594
PARTISAN REVIEW
woods anywhere in this country, and was interrupted by short wood
roads that apparently soon came to a dead end in the underbrush. They
had deep tire tracks, and were littered with trash, apparently not only
from vehicles on the ground but also from the hundreds of small aircraft
passing overhead every day; even the trees had scraps of paper and plas–
tic caught in them, all the way up to their crowns.
But the pharmacist knew a second forest within this forest. This
copse was surrounded by a ditch and a girdle of brambles, with a breach
in one spot where he could enter by way of a plank, without even hav–
ing to duck. After the semidarkness outside, it was light in here, as if in
a clearing, yet many things were growing here, providing shade, but
each tree or bush clearly at a distance from the next, off by itself-and
thus the shadows were also separate-and as a rule only one of each
variety-one raspberry bush, one birch, one pine, and so on, in a circle,
but all random, without order, which precluded the impression of being
in a tree or plant nursery. Also there were things growing here that were
very unusual for the area and wouldn't have been considered possible,
such as a Spanish chestnut, a Serbian spruce (a survival from the Ice
Age, thin as a rod but towering above the others), a mulberry tree, a
sycamore.
When he sat down with his old, cracked briefcase under the beech–
it, too, a unique exemplar-the tree with the broadest shade there, he
saw that he wasn't alone for a change. A few shadows over, a group of
woodsmen lay stretched out on the ground, taking their midday break,
with their tools-saws and ladders-next to them. They'd set fire to a big
pile of roots they'd dug out, and the fire was burning brightly, without
smoke, another unique feature among the others. The pharmacist ate like
them: the sandwiches he'd brought along in his briefcase-theirs were
very similar-and, for dessert, an apple (from the Taxham supermarket).
"Pharmacist?" The smell of medicine, which, whether he wanted it
or not, clung to him in his workplace and for a while after he left it-at
any rate his car was always filled with it, and he sometimes avoided the
car for that very reason-had dissipated long since, on the way. And his
clothing was so inconspicuous that in cut and color, at least there and
at this moment, it was hardly distinguishable from that of the woods–
men. And besides, he was barefoot like them, had already taken off his
shoes coming in: Noon was the time of day when he felt a great weak–
ness inside him, and not from hunger, so it helped him to have the
ground directly underfoot, especially in these woods where for a few
steps the path was soft with recently fallen piles of chestnut blossom–
strings, but then for instance offered a stretch with nothing but the hard
