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Once history is destroyed, all energy may be concentrated on what is about to occur, the future, which, as every grammarian knows, does not exist; though the old man who, in the story, ‘The Value of Money', plants apple trees he will not live to see bear fruit,
can
prepare for a hypothetical future because he has certain knowledge of the past.

The ‘Afterword' gives a depth of focus to the stories which precede it. Some are spare, lucid accounts of events – the slaughter of a cow, the birth of a calf, the mating of a goat on a snowy night, genre scenes in which men and women engage with domestic beasts on terms of familiarity and respect. Another, more evolved story is organised around a pig-killing, a feast, and the death of the grandfather who is a boy's ‘authority about everything which was mysterious'; this culture is carnivorous and patriarchal. And the community is growing old.

Here, youth and, in some sense, hope exist as memory; the sons of Marcel, the orchard planter, won't work the farm when he's gone. Young people mostly leave the village. A certain elegaic tone is inescapable and the longest and strangest story, ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol', takes its narrator finally among the dead. This story, with its fierce dwarf heroine and its hero who has returned to the village to die, is the only one that seems to carry a burden of allegory.

Tiny Lucie, nicknamed the Cocadrille out of love and hate, despised, half crazy, scours the mountains for berries, mushrooms, herbs that she sells in the city, is murdered for her savings, comes back to haunt the man who rejected her in favour of
the spurious lure of America, and convinces him at last of her inextinguishable love and the presence of the good neighbours, the dead.

Pig Earth
is only the first part of a larger work, in which Berger intends to examine still further the meaning and consequence of the threat of the elimination of this reservoir of human experience.

(1979)

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe. These stories of European country life in the late twentieth century are permeated with a sense of loss. We know that, even as we read them, the world they describe is crumbling away. They are stories about the final divorce of human beings from the land, as great a change as, perhaps greater than, the transition from Stone Age to Bronze Age, yet one that has been accomplished within the lifetime of the old people who still hope to die in the houses where they were born, to which their children will never return.

Not that the deserted village is a phenomenon unique to the late twentieth century. Throughout history, plague, famine, and changes in agricultural practice have periodically emptied the countryside. What
is
unprecedented is what could be called the
deruralisation
of the countryside, as the multinational agribusiness industry renders subsistence farming in general and the small farmer in particular permanently redundant. Then everywhere that is not part of a city becomes in effect a giant suburb, dependent for all its services on the urban areas. This has already happened in parts of the USA and in much of Britain. In Europe, it is happening at dizzying speed.

There is a time limit on the timeless, eternal world of the peasant. The villages do not stay deserted for long. They become tourist resorts. Conurbations of weekend cottages. The land becomes so much scenery, no longer the site of labour, reduced to pure decoration.

John Berger approaches this enormous theme with infinite delicacy, through the experience of some of the men and women of
the region of the Alps where he himself lives. He is often present, a reticent witness, in these stories, which are remarkable for their quality of visionary intimacy, a sense of the sacred quality of everyday things that recalls the interiors of Vermeer. And also for their intense respect for people, their
seriousness
.

Berger says that these are love stories, and ‘Boris is Buying Horses' is, amongst other things, a study of obsession, but they are just as much stories about loneliness, that savage passion, as if love and loneliness are aspects of the same thing.

In the first story, ‘The Accordion Player', the central figure, left alone to work his remote farm after his mother's death, finds himself suddenly weeping for the loss of the past, and also for the loss of the future. ‘He wept for the farm where there were no children.' For what woman would marry a peasant farmer, these days? Marry toil that remains ceaseless and an isolation that increases in direct relation to mechanisation, as farming requires fewer and fewer workers? In the old days, the whole village turned out to help with the hay harvest. In summer, everybody adjourned to the high pastures, to graze the cows. What used to be celebrations are now lonely chores. ‘In the Time of the Cosmonauts' puts this very graphically: ‘A number of years ago when the Russian, Gagarin, the first man in space, was circling the earth, every one of the twenty scattered chalets at Peniel housed, each summer, cattle and women and men. So many cattle that there was only just enough grass to go round.' Twenty-five years later, only an old man and a girl are there, and ‘there was so much grass they could let their animals graze night and day'.

As it happens, this girl, Danielle, might have married a peasant farmer, if one had asked her. But the mountains, in the concrete person of the old man, filthy, almost demonic, almost heroic, offer themselves to her in such a primitive and atavistic manner that, terrified, she runs away.

Even so, little that is primitive and atavistic remains in these upland farms, where now the mating season heralds the visit to the eager cows not of the bull but of the inseminator. The most primitive and atavistic thing in the mountains is a man-made horror, the manganese plant in the title story, ‘Once in Europa'.

A small family farm, home of the woman who tells the story, is flung down like a gauntlet in the face of insensate industrialisation; the plant surrounds it. The plants kill her lover; it has
crippled the man whom she later marries. During the course of her life, its noxious fumes lay waste to the valley in which she lives.

Yet there is an infernal grandeur about the manganese plant and the devastation it wreaks. Only nature itself could be more destructive. Can't one bolt of lightning kill a whole flock of sheep? There is no such grandeur about the slow erosion of the farming communities as they are encroached upon by the banality which is our century's particular gift to civilisation. In ‘Boris is Buying Horses', a woman seduces a farmer in order to gain possession of his house, which she and her husband proceed to run as a souvenir shop. This is a glimpse of a future in which the Alps have become a giant theme park.

Once in Europa
is about history at work in daily life. This is the second volume of Berger's projected trilogy about twentieth-century peasant life, which has the general title
Into Their Labours
. It is Berger's genius – and I don't use the word lightly – to reveal to us how the process of history affects people we come to know as friends, so that we suffer with them, grieve for them, hope for them, realise that we, too, are part of the same process.

The final story in the book, ‘Play Something For Me', takes a young farmer on a day trip to Venice, where he makes love to a shop assistant during a
festa de l'unita
, which is a good urban substitute for a village festival. She urges him to leave his cows and come and work in the oil refineries at Mestri. Perhaps he will. Like the eponymous accordion player of the first story, he is a music maker. ‘The accordion was made for life on this earth, the left hand marking the bass and the heart-beats, the arms and shoulders labouring to make breath, and the right hand fingering for hopes!' These are not pessimistic stories, although often they will make you cry.

(1989)

Unlike the Grimms' collection of fairytales, without which no home is complete, their collection of German legends has never been translated into English before. What is the difference between a fairytale and a legend? The Grimms themselves scrupulously differentiate in their own Foreword to the first German edition of 1816. A fairytale, they say, can ‘find its home anywhere', it belongs to the timeless, international zone of poetry; but the legend – ah! the legend, securely attached to a specific place, often a specific date, is the folk spirit recreating its own history. Is distilled essence of folk spirit. Is, in short, essentially, gloriously and unpollutedly
German
. ‘Nothing is as edifying or as likely to bring more joy than the products of the Fatherland.' H'm.

Ironically, Donald Ward's scholarly notes on individual legends suggest that many of the German legends aren't so very German, after all – wild hunts, mermen, headless horsemen, dwarfs and giants distribute themselves throughout Europe and, indeed, the world with a grand disregard for frontiers.

Volume One is composed of odd, fragmentary bits and pieces of pseudo-history and folk belief taken, mostly, directly from the mouths of the German folk themselves. It is a feast of snacks. The very inconsequentiality is enchanting. ‘There is a bridge outside of Haxthusen-Hofe near Paderborn. Beneath it lives a poor soul who sneezes from time to time.' Who? Why? You can almost see the Grimms' informant shrug. Who knows? Just take my word for it.

Early nineteenth-century Germany was rife with such spooks;
many of them seem to have fallen out of a household tale, folk motifs in search of a narrative. What of the ghostly girl, carrying a bunch of keys, often seen washing herself in a certain spring? And another girl, with long, golden hair, who frequents the mountainside on which she was burned to death – what
can
they be up to?

The answer, usually, is nothing. Neither numinous nor ominous, they possess only the existential validity of being there, part of the imaginative furniture of the place, ubiquitous and homely as the village idiot.

Sometimes the legends are uncanny just because they are so enigmatic:

Once a man was riding through a forest late in the evening when he saw two children sitting next to each other. He admonished them to go home and not to tarry any longer. But the two began laughing loudly. The man rode on and after a while he encountered the same two children, who began laughing again.

The pointlessness of it is the whole point; it is a free-form apparition, awaiting a random injection of significance, or the formal shaping of the storyteller's craft.

I wonder if the method of the collectors differed when they were out after
real
pseudo-history, serious German essence rather than frivolous invented narrative? How much did they themselves want their informants actually to believe in the things the informants were relating? The almost lunatic precision of dating and locating material – ‘in 1398 . . . near Eisenach, in Thuringia . . .'; ‘In 1519, just before the plague killed many people in the city of Hof . . .' – gives a specious appearance of authenticity to many a tall tale, though, indeed, some of these references come from old books to back up the memories of old people. All the same, these legends occupy a curious grey area between fact and fiction.

There are anecdotes, old-wives tales, tales of saints and miracles, marvellous lies designed to test the gullibility of the listener – most of them designed to be neither believed nor disbelieved, designed to court no more positive response than ‘Well, fancy that!' It is a loose-jointed, easy-going way of decorating the
real world with imaginative detail. As Lévi-Strauss says about such benign and cheering superstitions, they make the world ‘more tasty'. It was a tasty old world that the Grimms found, all right.

Mermen are just the same as we are except for their green teeth. The edges of the petticoats of water-pixies are always sopping wet. The devil, a constant visitor, lends his name to inauspicious tracts of land like the Devil's Dance Floor, and the Devil's Pillow, a boulder on which the very mark of his ear may still be seen. Dwarfs borrow pots and pans for their weddings. Fairies borrow human midwives for their lyings-in.

Some narratives start out like true fairytales, only to collapse in grand anti-climax, pricked balloons from which the magic suddenly leaks out. A young man releases a dwarf from a spell but no good fortune accrues; he can't get rid of the dwarf, an unwelcome lodger, thereafter. A girl sees another dwarf pouring water in front of a house; shortly afterwards, the house is saved from fire. Some time later, the dwarf is out with his watering-can again; and what happens this time? A big fat nothing happens, this time.

Often the very magical matter of the fairytale comes down to earth with a bump in these matter-of-fact renditions of wonderful occurrences. The anti-hero makes his appearance. A poor girl who, like the Fairy Melusine, is a snake from the waist down, must be kissed three times by a chaste youth to regain her natural shape. But the lad from our village dared kiss her only twice! ‘Each time, in great anticipation for the unhoped-for miracle, the maiden made such dreadful gestures that he feared she was going to tear him to pieces. He, therefore, did not dare kiss her for the third time, and instead departed in haste.' Departed, in fact, to forthwith lose his virtue to an ‘impure woman' and, with it, all his fairytale eligibility for the task of rescue.

Some of the legends are, in fact, shaggy-dog stories. The boy in Freiburg in 1545, for instance, who was cursed to remain standing up. Eventually his feet wore grooves in the floor. Because he was standing near the stove he got in everybody's way, so they picked him up and stowed him away in corners. At last they all got bored with him and covered him up with a cloth.

Amongst many other such delights may be found the true stories of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and of Bishop Hatt and the
Rats. There is a delicious little giant girl who scoops up plough, horses, ploughmen, and all in her apron and takes them home to play with: ‘Oh, Father, it's such a marvellous toy!'