Across

The Viewer Takes Action

The monthly tarok game was scheduled for the Wednesday of Holy Week. We meet somewhere in the Salzburg area, at the home of one of the players, who usually invites a fifth, so that each player in turn sits out a hand and merely looks on. (This fifth is often someone hitherto unknown to the others.) On this occasion, the game was to take place in a house on the Mönchsberg, situated, in a manner of speaking, at the bottom of the pass, over which the road, after rising from the plain, leads down to the courtyard of the Festival Theater, and thence to the Old City.

Ever since I was a child, playing cards — and not only the special tarok cards — have for me epitomized “country.” That would have been my answer if asked what I visualize when hearing the words “card game.” Country in every sense: open country, flat country, countrified country, small country (such as Andorra or San Marino), landlocked country, the country which, unlike the state, has no laws but only customs … And, for the adult, cards still have the same magic; they can at any time fit the parts of a country together for him into a whole country. Held fanwise on the four sides of the card table, they represent in my eyes the “heartland,” which, as the game proceeds, projects its colors, its smells, and its language beyond the limits of the room into the country round about. Even as a child, when I only watched, every game was for me a kind of circuit, which in the course of the play opened out into a spiral, etc., until the horizon, as I looked out the window, shared in the colors and symbols of the card country. The police siren outside was drawn in, as was the singing of the crazy man in the gateway of the cemetery. During the first card game I was allowed to take part in, a funeral procession came down the street. The feebleminded woman, who had sometimes let us youngsters look under her skirt, had died. The coffin was draped in white, in token of virginity. It was a day in early January; rain was falling; the trees were black-brown; molehills looked out from the yellowish snow. Yes, to me a card game means that country where I, in accordance with my ideal, can show my colors and pledge allegiance to them; above all, where I can be laconic. It needn’t absolutely be tarok; just that tarok is probably the most varied, or, as someone once said in the days when it was played more frequently, “the most beautiful of games.”

Summer time had been in force for some days. Though the sun was still shining, the supermarket on the ground floor of the apartment house was already closed. The slanting reddish light made the shelves look more spacious. The plastic milk pall — which the old woman, as usual, was carrying on her way to the Moos farm — ordinarily a familiar signal in the dusk, shimmered strangely in the daylight. The houses of the Colony were still half in sunlight, yet the shutters had already been rolled down. Shading his dazzled eyes with one hand, a child appeared at the terrace door in his nightshirt and called out into the garden, where his parents were sitting in strangely premature end-of-the-working-day poses: “I can’t sleep.” Great flocks of sparrows had taken over the deserted streets and the invitingly vacant bridge. The sun’s rays, falling through the slits in the shutters, covered the newscaster on a television screen with slanting stripes.

It was too early when I got to the Mönchsberg; the game was not to begin until nightfall. I might in the meantime have gone down to the city and read newspapers in a café. I have often wondered since then why I didn’t give in to my old habit. Be that as it may, I turned off before reaching the house, and climbed up the road which, with occasional rises and falls, follows the long mountain ridge. I didn’t turn off as a result of any decision, yet I thought: “This decides it.” All the same, I insist: I have never questioned the accidental nature of what I did; I acknowledge it.

With the coming of dusk, the road, which only a short while before had been intermittently crowded, emptied. On all sides, what a moment before might have been a man-made park became a primeval mass of rock.

The ridge of the Mönchsberg is not straight, but recapitulates the meanders of the Salzach below. The mountain consists of the delta rubble deposited by the river as it emptied into the great lake that was there thousands of years ago. The rubble was deposited evenly and rhythmically in layers that can still be discerned in the slightly tilted striped pattern which runs along the whole length of the mountain, and is accentuated in winter by the blown snow in the grooved stripes and by the serried rows of icicles. The rubble — ranging in content from small pebbles to fist-sized stones — is held together by a light-gray block of limestone which with its abrupt promontories, needles, sharp edges, and cracks gives the Mönchsberg its jagged, craglike character. Where the pebbles have fallen out of the limestone, innumerable craters seem to darken the rock. The layer of humus at the top is thin, and the roots of the trees (for the most part, beeches and oaks) grow right through the often porous shelf of rock below it. In some of the hollows off the main road, there is enough soil for a vegetable garden; but there are also swampy patches that are almost inaccessible. Altogether, the mountain, though wholly surrounded by the city, is not at all a “city mountain”; despite its undeniable urban aspects — benches, blacktop paths, streetlamps — the mountain ridge, once the strollers have gone home, throws one back into the wilderness. Barely a hundred yards below, the city is hidden by fog, while up on the cliff the moon may be shining. The snow that is falling around me at the present moment is rain on the city squares down below a moment later.

If we consider that this mountain owes its origin to a flow of scree into an arm of the delta, might we not speak of its “beginning” and “end”? Thus, I made my way to the end of the mountain, where a flight of stairs, some consisting of old marble, some of new cement (with steps of such varying height that it’s easy to lose one’s footing on the way down), leads to the Mülln quarter and the Salzach. There on the riverbank is the old people’s home, into which I have several times seen men in braided uniforms carrying coffins. Behind it extends the plain, with the new suburbs of Lehen and Liefering; over the football stadium, birds darted to and fro in the glare of the floodlights. Before coming to the stairs, I turned around and, for fear of being late, took a side path leading back to the foot of the mountain.

Already the tightly closed lilac buds showed a bluish shimmer. A big black rag flew into a greening tree: a raven. The rock was traversed by shiny snail tracks, and white downy feathers clung to the clefts where bird food had been strewn. In the midst of bushes and ankle-deep leaves, a rusty garden gate stood solitary; there was no fence to go with it, not even a house behind it; it led to an impassable cliff. Rainwater had gathered in a ring-shaped beech root, as in a cistern. On a root nearby, a gray hare was sitting, barely distinguishable from its resting place; it gave me a friendly look.

Over long, sloping meadows and hollows, the side path loops back to the ridge road. It starts at the bottom with another, almost hidden stairway, beside which, in one of the numerous recesses in the cliff, stands a house which, though built of stone, looks like a makeshift shack. It is the meeting place of the local shooting club. The shooting range is behind the hut, in the wind-sheltered hollow between the stairs and the cliff, where under other circumstances the garden would have been located. Wednesday is crossbow day (as was indicated by the crossbow emblem flown from the flagpole in front of the shack). A number of cars were parked in the driveway, including some from across the border, bearing the insignia of the Berchtesgaden district. At that moment, a man was removing a dragon-shaped bundle from the trunk of his car. A signboard attached to a pole announced a “His-and-Hers Shooting Match,” a “Solstice Shooting Match,” and a “Fruitcake Shooting Match.” All that could be seen of the shooting range from the top of the stairs were the targets; the archers were hidden by a wooden canopy that surrounded the entire range. Each of the targets was lit by a lamp of its own, and the holes in them formed a Braille pattern. Each time a bolt struck home — with a toneless thud — the target and the projectile were carried to the archer on overhead wires and then, minus the bolt, back again. An incessant thudding and whirring could be heard from the brightly lit range, though there was never a human to be seen. On an overhanging cliff behind the hut, there was a doghouse, from which a multiracial mongrel answered the impact of every single bolt with a rather pathetic bark. During a pause in the shooting, conversational voices could be heard. One of the speakers seemed to be a stutterer; when he came to a word beginning with “s,” the conversation shifted to the conditional mood—“would have,” “would be”—and took a long time getting back to its point of departure, the Singer sewing machine, fustian, worsted, and mother-of-pearl buttons.

On the sloping meadows above the stairs — the archers now inaudible — the densely growing dandelions, interlocking like small cogwheels, had closed with the onset of twilight, and their diurnal yellow gave way to the dark enamel-yellow of the buttercups (more thinly spread, because the flowers were so tiny) on their tall, thin, ramified stems, which, though there was hardly any wind, swayed all along the slope, accentuating the “evening” character of the scene. On this part of the mountain, the rock is almost everywhere covered by grass, but the green in every rib, bend, groove, and crevice brings out the rock shapes all the more strikingly. The only tree on the long slope, almost at the top, is an elder (ordinarily a mere bush) with a thick trunk, which, though steeply inclined, is clearly in no danger of falling. Ring after ring of branches sweep upward in ever-new impulsions, and the whole tree stands against the background of the sky as though ready to take off. In passing, I saw here and there in the forks of the branches something resembling eyes (just as trees are improved by having the buds, or “eyes,” of other varieties grafted onto them). These were the light-colored heads of the titmice that spend the night in this elder. As, climbing higher, I looked back over my shoulder, the grounds of the provincial hospital came into view. A white helicopter pattern had been painted on an illuminated circle of concrete, and just then a real helicopter was landing, while at the edge of the circle an ambulance stood ready, with a stretcher protruding from the open rear door. Through the great doorway fronting on the road, a late visitor was stepping out into the open. In the stairwell of one section, as in certain hotels, nets were stretched out, which were supposed to stop patients from jumping over the banisters and into the lobby. “We wouldn’t want to die in there, would we?” I heard a passerby saying; by then, it had grown so dark on the mountain that the speaker was faceless.

From here, the slope descends into a deep bowl, suggesting a doline caused by the collapse of an underground cavern. One side of the bowl is almost vertical, and here the rock, a peculiarity of this bit of meadow, forms a high, naked wall. The bottom of the bowl is sheltered from the wind and the wall is dotted with niches, where the homeless take shelter. In one of these recesses, two figures sat huddled, covered up to their necks with a plastic poncho. A little wood fire lit up their faces. They were a man and a woman, gray-haired and gray-skinned, shoulder to shoulder. There were bottles of liquor on the stone shelf level with their heads, but neither reached for them. They scarcely moved; and when they did move, it was with strange, indecipherable jerks, like creatures out of another geological era. Yet, though they turned not toward each other but toward the fire, they were talking. Noting the observer up at the edge of the bowl, they fell silent and stared at me, motionless, poised for action. They wouldn’t do anything, and yet, just with that glance, something had happened between us. Was it only a joke that when I continued on my way a woman coming toward me in the next circle of light cried out: “Help!”

The circle of light did not belong to a streetlamp; it came from the open door of the dormitory at the edge of the clearing; after the vegetable garden behind it, the forest begins again. This dormitory is several stories high; there, at the brow of that primordial hollow, it almost puts one in mind of a skyscraper. Next to it is a smaller service building, with the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor. The path passes between the two buildings. In the dining room, a boy was sitting alone, waiting for his dinner; in the kitchen, a white-clad kitchen maid was ladling soup into his bowl from an enormous caldron. Nearly all the other students must have gone away for the Easter holidays; only a single room in the building was lit; on top of the clothes cupboard, a suitcase; down in the entrance hall, a bicycle with a soccer ball on its baggage rack. The student did not look up when the maid set the soup down in front of him. After the meal, he brought his dishes back to the kitchen and slowly drank a glass of water.

Up on the ridge road, by the streetlamps, I saw two deep-black angled lines on the trunk of a beech tree. They couldn’t have been there on my way out; this war paint on the smooth, light-gray bark could not have escaped me. I thought only: Now! Then I bent over, picked up a stone, and set out at a run. Beside a breach in an old battlement, I saw another black spot, even larger than the one on the tree trunk; the paint — I touched it in passing — wasn’t dry yet. Could it be that what drove me on was not the fact that they were swastikas? After all, one often comes across swastikas, and not just in this country; and besides, in my excavation work I had seen any number of old artworks in which this symbol has a perfectly innocent meaning or is used as a mere ornament. I recall, for instance, an early Christian mosaic floor in which cranes are carrying swastikas in their beaks. Could, then, this freshly sprayed sign be a symbol of peace? No, a swastika is a swastika. And this sign, this negative image, symbolized the cause of all my melancholy — of all melancholy, ill humor, and false laughter in this country. And this accursed mark had not just been daubed on out of caprice or thoughtlessness; it had been traced with malignant precision and black determination, laid on thickly and thoroughly; the exaggerated hooks were intended to threaten evil, to hit the viewer full in the face; and indeed, they did hit me full in the face. Me? I? One great burst of passion.

In running, I felt an unaccustomed impersonal strength, which, however, did not emanate from the stone in my hand. The very teeth in my mouth became a weapon. On the narrowest part of the mountain, where it tapers down to little more than a crest, a woman in a fur coat was standing by the rail at the edge of the cliff. The streets of the Old City down below were recognizable only by the narrow, reddish trails of light between the dark, almost deserted buildings. In the darkness, the illumined twin steeples of the Kollegienkirche, which, with the rings of light-colored stone figures on their flat roofs, resemble castles on a chessboard by day, became grimacing Indian idols; the clocks became eye sockets, the window ledges bulging foreheads, and the rings of statues flaming hair. The most tranquil and at the same time the most powerful lights in the city were the rows of reddish-yellow lamps on the railroad-station platforms. Reflected in the water, the cars on the river bridges became vastly magnified shadow caravans without beginning or end. Two crossed overhead bus wires hissed like a whiplash through the deserted city squares.

Nothing escaped my notice as I ran. In passing, I kicked a paper carton with some French-fried potatoes left in it off the path (a McDonald’s has recently opened on Getreidegasse, the Old City Commission has commended its façade for blending harmoniously with the neighboring buildings; a lot of the young people, including my children, meet there). A hedgehog, dark legs, black snout, shining little eyes, dug itself out of a pile of leaves — no doubt it had just awakened from its winter sleep — and then swam seal-like through the mass of foliage, heading for the woods. In places, especially noticeable to the runner, the mountaintop was immersed in exhaust fumes from the ventilation shafts of the garages built into the rock below. On a dwarf tree, a mere pole split down the middle, sat an enormous owl, within reach of the road; it did not take flight at my approach, but fluffed up its feathers, turned its head toward me, and followed me with its round eyes.

At its apex, the road passes between two long walls of rock. At one point, the gully thus formed was not “empty,” or so it seemed to me as I ran. My eye fell first on a spray can (the word “bomb” rose to my mind), then on the finger on the button, and last on the figure attached to it. The figure had no contours, but immediately had a name: the name given, in a purportedly faithful Bible translation, to “the evil one”—the Frustator. Time and again, one meets with hostile faces, but the Frustator, the archenemy, is faceless. Up until then, I had often had intimations of his presence, though always in a crowd, in passing: a grotesquely supple thumb joint; the chalk-white interior of a mouth; a bare foot shaped like a crocodile; an eye from which all color seemed to have drained; a neck swollen from blowing into a police whistle. But here at last I saw him as a whole, not in a crowd, but alone.

The runner became a pursuer and pursuit meant “action.” No such thought as “I shouldn’t” or “I have no right” entered his head; at the most: “For my own good, I had better …” Perhaps, in spite of everything, I’d have run past him if he hadn’t been standing in the middle of the road. But then the stone was thrown and the enemy lay literally crushed on the ground, as unexpectedly as once in my childhood a rooster which, unintentionally to be sure, I had hit on the head with a pebble thrown from a distance — with the sole difference that the rooster, just as surprisingly, stood up and ran off as if nothing had happened.

I had not thrown blindly, but with wide-open eyes; I had not seen my surroundings but, strangely enough, larger-than-life, my own face. It looked to me neither grimacing nor calm; it looked more like the face of an unknown person, or rather of a hitherto unknown, close relative, who had now at last turned up.

Though I did not regard my adversary as an animal, another incident involving an animal comes to mind. Some children were throwing stones at a cat, saying: “If we hit it, we aimed wrong.” I had not aimed wrong. Even as, still running, I pulled back for the throw, I knew my stone would strike home — and kill.

A wind came up. As so often on this mountain island, the wind was suddenly there, without preceding squalls. It blew in full force, as though its passage through the Bavarian plains had been a buildup and this point on the fringe of the Alps its goal. The sounds of the immediate vicinity, clearly audible only a short moment before, were gone. But the roaring of the wind brought the slightest, most distant noises close. A board fell to the ground. A horse neighed. Someone stood outside a house and laughed. A hammerblow was followed by the clanking of an oil drum. A bell note came from one of the churches on the edge of the city (or in one of the villages beyond). And perhaps that clapping of hands was far outside the city limits.

With great groaning wings a swan, white in the darkness, flew over the mountain. The wind was cold and brought with it a mass of clouds that scudded across the sky with the speed of a spring tide. Briefly, the moon peered out of the advancing veil of mist, and then was seen no more. The swaying trees on the ridge made the strings of lights on the plain below flicker and tremble. The treetops roared like a squadron of planes. Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds. The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of mistletoe in the branches were abandoned birds’ nests. The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature’s grandeur, I thought: This is the world! Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city.

I bent over the dying man. He puffed out his cheeks, as though gill-breathing had set in. From his breast pocket emerged, scarcely audible, music from a tiny transistor radio. The man was wearing checked knee socks, and his coat had light-colored patches at the elbows, which reminded me of certain armbands. He seemed elderly; his hair was white. Or could it be that he was really young and had only now, by a speed-up process as in time-lapse photography, become white-haired and wrinkled? I experienced a strange disgust — a kind of sympathy with this man’s disgust at having to die; at having lost his Christian name and being reduced to some sort of “dead Otto” or “dead Erwin.” Then the white-haired man actually made a grimace of extreme revulsion, which spread to me as I bent over him.

With this grimace still on my face, I quickly dragged the body out of the road and up the embankment. At this point the edge of the cliff is near, and I let the dead man fall. I was pulled after him, and for a moment I fell with him.

Sometimes the suicides who jump off this mountain fall through the roofs of houses down below or tear the overhead wires of the bus line. But this side of the mountain did not overlook the city; it surmounted seldom frequented terraces and obscure patches of woods. This incident — I knew while the body was falling — would never be cleared up. My freedom was not threatened. The body would quietly rot. And nevertheless, since I had thrown that stone (of this, too, I was certain), action against me was underway — not a legal proceeding, not an inquest; not a demand for extradition; but — at last I found the word which restored my lucidity — a “challenge.”

Back in the gully, I picked up my projectile, which was still lying there, and with it scraped the unfinished rune off the rock. The stone grew hot in my hand from the friction and smelled like a flint just before the sparks fly. I sat down on a tree root protruding, at the height of a folding chair, from the opposite wall, close to the scene of the crime. At this point, there is a double bend in the road; this gave me a view of a separate section of the rock face, shaped like a truncated pyramid and topped like a ruin with grass and saplings. Here for the moment lay the ruins of a temple in the jungles of Central America. Then in the lamplight the cliff took on the gray coloration of a wasp’s nest, riddled with black cells which seemed abandoned yet alive. The layer of foliage at the foot of the cliff blew back and forth in the storm wind, with eddies, waterspouts, and breakers, and the nest with its black holes changed into a chalk-white oyster bed (the oysters being the shell-shaped stones protruding from the cliff). At the center of the oyster bed, the symbol I had scraped away marked an empty space which, as I saw it, belonged to the cranes, the gulls, and the kingfishers of the silent world. And I experienced a sense of triumph at having killed. I even smacked my lips aloud. This is my history now, I thought. My history will sustain me. Justice had been done, and I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated.

It was a big mountain. No blood would flow from the city fountains. No animal would talk. “Everybody off this mountain!” (I shouted that.) Only then did it come to me that I had cursed the dying man in his last moment and hurled the same curse after the corpse as it fell off the cliff. And my obituary was as follows: “At last, you have lost your right to exist!”

At the far end of the gully, a female jogger appeared, not detracting from the emptiness but enhancing it. She was embodied beauty, with blond hair and a jogging suit that glowed fire-hydrant blue in the darkness. In hurrying past, she smiled at the figure sitting on the tree root, and I smiled back. “Marvelous evening, isn’t it?” “Yes, today this gully is eternal.” As she ran, she played with the fingers of her striped gloves as with puppets. Punch and Judy teetered, jumped up, collapsed, flailed out at each other, and hugged, keeping up a dialogue all the while. A spotted cat came running after the jogger, pursued by a single tiny beech leaf scurrying over the ground.

When I stood up, I was so unexpectedly tired that I could hardly move. It wasn’t far to my card game (wasn’t I hours late already?), but I’d never get there. Something drew me off the road, into a nook to sleep in. When at last I moved, it was blindly, with my eyes shut. I didn’t even look when something came panting up behind me (a group of joggers). Blindly I groped my way over the meandering road, as though following the canal down below. When my eyes finally opened, what they saw, looking extraordinarily substantial, were a street sweeper’s twig broom leaning against a gravel box and, as though lit by the brightest sun, the white, granular wall with its lighted windows. “Here I am.” Who said that to whom?

The other card players were a priest, a young politician, a painter, and the master of the house. They were sitting in the library, a room almost bare except for books. The knotholes in the wide floorboards seemed at first sight to move in the cigar smoke. The legs of the light maplewood table, as the priest explained in the pause produced by my arrival, formed a St. Andrew’s cross, so called after the apostle Andrew, who had suffered martyrdom on an X-shaped cross. The name Andreas — which happens to be mine — aroused laughter and led quite naturally to my joining in the game. As if I hadn’t been late at all, I sat at the table, fanning out my cards.

Before that, I had stood a while on the threshold of the house. This threshold consisted of round stakes of varying thicknesses, each with its specific annual rings, pounded up to their heads into the ground, the whole giving the impression of interlocking wheels, or rather, because of the radial cracks in the wood, of juxtaposed sun disks, framed on the right and left by the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes. Threshold and oleander were lit by a spotlight affixed to the lintel, as an indication that this was the scene of the card game. “Threshold, play on,” read the old-fashioned writing on the door. And: “Card game, lead us.”

A few of the painter’s pictures hung on the window-side wall, where there were no books. Unframed and unglassed, they seemed to be emanations of the wall itself. A rust-brown, a saltpeter-gray, a mold-silver, a brick-red, a resin-yellow. Unlike other pictures, they did not draw the eye to a point but merely reflected colors. These, said the painter, “should be as luminous as the colors in a stained-glass window; that is my ideal.” Though he had lived in the city a long time, he was the stranger to the group. His eyes were invisible, so deeply embedded that their sockets rather resembled the eye-holes in a mask. Sometimes his voice was like that of a child, soft and matter-of-fact; and he never had to clear his throat before starting to speak. He kept holding up the game by discovering in each card dealt him a certain color providing the basis for a lengthy discussion. (Or he would bend down to the carpet and appear to be rubbing its wine red and cobalt blue into his face as a kind of war paint.) He was so short that his head barely rose above the edge of the table. He always stood up to deal. His tricks had to be pushed over to him.

The stairwell had smelled of apples, as strongly as a fruit cellar. The aroma was lost in the room where we were playing but became all the more pungent if one stepped outside. At times, moreover, one caught a whiff, though through a barrier of baffling admixtures, of spices from the food simmering in the kitchen below, to which our host turned his attention whenever he was out of the game: thyme? savory? cinnamon? Once, when the window was opened for a moment, someone was heard to say: “You can smell the snow he predicted.” “He” was the weather broadcaster.

The house was not quiet. Time and again, steps were heard on the winding stairs which led not only to the library but also to the various bedrooms; among them a swift, light scurrying as of an animal’s paws. Then there was a scratching at the outside door, and someone admitted a cat, which lay under the table during the rest of the game. It had a dark head, with yellow eyes; when the eyes were closed, the whole head was black.

In a basement room, a cello was being played, a heavy, long-drawn-out rumbling, which, in a manner of speaking, gave the whole house a musical foundation. The cello notes made the time pass more slowly; almost everyone who went by the house stopped to listen; and sometimes the players inside suspended their movements, as though for them, under the spell of Orpheus’ voice, things had stopped moving for a while. At the same time it was ship’s music; the library with its paneled ceiling was the salon, and the little oval windows in the gable were the portholes.

The cello fell silent. A bottle of wine was uncorked. The telephone rang in the entrance hall (“Not for me,” said the master of the house, while someone who could not have been an adult ran down the stairs). In the dark garden, the evergreen leaves of a holly tree glistened; the dull-black shape in it was a sleeping blackbird. A single stone lion, no larger than a hare, crouched on a pedestal near the garden gate. Down in the city, people were besieging the one open shop where cigarettes and newspapers were available. The trains at the railroad station looked colorful and massive, like components of the big cities they had come from or were going to; the tracks were a recumbent pyramid. And far from the station, the broken bottles atop the prison wall suggested pyramids of a very different kind.

Our game on the mountainside was fitful. If one player let his thoughts wander, did that suffice to make the others lose interest? Yet we were all serious about the game. I had seldom played so resolutely and I persisted in playing every hand. But there was no joy in it; only a dogged determination to win. And we couldn’t stop. Instead of becoming, as usual, more intimate as the game went on, we became more estranged. None of us could look his partner in the eye. We observed the rules punctiliously, yet our looks and gestures were those of cheats; and to cheat in this way is to play at playing. A lost feeling came over us. We all felt out of place. And in the place where we should have been long ago, “everything was too late.” On the one hand, five lost card players were on the verge of tears; on the other hand, each went on doing, and overdoing, his own thing: the master of the house kept pouring more wine; the painter, at every glance, discovered and exclaimed about some new color in the room (for instance, those spots of mold on the spine of a book); and the priest, in his capacity as a recognized authority on tarok, author of a treatise on the history of the game in the various countries of Europe, surprised the company by invoking weird and unusual exceptions and sub-exceptions to the rules (though these did not always work in his favor).

Only the politician tried, so to speak, to make the wind change. He proceeded as though he were responsible for the evening, which for him was not just another evening but a time of testing. Especially in his leisure hours, he always felt called upon to prove himself, to show that he could handle any situation. He would jump at the slightest opportunity to demonstrate his capacity for immediate action. If a mouse was sighted, he was the one to wake the sleeping cat and put it on the scent; if a glass fell to the floor, he would instantly block off the disaster zone where splinters threatened — and signal like a traffic cop to the person who arrived with dustpan and brush. Where others were panicked or hesitant, he was in his element. At present, to be sure, his determination that every moment should demonstrate his leadership, energy, and competence only made matters worse. He spoke and moved as though trying to take charge in an overcrowded lifeboat: with an enormous display of muscle, he tries to start the dead engine, and succeeds only in flooding it, while at the same time belaboring the faces and bellies of those to the right and left of him with his elbows, until, with all the fumbling and floundering, the boat threatens to capsize. To reconcile the players, he looked for resemblances. For instance, he found a resemblance in the way the master of the house and the painter put their glasses down after every sip; he discovered that the eyeglasses of the priest and of the master of the house were the same strength; and I, “the teacher,” had in common with him, the politician, if not his political party, at least the habit of pounding my cards with my fist instead of picking them up.

But the politician himself was lost, and more visibly than the rest of us, with eyes agape and beads of sweat on his hairline. The worst of it was that he refused to acknowledge his inability to cope with the situation, and kept on trying. Yet it was just this that brought the others together! While, a moment before, they had been staring into space, they now exchanged covert glances and even smiles, and stretched out their legs under the table in relief. Nothing was lacking but the one word that would have saved the day. But then, quite inexplicably, salvation came, brought by someone’s casual remark about the coming of Easter: “In three days, the bells will ring again.” That was the turning point. With a sense of release, we played a last hand and went downstairs to the dining room for dinner.

After the meal, the master of the house suggested making a fire in the fireplace, and each of the card players wanted to light it. The almost white beech logs lay in a disorderly pile in the wide entrance hall. One player after another carried a few of them in and put them down near the fireplace. All this time, a teenager, the son of our host, was standing outside at the hall telephone, with his back to the wood carriers, pressing the phone to his ear without so much as a glance at all the disturbance. (“It’s been going on like this since the beginning of his vacation,” said the boy’s father.)

The table had been cleared, the door was closed, the fire was burning, the card players sat drinking wine, the predicted snow (“the last snow,” someone said) came flying out of the darkness and beat against the windowpanes, which crackled at first, then were silent, as though a tension in the glass had been relieved; the son in the hallway kept mumbling into the telephone. Each one of the downward-swarming snowflakes was a symbol, undefined and undefinable.

I tapped my temples with my fingertips, as though to relieve some pressure or pain, pushed back my chair, and turned to the priest: “Do thresholds occur in the religious tradition?” I asked him. — “Literally or figuratively?” —“Both.”

While the priest pondered, the others said whatever came into their heads.

The master of the house: “Our cat here never runs thoughtlessly over a threshold. It always stops first and carefully sniffs the ground. Sometimes it avoids contact with the threshold and jumps. It’s only when escaping from a dog, for instance, that it loses no time in crossing a threshold; all it wants is to be inside. Then of course it’s the pursuer that hesitates.”

The politician: “I have two sorts of recurrent dreams about thresholds. In the first, I’m in my stocking feet; I slide off the threshold because, regardless of whether it’s wood or stone, it’s exceedingly smooth and rounded at the edges. But I always get to the other side safely, and my fear helps me. In sliding off, I ask myself: Where am I? And precisely because of my fright, I know where I am. In this case, the threshold is something like the take-off board in the broad jump. In the other sort of dream, it’s just the threshold of a room, a mere strip of metal such as you often find in new buildings. But I’m incapable of crossing it. In the whole dream, nothing happens, just that I’m standing by the open door, looking at my face, which is reflected in the metal under me. Once, when I managed to turn around, I saw behind me a glass cage full of simultaneous interpreters, all waiting for me to start making my speech.”

The painter: “Two ancient peoples were such bitter enemies that when one had defeated the other, it smashed the statues in the other’s temples and used the stone for paving its thresholds at home. In some cultures, we find labyrinth designs outside the thresholds; their purpose, we are told, is not so much to protect the threshold as to make intruders stop and consider a detour. To me personally, thresholds are no problem. I’m not mature enough for that. Nevertheless, I’ve sometimes thought: If there are paintings over doorframes, why not build thresholds and make them more recognizable by means of colored forms? We’ll see.”

By then, the priest had collected his thoughts. “To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “the tradition has little to say of the threshold as a material object. One of the prophets predicts that the temple will tremble so violently that even its stone threshold will be lifted. As an image, however, it occurs time and again, though as a rule a different word is used. In the indexes of works on the subject, threshold. usually refers us to door. The threshold and the door (or gate) are seen as parts standing for the whole. In the Old Testament, the whole is the city: in one passage, the mere earthly city—‘Howl, O gate; cry, O city!’; in another, the heavenly city—‘The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.’ In the New Testament, the gate stands in one passage for perdition—‘the gates of hell’; in another, for salvation—‘I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.’ Thus, the threshold is ordinarily associated with passage from one zone to another. What may be less evident is that the threshold is itself a zone, or rather, a place in its own right, a place of testing or of safety. Isn’t the ash heap where Job sits in his misery a threshold, a place of testing? Didn’t a fugitive put himself under someone’s protection by sitting down on his threshold? Doesn’t the archaic usage of ‘gate’ evoke the threshold as a dwelling place, as a room in its own right? According to modern doctrine, of course, there are no longer any thresholds in this sense. The only threshold still remaining to us, says one of our modern teachers, is that between waking and dreaming, and nowadays little attention is paid to that. Only in the insane does it protrude, visible to all, into daytime experience, like the fragments of the destroyed temples just mentioned. For a threshold, he says, is not a boundary — boundaries are on the increase both in inner and in outer life — but a precinct. The word ‘threshold’ embraces transformation, floor, river crossing, mountain pass, enclosure (place of refuge). According to an almost forgotten proverb: ‘The threshold is a fountainhead.’ And this teacher says literally: ‘It was from thresholds that lovers and friends absorbed strength. But,’ he goes on, ‘where nowadays are we to find the destroyed thresholds, if not in ourselves? By our own wounds shall we be healed. If snow stops falling from the clouds, let it continue to fall inside me.’ Every step, every glance, every gesture, says the teacher, should be aware of itself as a possible threshold and thus re-create what has been lost. This new threshold consciousness might then transfer attention from object to object, and so on until the peace relay reappears on earth, at least on that one day — and on the day after and the day after that, rather as in the child’s game where stone sharpens scissors, scissors cut paper, and paper wraps stone. Thus, thresholds as seats of power may not have disappeared; they have become conceivable, so to speak, as inner powers. If man were conscious of these thresholds, he would at least let his fellow man die a natural death. Threshold consciousness is nature religion. More cannot be promised.”

The priest pulled himself up in his chair and looked around, as though preparing to go on with his sermon, but then laughed as though surprised, exhaled, inhaled deeply, and told us how he had just remembered the stone threshold at home, on which he had often sat “bare-assed.” This threshold had been a granite block, not in the house but in the wooden barn. The threshold of the house was a simple pinewood board with an unusually deep knothole in it; he and his brothers and sisters had often sat there playing marbles in rainy weather. They had sometimes scraped their fingers on the rough board or got them full of splinters, which later festered.

His listeners also recalled things that had happened long ago. When one stopped, another took over, and the result was a single story in many voices.

“Sitting on the doorstep had a Sunday, end-of-the-day quality. A duty had been done and now you were resting. When passersby saw someone sitting this way on his doorstep, they became friendly. He was in his right place. Once, when some bigger children were chasing me with sticks, I didn’t run into the house, I waited for them on the threshold; they greeted me and nodded as if nothing had happened. Some thresholds were very high; in crossing them, you lifted your knees and bumped your head on the doorframe. Sitting on the threshold meant that the door could not be closed. Of course there wasn’t much you could do; at the most, blow soap bubbles or read, propping your heels and shoulders on the doorframe. The women would set a chair on the threshold and sit there with their knitting. I often used to stand on the threshold, watching a storm and letting the raindrops or a stray hailstone graze me. Once, when my grandmother had an attack of asthma, she ran out of the house and stood on the threshold screaming with terror and gagging (in the end, her screams were no more than squeaks). Some mornings, there were dead mice and birds’ feathers on the threshold, matted with blobs of innards. At spring-cleaning time, the thresholds got a thorough scrubbing; warm steam rose up from them, they showed their original pattern and smelled good. At Whitsuntide the thresholds were made festive with birch saplings on either side. I thought the threshold of my parents’ room was especially high. Strange signs were incised in the threshold of the house next door; it had formerly been a tombstone. The village wisdom had it that in case of earthquake you should not run out into the open but stand on the threshold under the doorframe; there you were safe. For me, ‘threshold’ evoked ‘ripping up’; because it was always the wood of the threshold that was first attacked by mold and that had to be replaced most frequently. Thresholds are noticed only in the country; in the city, they are forgotten. The most beautiful threshold I’ve ever seen was a natural creation, the entrance to a stalactite cave; it was a compact, luminous slab, perfectly rounded, an additional glassy-white floor among floors. The most beautiful threshold I ever saw was a kitchen threshold, covered with linoleum and riddled with thumbtacks; after a day of talk, I had come home to palpable things; the threshold is my place, I thought, and there I stood. Standing outside a closed door as a child, I would shout ‘Stupid pup!’ instead of ‘Open up!’ And similarly, at the threshold of the forest, I’d shout ‘Stupid pup!’ before going in. Bird tracks on the snow-covered threshold. What is the opposite of threshold phobia? Fringe benefit.”

The others turned to the questioner. Had he wanted to “test” us? He replied: “No, not test, just make you tell stories. You see, I’ve noticed that there’s no better way of getting people to tell stories than to ask them about thresholds.” In the enthusiasm of our storytelling, we even interrupted the son of the house, who was still on the telephone, to ask him what he thought a threshold was. He answered succinctly: “A nuisance!” and sank back into his telephone corner.

One after another fell silent. But this was not the usual lull in the conversation before a group breaks up. The storytelling seemed, rather, to continue in the silence, and thus to become more eloquent than ever. Each of us delved deeper into himself and there met his neighbor, with whom he now, without trying, had everything in common. “Once upon a time there was we.” (How is it that I can say “we”? After all, we were not very many. And I trusted this “we.” Once upon a time there was a fact.) One burst out laughing, seemingly out of a clear sky, and another nodded; or one drew a line through a ring of wine on the table, and his neighbor added to it.

We had stopped drinking; our host forgot to pour more wine and the guests forgot to empty their glasses. Cigars went out and so did pipes. A smell of quinces drifted in; and, from outside, puffs of snowy air. Our host stopped being a host; from then on, he was merely one of the several persons who had met “somewhere.”

We all sat straight in our chairs, as though backrests were no longer needed. Were we waiting for something? No, the event — the story — had already happened. In the embers of the dying fire, our collective eye discerned a glittering nocturnal metropolis filled with roaring, flashing, and crashing, with relays of light and shadow running from end to end; sometimes sparks shot across it like ambulances. Strange how the gaze sinks into fire, whereas it usually bounces back from flowing water.

We were not waiting; yet someone was still missing. We didn’t know it until the lady of the house, just back from somewhere, appeared in a festive midnight-blue coat and boots shaped like birds’ beaks, and sat down nonchalantly in our midst. She completed the circle. Beside her the men looked unshaven, and beside them the woman’s face, shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, betrayed a fatigue that was a kind of happiness. Something had moved her (a musical phrase? the snowy night?). Quite naturally, she took part in the silent, all-disentangling exchange of stories. In the midst of the warm room, her coat gave off cold; the snow crystals on it, interlocking at first, softened visibly into drops of water. A daddy longlegs ran into our field of vision, its little round body duplicated by the shadow under it. Outside the window, a screech owl, so close it might have been perched on the windowsill, let out a catlike screech. The house next door became visible, a yellow wall covered by a wisteria vine, its arm-thick stem coiled and tangled like a display of sailor’s knots. A birch stood white in the darkness, its hanging switches moved only by the falling snow, only one branch vibrating in the void; a bird must have just landed on it. A yew tree grew star-shaped out of the ground, its star-shaped needles pointing like a road sign to the arch in the hollow, which framed the sparse but brightly twinkling lights on the plain below.

We separated outside the house, where the road branches off in different directions. The snow along the edges (it had melted everywhere else, except in the half-rolled leaves of a box tree, the whole of which it transformed into a snowy beacon) heightened the “crossroads” image. Each went his own way. Our host walked backward through the front garden to the house. His wife stood upstairs in the open window, looking out beyond us; her charm was of the kind that made one dream and not stare. For a moment, the house — the lantern affixed to the outside wall made you think of a farmyard at night — seemed to be part of a mountain village.

Instead of heading across the plain on my way home, I turned into a street so narrow that no one could have walked beside me. This street describes a loop which, after a steep hill, leads to the main road to the Old City. A phone rang in a house on the hill just once, as if it were a signal. I wanted to be alone with the falling snow. As I went downhill, something drew me upward, but to a much higher mountain, above the tree line; in my thoughts I saw myself on the crest of the Untersberg at night, between bare limestone cliffs, with nothing on my mind but the next step and the next handhold: “wholly present!”

Down at the intersection I ran into the painter, who was deep in contemplation of a cleft in the rock that was covered by a climbing plant — not just covered, but completely filled with it; he was holding a heavy robe of tight-meshed blossoms, blue through and through, bedded and framed in leaves. In the blowing, melting, then freezing snow the blue had the color of an old glacier; the flowery train was its tongue. When I looked longer, the blue seemed to stand out against it, and an expression often heard at digs came to my mind: “You must find the edges.” The painter swung the plant-robe and called out to me: “How merry are colors in motion!” And: “There are colors everywhere!” And: “Colors need to act!”

Together we went down the so-called Festival Stairway. On the last step the painter stopped, pointed one hand at the mountain behind us and the other at the Festival buildings ahead of us, and said: “It’s not a threshold that made me stop here. No, what stops me is a borderline. Or rather: something in me is stopped here, even if I go on. When I set foot in the Old City, something in me stops breathing. Some say the city puts them in a bad mood. I call that an understatement. A bad mood that makes you scream is more like pain. Whenever I come here, I try to pretend that nothing is wrong. But after a few steps, the borderline makes itself felt, colors lose their meaning, and even if I run, I can’t breathe. And the main thing perhaps is not the crowding — now, for instance, the city is empty — but this overpowering central zone that no crowd can fill. Or is it the other way around, that nothing can fill the center, so that all there can be is a disorderly crowd — a pushing, staggering, shoving, a barring the way to one another, as nowhere else in the world? No, nothing here makes for space, neither the parades nor the march-pasts of scar-faced city officials nor the swaying chamois beards on simpletons’ hats. Nor the processions of glittering brocade cloaks and golden monstrances; nor the melancholy idlers. And yet I once saw a procession in the city: a group of feebleminded people, slapping each other on the back, pushing and wrestling, swarming from souvenir shop to souvenir shop, shouting their joy at being let out, at being in town. The big bells, it’s true, give one a feeling of the place, except for the chimes, which to my mind evoke the slamming of a tin door, a car that won’t start, someone clearing his throat, or the clatter of high-heeled shoes. Did you ever lose your footing in the woods, while climbing a mountain for instance, and reach through the underbrush to grab a rotting tree trunk? Precisely because your hand meets with no resistance, you feel for a moment as if it were gone (severed by a yellow and black salamander or some other crawling thing). I’ve often had a comparable feeling when coming into this city. Here, too, the transitions are as camouflaged as the boundary between mold and foliage. See how the facade of the Festival Theater in front of us has been adapted to the mountain behind us? In the eyes of those responsible for the building, the gravel embedded in the limestone makes the mountainside look like concrete; and that was their justification for building with concrete. They even prided themselves on the idea: mountain and theater were one. To make the building even more mountainlike, they chiseled artificial fissures into its concrete façade. That’s what I mean by border fraud. And I call it a crime. Take a look at the line back there, where the rock face seems to merge with the concrete. At first sight, the two substances that have been forced together don’t even seem related; in the mountain, you see any number of oblique layers, and in each layer, after you’ve looked at it for a while, the sinking, rolling, stopping, and spreading of gravel is repeated, along with the intervals when the waters were at rest. With each new stripe, the tide seems to change. But in the adjacent concrete wall, the most you can detect is the impetus with which at some time or other — you get no feeling of time — a mixture of cement and gravel was poured into the revetment. The rock is covered with moss and lichen, its recesses and outcroppings with flowers and grass; the imitation, on the other hand, is covered with a film of cement, and not so much as a blade of grass has ever grown in its artificial fissures. How colorful the mountain can be, especially in wet weather; apparent gray turns to brown, yellow and red, even eggshell white, basalt black and bottle green, after the manner of gravel paths in the rain — whereas this monstrosity thrown up in front of it shimmers eternally in its pallid non-color. Isn’t it strange? The mountain, a piece of nature, is real to us, whereas the artifact affecting kinship with it repels us with its ludicrous unreality. Border fraud is in this case a crime, and such criminals are my enemies. Even on the mountain slopes, criminals erect their bastions with impunity: they need only leave the façades of their residential or commercial bunkers unfinished and they are given credit for respecting the environment. Any sheet-metal shack, any space station, any Bedouin’s tent would be more respectful. And the disrespect so typical of our city is most strikingly exemplified in the Festival Stairway, on the bottommost step of which we are now standing; which the experts rave about; and which in my opinion is of all outdoor stairways in the world the least deserving of the name. Ordinarily the word ‘stairway’ makes me think of ‘airiness’; here I think of ‘doldrums.’ The mustiness of the whole city begins at the uppermost landing. Here again, on these stairs, there is no space. Hardly anyone lingers here. At the most, someone wanting to catch his breath will lean on the iron bar that has been cemented onto the concrete in lieu of a banister. On the way down, a lot of people run; on the way up, they count the steps either aloud or to themselves, as one might in a tower. The steps — split granite slabs — are too high, too narrow, and too shallow. Footfalls are dull thuds or squeaks; you can’t walk two abreast if someone is coming in the opposite direction; if two people do walk side by side, the steepness makes their conversation shrill and it’s frequently interrupted by panting; when I meet my best friend here, we hardly recognize each other because the difference in elevation distorts our faces — and often enough they are not just distorted but also obscured by a shimmering film of cement — or else I see him only as a silhouette, it’s as if I were seeing him at the far end of a tunnel. These stairs don’t leap up the mountainside as an independent structure, they are a mere accessory of the concrete, which in places they are obliged to tunnel under. Instead of sweeping lines, they move in sharp angles followed by sudden curves, which are as troublesome to a slow walker as to a runner. The middle landing, which in other stairways offers an occasion to stop and look around, is placed in a dark and musty tunnel with a black puddle of urine in one corner and a pile of black-and-white pigeon droppings in the other. No, this isn’t an outdoor stairway; it’s a sewer. The Magic Flute serpent hewn into the stone parapet isn’t an ornament, it’s just bric-a-brac, and the court at the lower end of the sewer is likewise full of Festival bric-a-brac, and other kinds as well. And I must beg you not to imagine that my nocturnal tirade is my last word about border fraud. I mean to …”

The painter stopped and laughed. “Hm. What will I do? What will we do? Because my enemies elude my enmity.”

He stepped down from the stairs to city level and continued: “One day, when passing the statue of Mozart, I was surprised for a moment to notice that the face is turned toward the Old City. I had always thought of it as looking toward the river and away from the city. Then another day I was surprised to see that the two Gorgons’ heads to the right and left of the New Gate — the real mountain tunnel — point the way out of the city; I had always thought that the snakes in their hair and their blood-curdling eyes were addressed, rather, toward people going into the city.”

We went from one Old City square to another: all deserted, except for one where a drunk was leaning against the fountain, asleep; he was clutching a bottle, and one of his cheeks was puffed up. But the bars were loud with what the painter called the laughter of “triumphant heartlessness.” At that point, to my own surprise, I managed a reply of sorts.

“But,” I said, “would the light and air beyond the borderlines you speak of be so effective, so refreshing, so substantial if not for the dead calm in the center? Without it, would I, in passing from the Old City to the plain, always be overwhelmed by a wave of space? When I stay away from the city, the wave fails me. Doesn’t this suggest that the one sphere makes the other possible? And what better example can there be of how emptiness and superabundance complement each other? I, in any case, need the city and I need it as it is. My place is the center; it, too, takes its measure from outside, from the plain, and then I am its master. Every swarm of tourists that bars my way is welcome to me. The circle I describe around camera-toters starts me on my way to the open meadows; every detour I make in the crowd brightens the country daylight for me. The poet Georg Trakl, who celebrated the ‘beautiful city’—didn’t they all go strolling on the empty plain almost every day? Maybe it’s just that Salzburg should have another name: Charleroi or Taranto, or in a pinch Salinas? Yet salt was once held sacred. It transformed the stranger into an honored guest. Look at a handful of salt crystals under a magnifying glass; those translucent cubes glitter like the walls of a white city, with the crystals strewn farthest from the center as its outworks. Salt is dear to me-to look at, to touch, to season with. It reminds me of my birth and embodies a kind of measure, or law. Once in a Mediterranean salt marsh I saw the ‘house where it was born,’ a stone building on a jetty far out in the water, with an outdoor stairway leading to the entrance on the upper story. In Virgil, salt is always connected with the words ‘small’ and ‘concealed.’ This salt house seemed small and its inhabitants, or so at least I thought, lived in concealment.”

We had stopped at the end of the Mozart Footbridge across the Salzach. At that point the painter asked me my name, which, he said, he hadn’t caught when we were introduced. Then a strange thing happened; without a moment’s hesitation, I said my name was Hurler, and even added: “No, I’m not joking, that’s my real name — Hurler.”

The painter answered in a tone of friendly mockery: “Judging by what you’ve just been saying, it ought to be Spite.” Thereupon he set foot on the wooden bridge. As I remained on the bank below, his eyes were now level with mine. His way of taking leave was to observe that my face reminded him of the boisterous idiots whose forays through the city he would so gladly have joined: “They were my family.” Then he vanished across the bridge. Once, from halfway across, he called back that he wished for my sake that this night’s snow would turn to salt. Reclusive as I was, I then learned something: to look back — the backward glance, as it were.

The footbridge remained deserted. Just once, a couple appeared, the woman wearing a long evening dress under her fur coat, followed by a little girl with braces on her teeth, pushing a bicycle. Under her footsteps, the bridge swayed like a gangplank. The entrance to the bridge with its crossbars looked like a gangway that would be lifted as soon as these people had passed; then no one would be able to board the ship.

The squat, mottled trunks of plane trees came into sight on the opposite bank, lighting up that whole part of the city. On the hither side, brownish slush was splattered by cars, in whose dark interior a white shirt collar could now and then be seen. Accentuated by the swarms of snowflakes, the headlight beams of cars moving bumper to bumper looked like towropes. Here by the side of the shore road, the victim of a traffic accident had once lain, whimpering, clutching his legs to his belly, foaming at the mouth, his teeth chattering; mistaken at first for a “victim” in a first-aid exercise. The swollen but almost soundless river carried whole green bushes along with it. Not a single bell was ringing. In an isolated house on the slope of the Kapuzinerberg, the lights went out one by one. An alarm clock ticked; an ink pad dried. It came to my mind that the name of the road I was standing on was masculine and that of the one on the opposite shore feminine: Rudolfskai and Giselakai. The deserted footbridge was framed on both sides by an iron structure which crossed the river in three arches, hop skip jump. The entrance to the bridge was an arcade, decorated with a climbing plant that made me think of Virgil’s “smiling” acanthus. Here, however, nothing smiled. The bridge gave off the wrong emptiness, not the kind I wanted. For a while, I inwardly kept up my conversation with the painter, at first so intensely that I accompanied it with gestures; then my arms hung motionless and my silent monologue died away. A whiff of perfume came to me from the arcade — from the woman in the evening dress? — and the melting snow dripped and gurgled in the drains. I had had epaulettes of snow, which now quickly vanished.

Though there was plenty of room in the last bus — known as “the drunks’ special”—I stood on the moving disk between the two sections, which turned slightly on the curves. The floor of the long, tunnel-like vehicle rose, fell, and tilted this way and that; an empty beer bottle kept rolling under one of the seats and then out again. The two arms gripping the overhead wires not only conveyed the needed current but seemed also to save the bus and its passengers from sinking into the earth; following their example, I clutched the hanging straps above me with both hands.

It was a short ride; at that late hour, the bus went no farther than the cemetery. By then, I was the only passenger. I didn’t get out until asked to, and then I took elaborate leave of the driver, becoming more verbose from step to step. “Good night, Mr. Chinaman,” said the driver, and started round the circle on his way back to the city.

My housing development was still a long way off; for me, it couldn’t be far enough. For a moment, the bus wires against the open sky veered off in the direction of a suburb in Japan. Shining in the lamplight, the gilt letters on the cemetery gate were an illegible script, or all the scripts in the world combined.

Something drew me westward, across the meadows to the canal. But at the moment that didn’t seem to be my place. I stayed on the main road, which is bordered on the left by the cemetery wall, and as I walked I looked at the distant embankment — on my side of it the Canal Tavern, dark except for a single light in the upper story. The building, another symbol, looked to me like a lock-house.

For a time I was alone on the road and imagined that Loner — like Loser, Hurler, and Spite — was a name. After a while, a man with hobnailed boots came along in the opposite direction and said in a malignant tone: “I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.” As far as the end of the cemetery wall, I ran. The crematory amid the pines was lit up like some “sight” in the Old City. A yellow glove hung from a branch near the sidewalk. Above the road, the bus wires seemed to be woven into a steel net that wouldn’t move before dawn.

The short stretch where the road rises — the Salzach, which has now been diverted eastward, used to flow here — gave me a chance to breathe deeply and I savored it. Though the former river terrace was not very high, the plain it led to — where the village of Gneis is situated — was definitely a plateau, and here the air was perceptibly colder. There was still snow in the fields, and where the earth showed through, it revealed a pattern resembling bird tracks. The mistletoe balls in the trees had white caps on. Icicles cut through the April foliage and reflected the night light with the clarity of glass. Birds chirped from tree to tree, as though eager to know whether their friends had lived through the storm.

I bent down and washed my eyes and temples in wet snow. I wished it would start snowing again. My lips and forehead thirsted for snow, as though I hadn’t had my full share of winter yet.

In the suburb of Gneis, there was little light except for the streetlamps. An old old woman was standing at the window of a dark ground-floor room. The curtains were open and her face was close to the pane, but half concealed by her misted breath on the glass; no one would now have stood up to the look in her eyes.

Near the center of the village, the outlines of two children were painted on the roadway. The boy, who was a head taller, held his arm protectively around the girl. Both carried schoolbags. The sister was characterized by a pigtail, the brother by the prominence of his occiput. Under the layer of snow, the pair recurred several times in almost, but not quite, identical versions. The snow around them had melted, and the luminous paint glistened, though blackened from head to foot with tire marks.

I stood for a long time in the street, deep in contemplation of the schematic figures. Contemplation? In any event, there was nothing contemplative about the look I gave the driver of the oncoming car (who braked just in time), because he quickly closed the window he had already half opened and drove off without a word. Maybe he had only wanted to ask for directions — would the woman beside him otherwise have said: “Forget it, can’t you see he’s a stranger here himself?” And I called out after the car: “I’m only fit company for enemies now. Only my enemy is my friend.” Since this enemy no longer existed, all that remained was an aimless “Wipe him out!” (But at the same time I thought: Lucky none of my pupils’ parents was in that car.) Only then did I notice how many plays had been going on inside me, plays upon plays only a few hours before — and now not a single play was left. Or rather: I had run out of lines.

In the wooded section before the Colony, a mist arose. Only a few jutting branches could be made out clearly; trunks and treetops had almost disappeared. I dove into the mist as into a familiar element, one that suited me. The amount of space seemed infinite, and all for me. Suddenly on a tree trunk my shadow came to meet me.

I was almost disappointed when houses came into view; the gray of night was plenty of light for me. But in Oak Tree Colony I was — important to get this straight at such an hour — at home. The asphalt under my feet was home ground; this was in every sense my territory. Hadn’t I once wanted to shout at a noisy group of foreigners in the Old City: “Quiet — this is Austria!”? My country: an enamel sign in a provincial railroad station showed a pointing hand, with the words: “To the well.” My country, indeed. A man’s own country meant refuge, he could defend himself.

“But would you also defend this country of yours?” “Perhaps not the parliament building” would be my answer to such a question, “but this barn and that vintner’s hut, definitely.” For I can say of myself: “I am sick with my country.”

Now in the dense mist of the plain there was nothing but the Colony; no mountains, no sky; the desolation was almost complete. Some of the new houses were still unoccupied, and here and there the streets still smelled of fresh paint. The curtains of the foreign workers’ houses were of various dark colors, and even on the fully laden clotheslines there was seldom anything white to be seen. A barn glowed with inner light, shadows of animal bodies and human heads moved about and intermingled, as though a mare or a cow were being delivered. By the football field, a landfill far out on the heath, the dark tavern was being guarded by a dog named Nadir du Mistral with glass eyes and ears that resembled horns. A short, fierce, peacock-like screech issued from the Home for Retarded Children; a fluorescent light flickered; the windows were open at the top and the blinds hung down at a slant. A car had just driven into the garage; the top was covered with snow mixed with greenery; the driver, his hands on the wheel, was listening to the news on the radio; the only light in the villa that went with the garage was in the aquarium, where ornamental fish slowly swam back and forth.

I sat down by the canal, on a bench next to the phone booth, facing the apartment house where I lived. From time to time, the wind whistled through a solitary spruce by the water. I shut my eyes. Behind me, the Alm, almost silent over the rest of its course, roared like rapids — at this point, it drops steeply. Had I slept? When I opened my eyes, there was the half-moon with the face of a decrepit old man; a spruce branch was waving like a bird’s plume in front of it. In the moment of my awakening, the whole tree darkened and became my shadow.

I went into the house and without turning the light on anywhere, either at the entrance or in my apartment, went straight to bed. I lay with my eyes shut and began to feel warm. The mountain that goes by my name appeared to me. (It’s known to me only from a picture.) Mount Loser stood detached under a spacious sky, as though in a sphere of its own; and yet it seemed only a few steps away. From a rounded hilltop, which formed the pedestal, rose the naked cliffs of its gigantic upper story. Its flat roof was covered by a deep layer of snow, overarched by transparent gray air. The snow lay in wavelike dunes, and on the side of the mountain a white fountain surged into the gray air — a sign that a storm was raging up there. It must have been a severe storm, because the snow cloud was long and almost horizontal; indeed, it had a slight upward tilt. At the same time, the scene, beheld from a distance, seemed perfectly still; even the white of the fountain was motionless. In the sheer wall below it, there were dark spots, almost like gates or niches. Open, O gate in the rock. Take palpable form, 0 Aeolian Mount Loser.

Yet no peace came. Something was missing, something without which any appeal to any object whatsoever was premature. And premature meant pointless. The object ceased to be a thing of this world. “Something is missing” meant: there was room within me, but it remained empty. I did not expect the missing thing, I couldn’t — I had no reason to expect it. There was simply an unfilled space within me — and its emptiness was sorrow.

“But what is this thing that is not to be expected? The rustling of a tree that becomes a voice? A fountain rising from a cliff? A burning bush? Why not admit for once that what you lack is love!”

At this point, I finally lost my temper. “What kind of love are you people driving at? Love between the sexes? Love for another person? Love of nature? Love for what one has created? I, in any case, am homesick just now for a body, and not for its sex, but for beloved shoulders, a beloved cheek, a beloved glance, a beloved presence. Love? Incapacity for love? Lover’s sorrow? The sorrow is present only now that I am without love. You have only invented ‘incapacity’ as a pretext for your loveless argument. And when love sets in, I won’t have to appeal to the distant mountain anymore; of its own accord, it will move into our sphere, a salt dome, confirmation of thy, my presence. With the onset of love, I shall be safe. Or it will not have been love.”