House by the Lake.
Drive.
Sometimes, to change something, you have to leave. Freedom begins with the sound of an engine. The roar of the motor woke the road. The low hum quickly gained strength, turning into a dense growl. The city hadn’t fully awakened yet. But the Harley was already breathing with its full chest.
It was carrying Clara and me away from the pressure of the city. Empty streets, rare cars, and sleepy intersections flashed past. We were distancing ourselves from the concrete embrace of the stone jungle, which squeezed like a vice. Where nerves were stretched like sixth-gauge strings, ringing from the rhythm of the outside world. The city was a machine of calculations and foresight, in which almost no room remained for living breath.
Sometimes it seemed the megalopolis truly lived a life of its own. A huge body of concrete and glass slowly digested people, turning them into tired shadows moving on a schedule. Its streets pulsed with flows of cars like arteries, and the windows of houses glowed with cold electric light—thousands of indifferent eyes.
Gradually, the dull echo of the streets vanished, and the engine sounded different—deeper, freer. The wind hit my chest. The road markings began to flash faster. And the motorcycle seemed to understand: space lay ahead. For my tuned Heritage, this was the first outing into the long-awaited expanse, and it responded with a confident grip on the road.
City streets had always kept it in check—traffic lights, intersections, dense rows of cars. Here, nothing restrained its heavy breathing. The Harley straightened its gait like a beast finally released from a cramped cage. It rolled easily and decisively—with that powerful smoothness that appears only when a machine is allowed to do what it was created for: to go forward.
Every twist of the throttle echoed with a deep vibration in the frame. The road vanished under the wheels in a long gray ribbon. It seemed the bike itself felt its rhythm. It wasn’t just moving—it was striving forward, as if it had been waiting for this moment for a long time.
Behind me, Clara laughed—almost inaudibly in the wind. I felt her hugging me tighter on the turns. Her hair fluttered. Sometimes it whipped my shoulders, and then I felt the light scent of her perfume mixed with the cold smell of the road.
We raced further and further from the city, leaving behind the lead-gray smog that thickened the air above it. The piercing wind hit my face. It grew stronger, the air—colder and cleaner. The concrete gradually disappeared, giving way to occasional fields and groves. The road lost its urban straightness. The asphalt became coarser. Rare gas stations vanished, and billboards gave way to small signs:
“Protect the forest from fire”
and signs
“Caution: wild animals.”
It felt as if we were crossing an invisible border—a line beyond which the world ceases to be a machine. The asphalt ended almost unnoticed, giving way to an old forest track amidst a wall of trees. The Harley gave a dissatisfied shake of its frame but continued forward, picking its way between tall pines. The air here was different. In it, one felt the damp coolness of the forest, the smell of needles and old tree resin—a heavy, tart aroma that never exists in the city.
Calmness.
Clara leaned forward slightly and touched my shoulder.
— “Almost there, ” she said.
We turned onto a path deep into the forest. The house appeared unexpectedly—as if it had been standing there all this time, just waiting for us to finally see it. A gray roof flashed between the pines, and then the whole picture opened up.
An old log cabin with a wide terrace looked out at the lake calmly, as if nothing in the world ever changed. Clara climbed off the motorcycle and just stood for a few seconds, looking at the house. She ran her hand along the terrace railing, as if checking if everything here remained in its place. Just like the key, which she found immediately without looking.
The wooden walls of the house smelled of resin, old wood, and the cold water of the lake—that special scent found only in houses that have stood by the water for a long time. The mirror-like surface of the lake, which opened up behind the house, reflected floating clouds lit by the setting sun and a magical, pink-lilac sky.
A light mist was already rising over the water itself. It drifted in thin strips between the piles of the old pier and slowly spread over the water’s surface, as if the lake were exhaling cold night air. The forest around seemed ancient and patient—as if it had seen many such fugitives coming here in search of silence.
There was no mobile signal here. No neighbors. Only us, the house, the forest, and the water. It was a corner of silence—simple, slightly detached from the world, but cozy in its own way, like places to which roads do not lead, only the habit of returning.
The only hint of civilization was a power line passing through the forest. The wires stretched over the trees in a straight line, almost without disturbing the peace—rather reminding us that the big world was somewhere nearby, but not here.
By the water, on two old logs, lay an overturned HDPE boat. Heavy, modular, clearly a two-seater. It had been neatly put away for storage, as one puts away things used rarely. It looked a bit clumsy and probably not the most stable on the water, but there was something primal in it. Nearby, under a shed by the wall, stood two oars. A bit further—an old metal mug on an overturned crate. To the side on the ground lay a coiled rope. It had long since rotted from moisture and sun, suggesting no one had lived here for a long time.
Nocturne.
In the evening, the lake barely moved. The wind died down, and the water lay motionless, reflecting the darkening sky. From the opposite shore, the scent of damp forest and cold needles drifted slowly. Somewhere in the distance, a night bird gave a short cry—sharp, but immediately dissolving into the silence.
We sat on the terrace and looked at the water. After the city, this silence seemed almost unreal. No hum of cars, no distant noise of highways to which the ear has grown so accustomed that it stops noticing. The forest around was silent. Only the water quietly lapped against the piles of the old pier.
A moment later, the hearing began to distinguish individual layers of this stillness: a distant sigh of the wind, the soft movement of water near the shore, the dry rustle of needles under the steps of some invisible beast. Clara was silent for a long time. Then she took off her jacket, laid it on the railing, and took a deep breath of the cold air.
— “Everything is different here, ” she said quietly.
I didn’t answer. Words were not needed. Night slowly descended upon the lake, and the forest around grew darker until finally, only the water remained—black, calm, bottomless.
Aria.
The evening had finally cooled down. Clara was brewing strawberry tea, and its warm, sweet aroma slowly spread through the house.
I lingered by the old bookshelf, running my fingers along the spines of books that seemed forgotten there since the last century. Between yellowed technical manuals and heavy atlases, I suddenly found my folder with printed poems by Lena Liri.
— “I wonder how this ended up here?”
I opened it at random, and my eyes were immediately caught by the lines of the poem “The Hermit.”
That evening, my state of mind almost matched that text. The silence of the lake outside the windows, the scent of old wood, and the feeling of a voluntary escape from city noise suddenly found precise words.
I sat down at the coffee table, opened my sketchbook, and right between the drawings began writing a translation into German — as if these pages had long been missing words.
The sentences came surprisingly easily, as if the rhythm of the German language fit this forest isolation better. It was simply inspiration — an attempt to translate the silence of “The Hermit” into a structure I could understand. I wasn’t thinking about music, and I wasn’t thinking that these lines would ever become part of a complex score. That three years later, this silence would explode into the thunder of the composition “Ins Nirgendwo” (“Into Nowhere”) — the fastest, most industrial and most energetic track of an album that did not yet exist even as an idea.
The house was warm. And for the first time in a long while, a sense of calm settled inside me.
Harmony.
I woke up with a sharp anxiety. My body still remembered the urban rhythm—the hum of cars, the vibration of the subway, the nervous heartbeat tuned to the noise of the city. I walked out onto the wooden pier.
There was absolute, ringing silence. Only the rare splash of water near the shore and the quiet creak of old boards underfoot. The morning air was cool and damp. From the water came the smell of raw wood, algae, and cold stone. The lake seemed to be steaming. A light mist hung over the water, turning the opposite shore into a blurred silhouette. The forest seemed distant and almost unreal, as if it existed in another layer of the world.
Clara sat at the very edge, huddling in my jacket. Her silhouette was barely discernible in the fog, and for a moment it seemed to me she had emerged from this morning haze as quietly as sound emerges from total silence. Her bare feet slowly drew circles on the water. Sometimes the wind brought the scent of her hair—light, almost elusive, mixed with the cold air of the lake.
She looked at the surface of the lake, where clouds drifted slowly. The forest was reflected in it as an inverted, mirrored world—sometimes it seemed that this was the real one.
— “Listen closely, ” she said softly, without turning around.
I sat down beside her on the cold boards. And for the first time in a long time, I felt the tension that had been squeezing me lately slowly dissolve into the water.
I listened to this silence for a long time, and it gradually began to fill with sounds. The noise of the wind in the pines. The snap of a twig deep in the woods. This was sound—living, natural, requiring no control. In it, there were no amplifiers, no guitar stacks, no drum kits.
The wind passed through the pines, creating a slow, barely audible rhythm. The water answered with dull thuds against the old pier boards. And suddenly, something simple became clear to me. We had been trying to make the music louder all this time. But real sound is not about volume; it’s about depth.
Clara sat beside me, her hand in mine. We just sat and listened. That morning, I thought for the first time that music might be born not from noise. But from silence. Then the sound becomes something else, and it had to be sought anew.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)