Neither of us came from this country. He was more from it than I, having been born in the capital, but his mother was born in the Carpathian Mountains and his father in Leipzig, and he grew up in the abandoned zones between world-class languages, which is perhaps why he gravitated to one that, however dead, offered a proper name for everything. And, being dead, it never changes. A lake is a lake is a lake forever. A lake cannot one day become a blind eye or a grave.

One afternoon, as we were inspecting a new shipment of ferns and orchids in the upper gardens, a procession of three black sedans with darkened windows drove up the alley of imperial palms, unsettling a cloud of dust, and halted in front of the temporary park office. The sight of them, like dark weasels among the greenery, sent chills up my spine. All four doors of the first car sprung open, and four men in military uniforms and gold sunglasses got out. One of them rapped on the door of the park office, entered, and after some moments emerged again. Then all four doors of the second car opened, and four more men in uniform emerged, one of whom gestured leisurely in our direction. The doors of the third black sedan remained closed. Shouldn’t you go to them? I asked. Yes, he said, but remained glued to the spot, a small Aphelandra squarrosa trembling in his palm. Yes of course, he said again, more to the plant than to anyone else. In the end, they came and got him and took him away in the third black sedan. A single door was opened from within, and I remember that as he stood peering into the dark upholstered interior, the look on his face was that of a man standing on the edge of an abyss, equally afraid of falling and of throwing himself in.

Plan by plan, sketch by sketch, undulating bed by bed, he bent the neck of nature. Nature isn’t a daisy chain, it isn’t a pocketful of posies, he used to say. Nature bites the hand that feeds it. But he never tried to tame nature, he never removed its claws or its venom. That was his secret, what set him apart from the rest: he only bent nature’s neck, he never broke it. That was his genius and his downfall, too. He let nature keep its wildness, and one day nature turned around and struck him down. Not one day, in fact—very slowly, stealthily, but the result was the same.