archive for three weeks and I wonder how things will go on, if I go on like this, how I’m going to blow up one week to a whole year in my final report, so I won’t have to return my DAAD money (God love it). With a jab of guilt, I see my Getty badge when I open my wallet. The snow books that I brought with me I now use to prop up my laptop on the low coffee table. Inside me the name Blackshaw closes like a heavy door.
Then suddenly, at the end of my fourth week, without my having had a thought about snow worth thinking about, the temperature drops overnight. When I get coffee in the morning, the palm trees look frozen against the sky, the warm wind is gone, the light is wintry, as if it had been filtered through crystal before falling across the street. The deserted concrete world of Wilshire feels like a grand communist boulevard, the only pedestrian I meet is a woman in an overcoat that looks as heavy as the jewellery-laden dress of a Romanov daughter. Looking at her, I get cold. It seems as if the chilled interiors of the city had been turned inside out, Reading Room temperature everywhere, the whole town an archive. The sky has a crisp yveskleinblue clarity. The giant slanting palm tree spiderlegs, tremendously high with light-lacquered leaves, they nod to me ever so softly, as I walk along beneath them. What is it they know about me?
That evening I rent a cheap compact car online for the next morning, Chevrolet Spark or similar. I still don’t sleep, I continue to blame the jetlag that already seems of another world, at night I’m afraid of the ghettobirds drumming above me, who could they be looking for in Santa Monica? On YouTube I watch Bob Ross painting An Arctic Winter Day, first a glass of warmish milk, then a glass of chilled Maker’s Mark, then more Maker’s Mark, then more Bob Ross, Mountain Cabin. Wide awake. The tiny BR logo of the TV station in the top left corner looks like a half-opened miniature window. Who would have thought one would one day think wistfully of Bavaria.
In the morning I’m standing in the middle of the car rental office, so tired I think I’ll crash through the floor any minute. Not enough compacts have been returned yet, so they offer me a van. And a discount. Yes and yes, please. A woman who is stuffing small papers into plastic sleeves in the back of the kiosk-sized room interrupts her tired automated gestures at the sound of the words Chevrolet Express. I bubble a tepid cup of water from the water cooler, as the bright, low morning sun that flattens the vacant lot is momentarily obscured by a hearse-long jet-black bus that slides up to the window.
As I’m looking at my stunted self in the shiny paint of this jumbo car, the dealer says: That thing’s legit. You could fit a full band in there. Drumset, even an upright bass.
Great, I say casually, but I’m on a solo tour today.
The car feels massive on the road, even though it floats along with a strange weightlessness, and on the Grace-Kelly-hairpin-turns up in Griffith Park I feel like George Kaplan for a moment, even if I’m no longer drunk. Bulky and cumbersome, like a tram that’s towed into the depot for the night, I maneuver the car into a space on the parking strip next to the abyss and eventually, even in the most spacious car city, I have to quarter two parking meters.
Alongside people in functional tourist clothing and landmark hats I drag myself up the pine-scented path to the Griffith Observatory. There is a strange expectant silence among my co-walkers, the mechanical shoe-shuffle like the footfalls of lost souls passing into the realm of the dead. With sudden majesty, the trinity domes of the Observatory rise from the horizon that is moved by our motion, a poor man’s Taj Mahal. To the right and close by, rolled out across the mountain, the Hollywood sign. I don’t walk toward the Observatory, but remove myself from the mommy-daddy squeals and the feebleminded iPhone-eyewitnesses with their idiocy on a stick. What’s a selfie stick but a dildo that takes pictures? And then, from the small Mount Wilson Terrace, I can see it lying in front of me, spreading out at my feet, this new, gushing town, the urban sprawl, pinioned from hill to hill. An angel. An albatross. World on a wing. Behind it, hovering above the enormous basin of LA, the sky-high ridge of the San Gabriel Mountains, and, bob-rossed onto the dark mountaintop, a featherfine sediment of titanium white, a single thin ribbon draped across the summit like the transparent remnant of a molted snake. A breath of wind and the brittle snow-skin would evaporate. The most mundane, the most menaced. The cool air is clear, the smogstench replaced by blossom and grass, and faintly I hear the distant surf of the city traffic. Deep down in my body I think I can make out something like the feeling of powder snow, as if I was touching fresh snow with my hands right now. But my palms are warm, a bit clammy. It seems as if my eyes, thanks to the sight of this faraway snow, were now simulating a distant memory. And though I wish it were different, you are here with me now, as if my body no longer belonged to me alone. Because that’s how it is, I think to myself, as I plug my ears with music: While the city was busy we wanted to rest / She decided to drive up to Observatory crest (Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band).
I’m a body without its heart, which was you, you thumped me through the days. Except, of course, a body without a heart isn’t a body without a heart. A body without a heart is a corpse. And now, as a corporeal remedy: to palm snow, conceal it in my hand, touch it for the first time without you, would that be the first time? For the first time snow in Southland. The mountains are an hour and a half away, you could drive there.
But as I sit in the muffled silence of my van, with the sylvan fragrance of the Little Tree wafting from the rear-view mirror, from which one of my eyes glares at me at half-mast, I’m suddenly frozen in immobility. We were standing before the James Dean bust on the other side and a seagull had stolen chips from your Doritos bag, had scampered off stiffly and then sunk serenely toward the city beneath us. Nevertheless, in the picture you’re smiling, your tonguetip tactfully touching your teeth, and if the photo is enlarged all the way to the end, you think you can make out the day’s orchid-white light inside your mouth on your incisors, and, dissected into pixels, in your sunglasses and doubled, you can see me too, in front of my eyes my phone like a black censor bar.
I drive down some streets that I know as movie titles—Sunset Blvd., Mulholland Dr.—and because I don’t know what else to do, I head away from the mountains and down the coast to Redondo Beach, where I believe I’ve found the parking lot at the pier where we went for a walk once on a foggy ashen morning, half drizzly but not cool, a mood that reminded me of Berlin then, which you couldn’t understand against this specific Pacific backdrop, and you laughed (Berlin by the sea?), and compared me to one of the ex-Pacific-Palisades-expats, grown men homesick like children, who began to cry when they heard a German word, because their language was mangled by the Barbaroi back home. Your laughter in the foggy spray of rain, the scent of salt and sand, your hair trembling in the wind like a flame, like sweetgrass, on the day before the day we flew home, not to Berlin.
My Chevrolet Express is the only car in the lot in front of the burnished ocean that lies like an old layer of gray beneath the cobalt blue of the afternoon sky. An empty aluminum can in the wind is rolling a sound of desolation over the concrete. I’m not even an expat here, because I speak the language, because I’m at home in two tongues. And split between the two. I don’t go to the pier, but stay put behind the wheel, turn on a soundtrack to myself, to momentarily endure myself: Well she left you the holes / The tracks in the backyard, December snow / But those sad souvenirs / They end at the fence line, and they disappear (Iron & Wine). I look out onto the dry square of the parking lot, faded concrete, palm trees, those leggy observers, wherever I look, their fronds like pompoms swaying in the air, as if to spur me on, or to shrug their shoulders at me. Behind them, the frilly film of the silver-gelatin sea. The past is matted and dull, and the foil of the present is brighter, but the dullness is showing through from below. I think of you until the windows are fog and the world disappears in the mist, in the mercury mist. And I seem to know / That everything outside us is / Mad as the mist and snow (W. B. Yeats).
There’s no face to my past, Blackshaw writes in January of his last year. It’s an eyeless mummy, moored and untouchable, sheltered in its hallowed death. There’s a rope tied to my ankle. The other end leads into a grave. There is snow on every headstone.
I sit in the car for a long time. But then the soundtrack must fall silent, after the music the silence seems total, and you must make the silver window weep, you must wipe a cold hole into the mist and let the tiny tear amoebas tear into the silvery surface, and you would like to be sucked upward through this hole into the sky, but you just open the window and smell the salted air, hear the seagulls’ smug guffaw, the light on the meter jumps from green to red. You steer your unwieldy tramwagon away from the ocean and leave this depot for the rush hour, where everything is immobile once more.
In the night, it will be February. Then, soon, there comes a day that will be the anniversary of the last day. Since I couldn’t live through all the four seasons at home, do I now have to repeat them all here? There are no seasons here. I’m afraid of this day with the single 5, half of a broken bicycle, a seahorse bobbing in the undertow, goodbye old day, last day, destined always to remain the shortest day of them all. How helpless you were back then when you told me what was going on, how loose it suddenly became, this we of ours.
I return the van, but I still don’t speak the language of the boulevards and I get lost, landing again and again before the glaring Pacific in front of Santa Monica, the model-sized pleasure pier in the distance. Finally, I find my way onto Wilshire Blvd. toward LA, quickly make my way over the gleaming zebra crossing across the four-lane blacktop, and I remember that Christa Wolf took the Big Blue Bus back to her hotel in the opposite direction each night and that she was looking forward to a glass of wine and an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The feverishly colorful flowers of winter, frozen fireworks, which must have surrounded her, too, back then, when she, as she would later write, was working on her insane project out here. The Quest for Christa W. When she was a scholar at the Getty, when the Getty was still in Santa Monica, she was visited by her husband, who appears only briefly as a single letter in the angel-book she would write about her time here. If I could write, I think as I push open the door to my casita in the garbage-smelly alley—it’s strange how quiet it can be in the middle of this boiling cauldron of a town, and for a second I’m afraid to enter the empty twilit room, afraid of the evening sun filtering its sea green light through the avocado tree and rolling it across the floor—if I had words, if I had letters for you, perhaps I could simply write you here to be with me, and if they read us as us then, the reading experience might somehow reflect back on reality and we would live together in a fiction, about which no one would know that us only means me. Of course, we would be mere fictions also, but maybe we would be happy fictions.
Jan Wilm studied English and American Studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, where he was awarded a PhD for a study of J.M. Coetzee. He has taught English and American Literature in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, and Essen. He is an author, translator, and literary critic, among others for the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. In 2016, he published The Slow Philosophy of J.M. Coetzee. Wilm lives in Frankfurt am Main.