Uprooting

Uprooting

"Do the right thing, because it is right" - Kant

I was uprooted again by a trick of faith, flung from the fertile earth I had been nourishing for over a century and a half, flung with such ease of conviction and absolute lack of malice, into the mouth of a man on trial in the Holy Land. A man claiming to be absolutely sure, with a twinkle of hope in the eye. I learned that it can happen to anyone, and that it takes a while to restore one's name and privileges with those upstairs and downstairs. The man in whose mouth I was lodged for speech, pictured the pastoral and penetrating odors of farmhouses in the countryside of his boyhood and adolescence. The starry sky above him, and how he never had enough time for any of it. His forehead would expand, high and broad, larger than the average German's, in his cell, torn between the green and the affairs of his father, the monumental - pedestals, columns, iron, repeating "Ich bin ein Deutscher" to himself.