Meetings with Herbert

Herbert drawing at our apartment in Cambridge, Mass, 1963

Herbert stumbled on my brother Gerhard and me having a lunch of bread and sardines on a blisteringly hot August noon in the shadow of Santa Croce in Florence in 1952. He came from Berlin, where he was a student of architecture at the TU. He travelled by autostop, while we had pushed our bicycles loaded with a tent, sleeping bags, and cooking equipment from Göttingen all the way across the Swiss Alps. It was his and our first time in Italy. We were drunk on art, museums, architecture, and the colorful street life.

Herbert had one thing above us, he expertly drew and inked his own pictures. Gerhard sometimes painted watercolors. I explored the visual world with my first camera—a simple box with a lens.

We stayed at the crowded Youth Hostel bordering on an outdoor cinema. Every evening we sat in the windows and watched operatic films until long after midnight. The noise was anyway too high to sleep. One could cook there too, but Herbert introduced us to a municipal soup kitchen near Santa Maria della Carmine, where we consumed huge quantities of spagetti with tomato sauce untill an irate city employe threw us out.

Dark-haired and sporting a brushy mustache, Herbert was a quiet man given to brief, sometimes absurd commentaries which he often softened by a barely contained chuckle. I liked him for the things he saw: the prevailing siena-red colors of the rooftops, a spindly, old man selling lemons from a basket, the characters in the soup kitchen, or a hidden detail of a fresco which I hadn't noticed.

A week later we separated. Herbert left for Rome, and we pedalled our bicycles south. The weather had turned cold and windy. On a bare mole hill somewhere in the Tuscan Crete we sat half a day in the tent. It poured. The pass at Radicofani, a mere 900 meter, seemed as steep as any in the Alpes. On the descent I bumped into Gerhard. Several spokes of his rear wheel were broken. But in Umbria the sun came out.

We reached Rome on the fourth day and found Herbert at the Youth Hostel on Monte Mario. He was in despair, ants ruled the place. The delapidated villa was the dirtiest hostel we ever stayed in. I taught him how to put the legs of the iron bedsteads into discarded tomato cans filled with water to keep the millions of ants from crawling all over him at night.... Again Herbert had ferried out a cheap pasteria on Arco delle Ciambelli behind the Rotunda, where we now ate twice a day. Bicyle thieves roamed Rome, so we took the bus into the city, a long way home. Our money was very short, we couldn't afford the expensive museums—except for the Vatican and the Sistina. I found a place where one could jump into the Forum Romanum from a modest height. We explored it twice free of charge. Herbert saw much more than we. He would later sell some of his drawings in Capri to make up for his dwindling resources.

Beyond Rome we didn't meet Herbert again. He spent several days in Naples before we could reach it, conducted tours for Frenchmen at Pompeii to earn some money; met a nice girl in Sorrento, and was invited to the villa of a French writer at Santa Agatha. A vegetable boat took him to Capri. I envied him these adventures, but two people were too many, and the fear for our bikes immobilized us in the cities. He hitchhiked back to Berlin on the very last day of his interzonal travel pass. All these events he described in a long letter, which reached me at my parent's home in January 1953. It still exists.

We exchanged a few letters in the following three years. His were often accompanied by a small etching or by ink drawings on the letterhead: a village in Corsica, where he went in 1953, bizarre sketches of the New-Year's ghost which persued him, subterraneous landscapes, and the grotesk, threatening tanks of the Allies in Berlin.

In 1954 Gerhard and I hitchhiked to western Turkey and Istanbul. There we found an au-pair position in a Turkish family for Gerhard's twin-sister Christine, who had been in a similar position in England for two years. In the summer of 1955 I was stuck in Göttingen, busy with my diplom thesis, but Gerhard decided to return to Turkey to visit Christine and explore Anatolia. Somehow Herbert joined him.

The trio took a boat from Istanbul through the Bosphorus and the Black Sea to Samsun, a godforsaken harbour town in Eastern Anatolia. It was hot and they went to take a bath in the warm water. Suddenly Herbert, still in shallow water, cried out for help. He collapsed with a severe liver attack and was close to passing out. He drank too much in those years, and was it the forced abstinence or the heat his latent cirrhosis played him a trick. They dragged him to the primitive hospital and eventually took him by train back to Istanbul. His father came and flew with him to Berlin. Eventually he stopped drinking and was dry during the last 30 years of his life.

Many years passed before we saw him again. I had moved to Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts to finish my Ph. D.. I had also married Barbara, and Susanne was 4 years old when Herbert came to vist us in 1963. He arrived distraught after two weeks in New York and at Harry Bertoia's in Pennsylvania. It took us a few days to drag his story out. He had flown on Icelandic from Luxembourg via Reykjavik. He had arrived two days late in New York. I shook my head. "Well," he said, "I had had a string of nightmares before the trip, seeing the plane on fire. So it came as no surprise when at night on the flight to New York the Superconstellation developed engine trouble over the Atlantic. I looked out and saw the engine on fire!" He was lucky. The captain made an emergency landing in a bog 20 kilometers from Gander, Newfoundland. The plane was in shambles, but nobody was seriously hurt. Buses rescued them, and they were put up in empty US military housing for 2 nights. "I never ate so much," he told us, "or drank so much coffee. Whenever we showed up at the airport another dinner appeared." Eventually a Canadian plane took them to New York.

Not enough strange misfortunes. a bouquet of lilies, wrapped in newspaper in his arm, he took a bus to Pennsylvania to visit Harry Bertoia. The last stretch to Bertoia's house he had to walk along the highway. Suddenly a police car screamed to a stop and ordered him to drop the package and raise his hands. What was he doing, walking alone through the countryside? Lilies?? They thought it was a gun.... They let him go. At Bertoia's chaos reigned. Harry and an assistant, stark nacked and green from copper-oxyd, were welding metal sculptures with acetylene torches. A young woman, equally bare floated freely between them. When asked to lay the table for dinner, she moped and stretched across the round table with the words: "The table is laid....." Much later Herbert made a pencil sketch of this memory, Die Grosse Liegende, 1997.

Barbara tried to chase the cobwebs from his head as best she could, but these days became infused with a strange yet loving atmosphere. Herbert told us his childhood nightmares and chuckled a lot. The culmination was a mussel hunt at Wingersheak Beach, southeast of Boston. You have to be very fast to catch the mussels before they vanish in the depth of their sinkholes. Herbert, already preoccupied with what lay under the earth's surface, roots, corpses, animals, in the many landscapes he drew and welded into skulptures, was fascinated. We took our small catch to the huge, deserted "haunted" house of a friend with some 20 beds and a dirty kitchen, and steamed the clams in a big pot over an open fire in one of its fireplaces. Herbert wouldn't touch the slippery morsels. Brigitte has a photo of Barbara and me eating mussels. We look like aborigines engaged in a sacred act.

From then on my memory is hazy. I visited Herbert in Berlin, maybe in 1966. Barbara and I saw him and Brigitte once more a few years later. On the first of these visits he presented me with the Small Sign VIII (1966) for Barbara. The print of the Torso arrived by mail. Somewhere in the late seventies our sporadic correspondence died out. Not knowing why, we kept silent, until one morning in 2006 I woke up with the sudden urge to search for the old friend. Fom Brigitte's website I learned that he had died in 2002.

Pacific Palisades, August 2006