SHORT STORIES

What came before Steinlage should perhaps be mentioned, if only for its irony. We had been drifting from one holiday flat to the next like people rehearsing homelessness in furnished rooms. And then suddenly, absurdly, we moved into a manor house. Twelve rooms. Two centuries old. The irony of elevation. Life has a way of shifting height unexpectedly, as if to ask what we do at different altitudes, who we meet up there, and what we become when the ground beneath us changes level.

Steinlage does not behave like a village. It behaves like a stage. At first glance it is quiet. A handful of houses, a church, immense forests pressing in from every side, farmland folding itself between the trees and water running underneath everything. The quietness is deceptive. The land is layered with history, rules, and continuities older than anyone who lives here now.

For more than six centuries one lineage shaped these forests. Knights first. Hunters and foresters later. Their tools changed from swords to rifles to binoculars, but the structure remained the same. An elevated right to watch.

When I arrived, I felt watched long before I knew by whom. Or by what. It wasn’t paranoia. The air itself seemed to contain an old attention.

One afternoon, half dreaming, I looked out onto the old road and saw, without trying, a procession of knights riding past. Armour. Banners. Laughter. Not imagination exactly. More like a historical afterimage breaking through for a moment. A reminder that the past does not stay buried. It circulates.

The first conceptual spark did not come from the forest but from Beatrice von Beren. On this two hundred year old piece of ground, once entirely in her family’s hands, there is a hunter’s room. A small slaughter and skinning chamber with refrigeration for the day’s catch. I met Beatrice there, and others, Deer Henning among them, at the barn entrance I crossed each day on the way to my studio inside. These encounters were accidental, but they opened something. Their ease around watching and killing, their matter of factness about the rituals of the estate, all of it belonged to the landscape in a way I had not yet understood.

“We eat what we shoot, let’s face it, they eat the finest grass, the best leaves, the juiciest saplings and we have the best meat.” I swallowed hard, accepting the argument, seeing them all in full camouflage, rifles in hand, while I stood beside them with my shopping basket. “How right you are,” I stuttered. “Actually, I’m just a supermarket hunter gatherer.”

Which was a good honest answer.

Beatrice once took us deep into the forest, pointing out paths, telling stories about lineage and local rights, introducing us to places where the privilege of watching had been uninterrupted for generations. We gathered mushrooms, looked at trees, listened to stories about her forest.
That excursion was the first time I sensed that Steinlage was not simply lived in. It was performed. But my attention was elsewhere. I was thinking about the Queen’s Guard boxes in Britain, those compact architectural shells designed for ritualised watching. Their geometry. Their posture. Their silent authority. Their humour. But the forest already had its own version. The Hochsitz. The rural guard box. A wooden periscope of social order.

I realised I didn’t need to import anything. The forest had built the symbol long ago. All I had to do was listen.
Anyone who has walked through a large, dark forest knows the feeling of being watched. Not metaphorically. Literally. You walk, and something tracks your movement before you ever even see it. This feeling returned to me and rearranged everything. The stage, the guard box, the Hochsitz. They suddenly became part of the same architecture.

And then came the smallest, simplest question. What if the deer stepped inside? That tiny inversion destabilises the entire logic of the place. A Hochsitz is normally a place of elevation, control, permission. But once the deer occupies it, the viewer no longer approaches as an overseer. They approach as someone who might be observed.

The forest flips.

The question stayed with me until it had to be built. Still thinking about guard boxes, I began sketching a Hochsitz of my own. Impulsively, almost urgently, and while building, the title presented itself. The Deer of Troy. Or Dear Troy.

I understood that what infiltrated the forest was not the idea but the object itself, the quiet humour of a structure that watches, especially knowing where it would stand. Directly in front of the slaughter room, looking at the hunters through binoculars at close range as they come and go, dragging heavy carcasses from special car racks, trailer loads full of ex-Bambis. Pools of blood reminding me just how much of an animal I am.

The structure follows three languages at once. The Hochsitz, the guard box, and the theatre. Unlike the ones scattered through the forest, mine stands on wheels. A hierarchy that can move. A symbol that refuses fixed roots, only perhaps hides above them.
The materials remain rural, unromantic, practical. Bolts, weathered wood, reclaimed parts, visible joints. The language of barns, sheds and rural life. At the front, a deer skull pushes outward. Not decoration, only presence. Eventually it will align with the viewing slit, turning the entire structure into a mask through which the forest looks back.

Once the structure existed, the forest began asking for its missing parts. First, the antlers. The structure existed. The binoculars, a small Pentax from my father, were mounted. But antlers were essential.

One night I called Deer Henning and explained the problem. A few days later he knocked on the door carrying two trophies in his hands, one of them his first shot. He looked both proud and shy. I told him I would have to cut off the horns. He looked wounded, then shrugged. Susanne didn’t like the skull anyway, he said. Still, when I sawed them off the next day, attached to a card with date, size, time, and a bronze plaque, I felt the weight of it. And then, holding them up against the structure, I realised they were too small. Too late. Too polite for what the object demanded.

Other antlers existed nearby, but they had their own politics. Greta, the ex-wife of the property’s owner, maintained a kind of spectral ownership from across the road. A guard box of her own. She was a polymath by her own declaration. Doctor, psychologist, pianist, calligrapher, Russian speaker, artist, brewer of alcoholic herbal concoctions, sewist, storyteller of encyclopaedic proportions. Hours of monologue.

I once asked, cautiously and at arm’s length over WhatsApp, whether I could use the antlers out of her collection. Absolutely not. They were destined for her own artwork. The theatre of antlers ended there. Almost.

Not long after, Beatrice arrived with company. Timo, a young, open faced, sensitive man. The chief hunter. “A professor in the school of hunting,” as she put it. We went down into the deep interior of the barn to my studio, which I shared with Ben. We called it the Room of Helen. Or the Hellenistic Room. On Ben’s side, the body. Muscle racks, weights, everything the body could wish for. In the middle, a neutral zone, presumably for the soul. And then my side. The mind, or the attempt at one. A circus elephant once wintered there, which somehow explained the room perfectly.

Timo understood the piece immediately and laughed. We talked about antlers. Buying them online was forbidden, he explained, because of animal protection laws, though of course there were loopholes. Mixed boxes. Private estate clear outs. Strange assortments sold quietly. “The prize stags are never given free,” he told me. “Too valuable.” Then he paused and added, almost shyly, that perhaps in the name of art...
He must have seen my face. Beatrice intervened with her mischievous humour. Better to stick with recycled antlers. We all laughed. It was not funny.

The structure blends into the landscape because it follows the forest’s grammar. It belongs to the rhythm of the estate, the old pathways, the centuries of elevated viewpoints. The Trojan mechanism is simple. A familiar form containing an unfamiliar consciousness. Here, landownership and sightlines are not metaphors. They are the architecture. The forest remembers its watchers. The estate remembers its lineage. The old castle, the border post, the watchtower, their functions still echo in the air.

I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I was trying to understand the place. The object appeared because the place insisted. And this was not against hunting. It is not for the deer either. Neither does it moralise the forest. It tries to expose the ethics already embedded in the act of seeing. Who holds the right to watch? Who sees first? What does tradition look like from the other side of the gaze? And, in the end, who eats whom? What remains is a structure that should not exist, yet does.

A Hochsitz behaving like a guard box. A guard box behaving like a stage. A stage carrying the gaze of the deer. And a deer looking back at six centuries of human ritual. A quiet architecture of reversal. A Trojan Deer.

And there I am. A complete stranger in Steinlage. A foreigner in Europe. With the old feeling that I was being watched before I knew by whom.

Camus once wrote that everything was happening without his participation.

On that point, I must disagree.