TE23 Double Feature

Anke Laufer

“The Island”

13:47 Second stop. Aasfeld Services. You stand there and watch: above the scorched earth, a lark climbs into a bruise-coloured bank of cloud, up into the middle of a lightning storm. It is singing its heart out; the carriageways’ roar like the surge and ebb of applause. Soon after comes the hail. As if a whipped-up mob were throwing stones at the theatre. You flee into the building. You stand and stare out, holding your service-station paper cup of lukewarm coffee. Waiting for it to be over. 15:34 The tailback winds across a mighty bridge over a valley, and when a sunbeam pierces the blanket of cloud, the crown of lashes above your right eye catches fire. You try to brush away the foreign body of light, like the thoughts that you try to extinguish: thoughts about time and what is yet to come. The way you see this world – for God’s sake . Your gaze as you’re driving, underestimating the landscape, perspectives shifting, running into a blurred video clip. The views are cut together in a fleeting memory, pasted into a 194

Cubist collage. Nothing fits properly, corners stick out, whole zones fall through the cracks – gone, lost. Perhaps that’s why you spot it: the island. This territory cut off from everything, hacked out of the scenery far below you, in the midst of the multi-laned ribbons, the sickle shaped slip roads. It lies on the other side of a railway embankment, this side of a reservoir, to the south-east, tapered into a tongue that pokes itself under the bridge. An island, quite clearly: size, morphology, tree population, layers of time and earth, half-sunken fortress walls of major building sites, with smaller, later interventions, scarred over again, while the roads extend around it in new ridges and faults. But at the centre, the island survives, an island of considerable proportions in a sea of man-made, barren wastes – shady, lonely, sumptuous. Wild. So you take the exit, a few kilometres further on, a road that winds circuitously down into the landscape’s basement floor. On the satnav’s screen, the zone is dark, empty and nameless, but strangely it tells you there’s a carpark, 195