Zsuzsanna Gahse
TRANS. BY Chenxin Jiang
Seeing and Hearing
Last summer I had the chance to book an inexpensive hour-long flight in a private airplane. The pilot was said to be an actor, but an experienced and enthusiastic pilot nonetheless. Upon learning that he had built his own plane, I was so astonished that I kept asking more and more questions. Soon I found myself negotiating a private flight, and I thought I could no longer back out.
Two or three days later I was standing on an airfield south of the Thur and waiting; it turned out that I had driven to an airfield that was only for glider planes. Someone on the large, green field pointed me to the right airfield on a map. I got there late, but the field was empty. A few women and men were sitting with drinks in a nondescript wooden hut on the edge of the concrete strip. They said that a red airplane had just been in contact and would definitely be there soon. They also told me how much an hour-long flight with them would cost, and it was roughly the same amount I had arranged to pay for my inexpensive flight. Some time later, a plane circled in the sky above me, and there was something very direct about the way it landed, as if a car was driving straight at me.
Then the actor climbed out of the plane and approached me on foot, and I went out to the airfield with him and climbed on board. I had to take off the hat I’d brought as a precaution and received a pair of headphones in return, because he said that although it was a small plane, you couldn’t hear a word without headphones. It’s strange to think that the official aerial pose, the official sky and air pose, starts with headphones. Like two air force officers wearing black earmuffs, able to see each other’s faces only in profile, we started trundling a few meters along the bumpy ground, and the moment of liftoff was unmistakable, as if we were driving except in three dimensions. While we strained to climb higher and higher, as if we were climbing a steep hill, the pilot told me that he had built the plane himself, and I was no longer surprised by this fact. He said he preferred having the wings above the body of the plane rather than below it, because it made for a better view. I easily recognized the streets I knew, the bridges, highways, woods, where the railway tracks led, and no part of the view was obstructed by wings fitted in the wrong place. These technical questions aside, it was a good day for flying, and there was no fog or rain. The Thur lay beneath us, and instead of appearing to flow, it was rigid like plaster and bottle-green. Underground the Thur is the biggest river in Europe, and if you know that fact you can observe it as such, whereas someone who doesn’t know that won’t get much out of the aerial view, since you can’t see what’s underground.
Whenever the pilot explained something, I could hear nothing but crackling. I must be height-deaf, I thought. After a few exchanges, he realized that I couldn’t hear his questions because my headphones hadn’t been set up correctly, but since they couldn’t be fixed midflight, I would remain partly deaf for the rest of the flight.
We had agreed that he would fly at a height of only five or six hundred meters. The pilot said that in populated areas that was not allowed, but outside those areas he would fly lower as I had requested, and when we had left the last village behind us, we dropped to half the height we were flying at, to the height we had agreed upon. The hills beneath us were nearly flat, rolled flat, scraped flat, barely worth calling hills, although they divided the Untersee or western tip of Lake Constance from the Thur region; I could only recognize the features of the ancient mountains by picking out buildings along the roads and in the woods.
Then we flew across the woods, and in a clearing of sorts I saw a little affair, entwined bodies twisting on a blue blanket, two bodies. We could easily make out people on the ground, which meant that down below you didn’t only have to worry about being disturbed by someone coming from the side or behind, but also from the air, as in wartime. Regardless of whether you were lying on the ground, running, or just standing there, a red gnat like this one might be following you, and every person, road, and farmhouse could be in peril.
After flying over the hilly plains we found ourselves above Lake Constance, the Rhine flowing closely along the lake’s southern banks while barely intermingling with its waters, and on the northern side the town of Meersburg and one village after another.
I hadn’t planned to fly over the lake, but we spent at least ten minutes hovering above the water with its white lines, its lighter and darker patches. The surface of the lake looked rigid, just as the Thur had, the waves stood still, and the different colors did not move. We roared over the marvelously colored sheets of lake toward Bregenz, which looked just the way it does on a map. Everything looked like a map. What was I doing flying over maps? I was sitting in a plane that was not inexpensive and flying over maps. The man next to me pointed upward at a few other airplanes, sideways at a flock of birds that had just swooped beneath us, and showed me several helicopters, kites circling, white gulls further below, and between us and the other planes, two propeller-driven planes. You should look at the sky, he said after we had landed. He had already tried to explain this to me when we were in the air, while I was preoccupied with our agreed-upon height of five to six hundred meters, with wanting to see the overgrown old walls and paths that had sunk into the ground. I had read that they could be seen from this height, without stopping to think about the fact that you had to be able to recognize what you wanted to see, otherwise you might think you were looking at an arid field down below because you noticed a light-colored patch, without realizing that it was actually the remains of a Roman settlement, or think that a Roman settlement was hidden in the light-colored ground, when it was nothing but a dry field. I know that the earth in these parts, the topsoil at least, is dark brown, nearly umber. The ground could just as easily be yellow, copper red or black, and the fields could be strewn with stones, but they aren’t. In some aerial pictures you can see pale rectangular shapes and straight lines. The remains of Roman walls probably lie hidden in plain sight, as it were, the rectangles are buried farmhouses, and the long lines indicate where the streets used to run. I used to know that and still do, but I don’t know anything else, maybe I’ve been sitting in an airplane forever and am still in one, and meanwhile the headphones have been fixed.
Zsuzsanna Gahse was born in 1946 in Budapest, grew up in Vienna and Kassel, and currently lives in Switzerland. She has published twenty-five books, and has translated the works of Hungarian writers such as Zsuzsa Rakovszky und István Vörös into German. Her work has received numerous prizes, including the Aspekte-Literaturpreis (1983) and the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Preis (2006).
Chenxin Jiang was born in Singapore and grew up in Hong Kong. She translates from German, Italian, and Chinese; recent translations include French Concession by Xiao Bai for HarperCollins and The Cowshed by Ji Xianlin for New York Review of Books. Awards she has received include the 2011 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation as well as a PEN Translation Fund Grant.