My watch showed seven. I had an entire night and day before me. But the workshop and the terrace room had no curtains – if I wanted to search for something there I had to wait for daylight. So, for this evening, there was only the room under the eaves left. I sipped the tea and looked around the room.
It covered almost the entire floorplan of the house. The longer walls sloped, interrupted on one side by the curve of the dormer with its small window. Shelves had been built in on both sides with sand-colored curtains drawn in front of them. The wall at my back separated the stair to the workshop from the room.
The gable end window under the overhang gave sufficient light to the staircase landing all day long , and from there a trap door led to the attic under the roof peak.
The other gabel-end which faced the southeast had been double glazed over its entire surface and was now completely covered by a thick baize curtain. The glass door behind the curtain led to an open terrace on the roof of the small workshop. The workshop and a porch were later additions which extended the width of the house by about three meters. The large drafting table, which had a white drawing board laid out on it, stood on two supports next to this glassed-over gabelend.
An open shelf between the curtain and the drafting table held a large cylindrical pot with brushes, two trays with pencils, bottles of India ink, and a glass with drafting pens and quill pens. Two different white plastic palettes hung to one side on a nail, and a small draftsman’s portfolio leaned against one of the supports for the drafting table.
I went over to the drafting table. There was a single sheet of paper on the white surface, a brush sketch done with a hard, flat brush and unthinned, black, India ink as if it were a doodle.
A rider on a horse, riding at a walk, on a line which looked like a wave. The sketch had the terseness and power of expression of a pictograph. It seemed to remind me of something, but I found no connection between the sketch and anything at all that I could remember. Perhaps I was expecting secrets everywhere and so had lost the ability to make simple, logical connections. I put the sheet of paper back on the drafting table.
The tea in the pot was still hot. I poured out the rest, which had now gotten very black, drank it down, and lay down on the narrow bed. I tried to remember.
The next day after that June night four years ago, I had gone back to the house on the hill, but there had been no one there. The house was shut up and a plastic sheet tied to the posts hung over the colored target. An old man in the neighborhood gave me the man’s name and told me that he generally shot at the target in the early morning before the tourists started using the path over the hill to get to the beach.
So the next morning I went back up the hill at about seven o’clock, and as I passed the last house in the village, I could already hear the dull thump of an arrow’s impact from the direction of the target. I went up the path to the level of the house and found a flat stone which lay near the fence in the sun with the night’s dew already gone from its surface.
I sat down so that I could keep an eye on the man. Although he had seen me, he took no notice of my presence. He shot six arrows at a time at the target, then laid his bow down and went down the slope to the target to get his arrows. Apparently he had gone that way a lot. Now, in the sunlight, I noticed a narrow, trodden path in the short grass.
In the daylight, the bow seemed less clumsy than I remembered. I could hardly make out the arrows in the target, but the morning sun threw their shadows on the colorful target and those black streaks pointed to the places where the arrows had hit.
Soon, however, all my attention was on the man. His movements were of a relaxed uniformity and were repeated at such regular intervals that they gave me the impression of a special kind of precision.
The sequence of movement which so impressed me then was always the same. The man picked up his bow, and then stood with his legs slightly spread so that his left shoulder was directed toward the target. He nocked the arrow while he kept the bow set on his left foot, let his right hand drop, and then, motionless, stared for a moment at the grass in front of his feet. Then he looked up and raised the bow toward the target with his left hand while the arrow remained on the string. Then the bow came to a stop. He grasped the string with his right hand, drew, and, almost at the same moment that the arrow reached his chin, let the arrow fly. For a moment he held the bow still in his hand, then he set it back on his foot. He repeated that entire series of movements until there were six arrows in the target.
The sun had risen higher and was hot on my shoulders. It must have been a half hour before he carefully unstrung his bow. To do this, he placed one end of the bow behind his left foot and pulled the other end of the bow over his right shoulder facing forward until he could take the bowstring out of the nock in the end of the bow. I got up and looked over at him. “Could I see the bow?” I asked when I saw that he was about to go back in the house. He hesitated and then came down the flagstone path to the opening in the fence between the high bushes. He looked at me, waiting, and as I said nothing, quietly handed me the bow. It was unexpectedly heavy.
The middle section was made of a mahogany-colored wood and had a deeply cut, sculptured grip area with a flat cutout section above it. The bow’s limbs, which were now relaxed, seemed to be whitelacquered and were surprisingly thin. They were the width of the grip at the ends where they were screwed onto the grip with large knurled screws. They tapered in a flat curve toward the other ends. There was a plate of dark, anodized aluminum screwed to the side of the bow toward the back, on which was seated something like a small disk held in place by a small set screw on its side. A narrow strip of Plexiglas emerged from a slit in the disk, in which a circle about the size of a pea was engraved with a black point in the center of the circle. That had to be his sighting device.
I took the bow in my left hand, as I had seen him do. The bow lay heavy in my hand and the form of the grip seemed to be remarkably unsuited to my way of holding the bow. I told him that, and he grinned happily.
“When you draw a bow,” he said, “then you’re not lifting its weight but rather pulling the bowstring which works along a line from the grip to your hand. It is…” He interrupted himself. “Look, this is an experience which is difficult to explain. When you draw a bow properly, then it fits into the movement of your body by way of your hand. This is the only way you can do it.”
I handed the bow back. That was how it had looked when he did it, and I believed that I had felt something of this confident “… This is the only way you can do it.”
“Do you believe that I could draw this bow?” I asked.
He looked at me carefully. Then he said, “If you seriously wanted to.”
I was astonished. “Isn’t it a matter of strength?”
“Strength,” he said, “strength is the least of what you need to shoot with a bow.”
“What do you need for it then?”
He stared at the target on the opposite slope and then after a while said absently, “I don’t know. Except, perhaps the conviction that you’re doing something completely. Exclusively. Perhaps”, he laughed, “perhaps archery is the most important unimportant thing in the world.”
We went to the house where there was a low wooden bench next to the door, and we sat down on it.
I didn’t know what to say. He leaned back against the house and closed his eyes. His face was tanned but his eyelids were very light.
“Do you want to try?” he asked without moving. He stood up without waiting for my answer. “Come back tomorrow morning early,” he said with his hand already on the door. “I’ll have a bow ready for you.” He nodded to me and closed the door behind him.
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