Across, page 8
Often there was something to laugh about: once, some horses actually turned up at the bus terminus, hitched to cabs that seemed to have come to this wilderness by mistake. Inside them sat exotic tourists, aiming their cameras without conviction at the Colony. But I didn’t laugh.
Yet I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me. In fact, I felt a strange satisfaction at “exposing” myself, just as there can be a certain satisfaction in exposing oneself to total darkness or a glacial wind—in laying oneself open to the worst sort of adversity. Satisfaction? No, pleasure. Pleasure? No, determination. Determination? No, acquiescence in the conditions of existence.
In all those days, I never once felt anything akin to guilt. What I felt was something worse. I had thrust a long knitting needle so accurately into someone’s heart that there was not so much as a cut to be seen in the outer skin, and everybody was congratulating me over it. But I saw myself from then on as living in—the word cannot be avoided—perdition. (And there were no hands with which to cover the face of him who had seen it; if anyone had shouted “Hands up!” I’d have left them dangling at my side, and not out of contempt for death.) When people come home from work in the evening, don’t they sometimes sigh while settling into a chair: “How good it feels to finally be able to sit down!” But, with me, sitting had the opposite effect. Nothing made me feel good. Only perhaps I should avoid the word “perdition” and say instead: “The bouncing bird, the cat washing itself, were lacking in the center of my field of vision.” In the center there was nothing, neither a playing dog nor a swaying daddy longlegs (or, if there was, it fled instantly). Or there was something in the center, but nothing pleasant. Once a freshly shot pair of chamois were hanging in the open garage of a villa, still dripping blood, hanging by their horns from two hooks, face to face. Even a bird and a cat appeared, but they were corpses drifting in the canal. Or the center was a place of staggering illusions: the light-colored logs lying crosswise at the end of the meadow looked like a dead ox; a seesawing brimstone butterfly appeared to me repeatedly as a scrap of yellowish paper. Or the center was a place of disillusionment; when I looked for it, it was hidden by billboards or by exotic shrubs with their unreal colors. Or the center itself was falsified: the house next door, raised by an artificially filled-in terrace, had a bell tower on the ridge of its roof in the manner of old farmhouses—but the area below the terrace seemed eroded, the shrine over the door of the house meant only: “You are not welcome here”—and the little bell tower, taken as a center, framed a mere hole: because the bell belonging to it, or the clapper, or the bellpull, was missing. By day, this hole often suggested a whirl of clotted milk, and by night, at best, an artificial satellite broadcasting the latest news of wars and disasters. The worst of these falsifications in those days were the so-called natural centers, occupied by the church towers, at least one of which “naturally” catches the eye at every turn of the head. Not only did these steeples, whether bulbiform, conical, or cylindrical, strike me as pretentious; I also regarded them as petrified delusions, making a mockery of our—all men’s—forlornness. Nobody needed them, but they set themselves up as friends in need. Even in misery, didn’t the horizon sometimes send us light and air, which wanted to be let in and seen? And these steeples cut off the view.
What I missed this particular Holy Week was the usual ringing of the bells. I hungered for it. It seemed inconceivable to me that a thinker some decades ago should have praised the big cities of the Communist world on the ground that the “deadly sad Western ringing of bells had been done away with.” The bells were silent. I was not content with the whistling of the wind. Nor with the roaring of the canal down at the rapids. Nor with the monotonously musical electrical purring of the approaching buses. I was reminded of a passage in a writer ,of the last century who praised the Roman poet Lucretius, saying that for him the “black pit was infinity itself,” and that his era, extending from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, represented a moment unique in history, “when the gods were dead and Christ had not yet been born, when man alone existed.” During the days when the bells were silent and the wind whistled and the buses purred, or so at least it seemed to me later on, I relived that era.
Yet my experience was rather different from that of the poet Lucretius, allegedly so heroic in his godlessness. It seemed to me as obvious as it was unthinkable that I alone, a human being with death as his goal, existed. Something was lacking, but not Christ and not the gods, and not the immortal soul, but something physical: a sensory organ, the crucial one, without which the whistling of the wind and the purring of the buses remain incomplete.
Often in the past, glancing at a distant mountain ridge, I had seen a procession of climbers without beginning or end, and thought in spite of myself of the famous trek to the gold fields; and in this procession, I, the viewer, was a dark, heavily laden figure among others. However often I looked, that gently rising line, broken by the tops of spruce trees, was uninhabited, orphaned. The lines up and down the pass yielded no human pyramid. How can I give a more accurate picture of the sense that I lacked? Perhaps only Greek has a verb expressing that fusion of perception and imagination (which is essential). On the surface, this verb means only “to notice”; but it carries overtones of “white,” “bright,” “radiance,” “glitter,” “shimmer.” Within me there was an outright longing for this radiance, which is more than any sort of viewing. I shall always long for that kind of seeing, which in Greek is called leukein.
While I waited for the big bells to come back, I conceived an incredible hatred of animals—not so much of birds as of all four- or more-legged animals. The birds with their soaring flight seemed to draw invisible communication lines through the air. But I despised all earthbound animals because, as far as I could see, they gave no thought to any kind of resurrection. They merely huddled, crept, crawled, scurried about, lurked, rutted, or dozed. I almost sympathized with the cruelty of children who kill cats and pull the legs off daddy longlegs.
Yet at the same time it seemed to me that I was reliving the origin of certain Easter rites—when, for instance, I glimpsed the fresh, fleshy white of a horseradish root, dug from deep in the ground; taken together with the lumps of earth clinging to it, that white struck me as a plausible color for life.
All through the weekend I lay stretched out on my bed, incapable of the slightest movement, clenching my teeth and fists, if you can call that lying. Early in the morning, a woman down in the street, who evidently worked in a pastry shop, said: “We’re having a heavy run on Easter eggs.” At noon, the shutters of the supermarket were pulled down for three days. For a long while, in the afternoon, a little bird fluttered up and down outside my window.
With a package tour from somewhere, I landed on the airfield of the moon. From the lobby of the air terminal building, a stairway led down to a restaurant that was jam-packed with Chinese. It was a sinister den, dimly lit and low-ceilinged. In the middle there was a platform—this was the place of slaughter. Naked men with long, curved, two-handed swords flung themselves on other naked but unarmed men. There was no struggle. Nor did the unarmed men run away. They buckled like apes overtaken by a pursuing lion, bared their teeth, and hissed (or rather squeaked) their last cries of terror at the butchers. The soles of the victims’ feet seemed also to buckle and formed high, loudly creaking arches on the platform. A moment later, the whole body was gone. Not only had it been cut into little pieces, but almost simultaneously it had been devoured by the people in the room below. What an instant before had been part of a gesticulating human being was now a chunk of meat vanishing into someone’s gullet. The mouths with these unceasingly active gullets marked, as it were, the innermost core of the Chinese quarter, which at one time had been the hub of all world happening. The slaughter would never end. Time and again, new loads of arms and shoulders were brought in, and in the place of these arms and shoulders there would once again be nothing. We travelers were separated by ropes from the place of slaughter. Bags in hand, we quickly left the airport. The moon was not our final destination; we now went to an elevator at the edge of the airfield, which was to take us back to earth. On the way, we walked under the open sky. Tall acacias rustled in a pale light such as foreshadows a cloudburst. It was not, as one might have expected, easy to walk in the lunar atmosphere—we didn’t hover. From step to step, our limbs grew heavier. I had no difficulty breathing, but felt that I soon would have. It was still a long way to the elevator stop, a windowless, sheet-metal shack, which was ringed by people waiting with suitcases. The only hope was to wake up. But I couldn’t manage to.
At length, the bundle on the bed opened its eyes and sat up. There was a color in the room. It came from the hibiscus plant growing in a large flowerpot next to the wall; a single blossom had opened, carmine against a purple, almost black ground. The pale pink pistil in the middle gleamed like the glass core of a lightbulb, and at the tip were the erect orange-yellow stamens. The flower was within reaching distance, and I held out my hand toward it. I had tried to feel it the day before, but all sense of touch had gone out of my fingers, and I had thought that the still-unfolding flower, as so often with hibiscus flowers, had already shriveled. Now I held a living weight, which cooled my hand and regulated my pulse.
What in the morning had been adulterated by the stench of tomcats now resolved itself into the fragrance of the apples spread out on the shelf. It must have been late afternoon, for the open door of the west room no longer admitted sunshine, but only a deep-yellow glow, in which the hibiscus plant cast on the wall a cloudy shape and within it a few clearly delineated stem shadows. “Late afternoon” reminds me that my son once said it was depressing to keep reading in stories: “At dusk”—it would be better, he thought, to say: “In the late afternoon.” “They arrived in the late afternoon.”
I stood up and looked around; I had never seen a more beautiful room. I bent over the hibiscus blossom. A daddy longlegs was groping its way over the wall, and I addressed it roughly as follows: “Oh. So that’s it. Aha. Hmm. Very well. Good. Why not?”
I took a long shower. Under the warm water, my body gradually grew out of itself. Stationary leg and free-moving leg took form. I took deep swallows of the liquid that would have choked me a few hours before.
In the kitchen, I ate a whole package of zwieback and recalled a saying I had often heard as a child: “Dizziness takes the appetite away.” I had been dizzy for days and now I was hungry. I ate an apple and knew at the first bite that I would go on eating.
Seated at my desk, I put my manuscript, “Thresholds of the Roman Villa,” into an envelope, addressed it, and affixed stamps. Only a short while before, I would have looked on without lifting a finger as every page of it burned or flew out the window. I read a letter from the school principal, who had once been my teacher and later became my friend. In it, he said I was expected back after Easter vacation, that the students had been asking for me, that the undersigned missed me—and not just in his official capacity. A postscript followed: “Please don’t forget that you’re a teacher. Even if your manner isn’t right, you are nevertheless an effective teacher, precisely because you are not entirely of the profession. What enables you to teach is your slight embarrassment, coupled with your total immersion in your subject. There are more than enough competent teachers. But students get the feel of a subject only from those who are at times visibly embarrassed at being teachers, from stutterers and thread-losers. Only such a one remains fixed in the student’s memory as ‘my teacher.’ Quin age. Let us then be up and doing!”
The reader of the letter sat down and wept; not over the praise, but over the salutation, “Dear Andreas,” for it seemed to me that for years no one had called me by my first name.
Still seated, I opened the window. The west wind grazed my neck and temples. In inhaling, I was taken with a violent coughing fit; all those days, I hadn’t once breathed deeply. A horse snorted beside me; that horse was me, as if my nostrils had suddenly grown.
The word “vision” has gone out of fashion. But a vision is just what I had then. I saw the ship of my life, caught in pack ice and already half under water, suddenly rise to the surface and go dancing away. Though the water might be no more than a rivulet and my ship a scrap of paper, perplexity was instantly transformed into a cheerfulness which was anything but caprice and which for the first time could be relied on.
At the same time, though, I realized that the murderous stone I had thrown a few days past marked the beginning of my own death. Since then, there had been something deadly in me, something that could be played down—as I was doing now—but not eradicated. I was no longer in a state of suspense—and my present lightheadedness had grief as its companion. To play down meant power. “Power” meant: “I have time.”
I sat down at my desk, picked up a pencil, and wrote in the flyleaf of Virgil’s Georgics: “Not an unfortunate accident, but destiny. Take accident as destiny. Not mine, but everyone’s. Destiny as man’s lot. Not his human lot, but his share. Distinguish two sorts of human destiny: lot and share. Man’s lot: as everyone knows, to die. His share? All I know is that if I haven’t had my share, I shall die without having fulfilled my destiny. My share is up to me; to obtain it, that is, I must challenge it. From disaster to destiny. Through destiny to self-awareness. I am determined and self-determined. Surrender? Yes, but not to any judge. No, I will not ‘surrender,’ I will seek out a witness. What for? To ask for advice. Who will be my witness? And time and again ‘the threshold’; lest you pass it by, slow down to a child’s pace. No, don’t slow down; restrain yourself.—Sunflower in the mist.—The epithet for hibiscus in Virgil: slender.”
A pyramid of wood for the Easter bonfire, heaped up at the point where the road passes into the meadow, was illumined by the last light of day. I went from window to window, this way and that, through the whole apartment. Now and then, on the slopes, a trial cannon shot rang out. A freshly washed bus was waiting at the terminus; with its two long, thick arms, it looked like a great stag. For a moment, the portholes of a plane taking off became transparent, revealing the bright blue sky behind them; for a long while, flocks of black crows followed its sooty trail, just as gulls follow the wake of a ship. Below, a child popped paper bags while walking in the street—his version of an Easter salute; while a teenager ran back and forth in an orchard, snapping a whip, which at every crack sent little clouds of smoke rising between the treetops.
This time, a different couple were sitting on the bridge railing: an elderly man in a double-breasted suit with a pocket handkerchief, tie, and white shirt, holding a younger woman close, murmuring and whispering as he rubbed his head against hers, and occasionally prodding her with his forehead; if they should fall into the canal, I thought, the water would hiss as if something red-hot had been dropped in.
Otherwise, the streets were deserted. But, undoubtedly, crowds were pouring into the churches for the Feast of the Resurrection. The mountains looked blue; then gray; then black. The rows of light at the airfield suggested a fiery cross, traversed by a constantly renewed arrow. The border station on the horizon gleamed like a factory decked out for a holiday.
Love welled up in me for this city in the plain. Its cityness. Substance of joy. The earth awakened within me, with a white Mayan city on the chalk cliffs of Yuca-tán, and with Heraclitus, warming himself by his stove and calling out to visitors: “Come in. Here, too, there are gods.” I wanted to throw myself on the ground, but not alone. At that moment, a single word sufficed: “Here!”
At length, the cathedral bells rang out in the distance. There the ritual of transubstantiation was being enacted: bread into “body,” wine into “blood.” The bell sounded twice, both times very briefly. It was as though a heart that had stopped beating began to beat again. A horse raised its head and showed its great eye with its light-colored, bristling lashes. The beaks of the gulls were at their sharpest and most hooked.
Little by little, the bells began to ring throughout the city area. I distinguished the bells of Elsbethen, of Aigen, of Persch, of Gnigl, of Sankt Andra, of Maria Plain, of Bergheim, of Freilassing (across the border), of Bayrischgmain, of Grossgmain (back on this side), of Liefering, of Wals, of Gois, of Taxham, of Grödig, of Anif, of Morzg, of Gneis; the bells of the Meadow Church, of the Moos Church, of the Old People’s Home Church, of the Dormitory Church, of the Poorhouse Church.
During the night, there was a violent knocking on the water pipes. The hibiscus blossom rolled up and fell off its stem, with a very soft sound. A warm wind blew through the wide-open room. There was a smell of wood smoke. Even before the first bus arrived, I heard a twanging in the wires like a catapult in action, followed by a crash, as between two hockey sticks. Up until then, it had been so quiet that the waterfalls in the mountains could be heard. Later on, a strange melody sounded from end to end of the plain. In my half-sleep—which was more like a special kind of waking—separate sounds answered one another and thus became music. A train whistle was followed by the rumble of a steel grating under rolling wheels. The rumbling was taken up by a barking dog. The dog’s barking took on the tone of the wind in the trees, which in turn blended into the enveloping sound of a short rainfall. Actually, it was not so much a melody as a leitmotif prolonged indefinitely. Every new sound took it up and intensified it. Every object that emitted a sound swelled, as it were, in my imagination and vibrated, converted into a musical instrument. Plucked instruments, percussion and wind instruments rang out, interspersed with an infrequent but precisely timed violin tone, as though from a mountain lake freezing over. The sound of the rain was rhythmed by a vibraphone-like ringing far below the road, rising from the round openings of the manhole cover. I had once taken the children to see a film in which terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings conversed by means of such a persistently repeated motif. Had extraterrestrial beings landed now, and was this sound their signal? No, this was an earthly sound, an earthly creature lay dreaming, and his breathing through a single orifice fed the earthly orchestra. Dreaming? I had never felt so wide-awake. A more delightful wake-up music was unthinkable.
