Across

The Viewer Seeks a Witness

In the days that followed, I didn’t leave the house. Most of the time I lay prone on my bed, my head in the crook of my arm. This arm was a kind of bulwark, behind which I felt sheltered. Now and then I’d pick up a daddy longlegs and let it run about in the palm of my hand, which tickled pleasantly. Occasionally I’d lie on my back, looking at the wall, where a flashlight and a shoehorn were hanging on a hook.

Outside the window, two thick ropes hung down; the housefront was being renovated and they served to pull a basket filled with mortar up and to lower one that had been emptied. In the dawning light, the ropes seemed strikingly massive and dark. At night, they made themselves noticed now and then by slapping against the windowpanes. In the moonlight, they glistened like glass; the melting snow had run over them during the day and then frozen.

The phone rang fairly often; but it was only someone who had dialed a wrong number — as if Salzburg were the city not only of disorderly pedestrians but also of disorderly telephoners. Finally, after calls for the “parish office,” for a man called Siegfried, for the “customs office for overseas shipments” and Part-Time, Inc., I shouted into the phone: “Shut up!” After that, I stopped answering.

In the morning, my mail fell through the door slot: advertisements, and one solitary letter, consisting of a printed form titled “News Flash,” with a check mark in the margin.

During the day, the sounds from the supermarket provided distraction. When it was closed for lunch hour, I waited almost impatiently for the beep of the cash registers to resume.

Of course, all this could be told in a different way. When I looked in the mirror, there were no eyes. I felt as if I had no body left; that is, I no longer had any share in the light and wind, in the cold or heat; and this was a privation. As I lay there without dignity, I was a painful husk; a husk with nothing inside. In the absence of a viewer, there was nothing left to view. Once, in the dusk, I confused the gigantic Untersberg with a wooded knoll. Another time, I saw a cliff as a flashing guillotine. A volcano had erupted in the Staufen; great gray-violet clouds of smoke drifted from its pyramidal summit; and when again I looked westward, the whole mountain had collapsed into a rubble heap only half its height. (In reality, the main peak was hidden by rain clouds, so only the much smaller front peak could be seen.) And what did “west” mean? The cardinal points had become meaningless, as they do for one cast adrift on the open sea; in the place of direction, confusion reigned. When once I made an attempt to dress, I missed all the openings and stood there like a twisted malefactor (funny, I have to admit). I heard sounds as when the Föhn is blowing; they seemed to come not from my field of vision but from around the corner, so to speak, from behind my back, taking me unawares, without the corresponding visual images. The everyday cries of the jackdaws rang out like bursts of gunfire; I suddenly heard the clip-clop of a horse’s hoofs as though a stopped clock had started (it would stop again in an instant); cocks crowed as though sounding the alarm, or taps. And whenever the bus wires struck together in the woods outside, a crashing and a crackling were heard as when a big building is on fire.

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.

I arose with the first light and washed the windows and floors of both my rooms. Outside, the bog appeared with its earth colors — green, brown, ocher, and black. It was blanketed in haze, purple in the dawning light. The great flank of the Staufen emerged from the western horizon, shimmering white like a strange star. “Beloved colors! It is by contemplating you that we live.”

I dressed after laying garment after garment over my arm like my own valet: blue-and-white-striped shirt, silk tie, double-breasted summer suit, black low-cut leather shoes, long, light-gray “dustcoat”; and into my breast pocket I slipped the hibiscus blossom, which had shrunk to a reddish cigar. I went to the mirror, looked for a long while into my eyes, and for once found myself beautiful. I filed my nails to a perfect roundness. With a single unbroken movement, I put my hat on. I leafed through my paper money, rolled it up, and thrust it into my trouser pocket. I left my apartment without locking the door.

On the street, an old crone, her face and neck a network of wrinkles forming innumerable tiny hexagons, approached and said: “Here comes Mr. Springtime.” The cracks in the asphalt at the edge of the street also formed a hexagonal pattern. A young man in uniform, wearing pointed shoes and carrying a suitcase, crossed the canal bridge. As the sun rose, a dog ran down a path through the meadow, swaying from side to side against the light like a covered wagon in the Wild West. And I did indeed bear westward, though from time to time I veered off to the north and south; or just stood there for a while. Now and then, I walked backward and then I had the eastern sun in my face. The sun didn’t disperse the ground haze but gave it a bright color. Later, it took on a lasting lilac hue, against which the branches of the trees looked intensely black.

On the Untersberg, there was snow only above the tree line; the plateau at the top was mottled with it. The whole mountain was sharply outlined; every gully and every crag stood out distinctly; only the hollow below the summit seemed a caldron of clouds, sending out spiral after spiral of mist. One of these took the shape of a giant eagle and went flying over the plain, hunting with talons outstretched and an eye of azure blue.

In crossing the thinly settled area, I met no one. Only once I saw someone on another path, and we greeted each other with upraised hats. On my way, I stopped into the Moos church, where services were in progress. Only a few people were there, at a certain point in the Mass, they gave one another their hands. Each of those present was expected to make a holiday wish. A woman with a polka-dotted head scarf said: “May Austria never die.” A young man said aloud: “May we become holy.” Two children looked at each other and grinned.

I left right after the blessing and went my way. The bog was rather bumpy in spots where peat had formerly been dug and which were now overgrown with grass. Here and there a patch of fallow land had been fenced off to form a community garden; from a gate that put one in mind of a ranch, a long, wide gravel path led to wooden cottages in the background.

The airport control tower, the tallest building on the whole plain, looked like an armless robot in the distance. I started toward it on a railroad track that came from the loading platform of a brewery. The warehouse was a long, yellow building with only blind windows in front. The sun shone on the great empty triangle and was reflected back. Momentarily overlapping, the shadows of two butterflies moved about on one of the blind windows as on a dance floor; the empty triangular space around them was a shimmering symbol of freedom. The railroad tracks in the meadow grass gave off a dazzling light. The ties forced me to take short steps like an old man; afterward, on the road, away from the tracks, I continued to move in their rhythm. A lone locomotive had once traversed this meadow, covered from roof to running board with homeward-bound workers.

The road enters a long tunnel which passes under the airport. Just before the tunnel, there is an athletic field, screened from view by a dense crowd, over which for a moment a white ball appeared. On a recurrent billboard, a blond woman posing in violet lingerie informed all comers: “These curves are for loving.” The highway was heavily traveled. Cars emerged from the tunnel with their headlights on; some turned them off at once, some a little later, some not at all. (“That’s the way we are.”) One car still had skis on top; the next, flowers; the third was already carrying a boat. A woman, perceptible only as a tapering hand on the wheel, held a long, skin-colored cigarette between her fingers and left behind her the image of a praying mantis. Utterly soundless in comparison to the crashing and honking on the ground, an enormous flying object, a commercial plane coming in for a landing, entered the air space above the endless column of vehicles. For a moment, it seemed motionless; only when it put down on the runway did it fill the countryside with its howling.

In the tunnel, the noise of the cars swelled to a roar and a blast, which passed through the portholes in the concrete wall and spread to the parallel foot and bicycle paths. A chain of fluorescent lights made the tunnel into a seemingly endless sequence of light and dark chambers, where pedestrians were by turns luminescent and invisible. The walls were covered with graffiti. The firstcomers had spread out freely, the rest had to squeeze in: Young man seeks young woman, view to sexual intercourse; Zion, devil’s-bread tree; Mother, your son is still walking under the sky; Kondwiramur. Two soldiers in caps and laced shoes saluted me in passing and called out: “Morning, Colonel. At your service.” Then came an unshaven man on a bicycle, who just said: “Hey, you.” (I, in turn, said to a woman who was running: “What’s the hurry?”) There was a cool, fresh smell in the tunnel. At the other end, it opened out to the west wind. The asphalt, pockmarked from stiletto heels and hobnails, looked, if you kept your eyes on it, like a dusty country road, spotted with raindrops.

Leaves blown in from outside showed that the tunnel was nearing its end. The section of landscape which came into view at the exit seemed suffused with a sort of transcontinental light. Here the Staufen is seen from a new angle; the accustomed pyramidal top breaks down into three broad humps, which draw the eye into the distance, and the gas stations, the warehouses, and the hangar begin to look like some sort of overseas settlement — in Tierra del Fuego or Montana.

The airport is correspondingly small, as if it were not part of the city but some sort of colonial branch office. The birches outside the terminal building were snow-white, and the luminous green of the young shoots of a larch tree seemed to fill the tree with tiny exotic birds. The stone rocket in the forecourt was replicated in the grass plot below it by a similarly shaped unopened crocus, whose dark violet emerged, ready for takeoff, from its silver-gray involucre.

Now it was midday and warm. Even the short wings of the ubiquitous sparrows sparkled in the sunlight whenever they flew up out of the hedges. From the fields adjoining the airport came waves of manure smell, and cows and pigs bellowed in the former Roman settlement of Loig, a little farther on. The straight line to the horizon drawn by the yellow laburnum bushes on either side of the highway was accentuated by the yellow of a gas station. As usual, I misread a “long-term parking” sign as “long-term farting.”

The air terminal building has two stories, surmounted by an observation deck. The second floor is occupied by a restaurant and a so-called hotel. This hotel consists of a short corridor with a few rooms on either side, so narrow that the two beds in it have to be placed end-to-end. In most of the rooms, the windows look out on the nearby control tower and the runways. Except in summer, the hotel is almost always empty; occasionally, a group will arrange for a banquet in the restaurant and book rooms in the hotel as well. There are no night flights.

The reception desk, behind a glass door that is always open, was, as usual, untended. I got the key from a waiter, whom I found in the terrace café. All the rooms were vacant, he informed me, and they were all the same. I wrote two names in the register: Andreas Loser and Tilia Levis. At least the waiter regarded the latter as a name, for he asked me: “Isn’t that an actress?” He had a bushy black mustache and said, without waiting for my answer: “Or an aviator? Or a foreigner? I’m from Kurdistan.”

It was cold and dark in the room; under the curtain rods and in the shower stall, the hum of fluorescent light. But when the window was open, warm spring air and quiet sunlight filled the room. The airfield didn’t seem to function at midday; there was only a helicopter flying back and forth, close to the ground as though looking for something, like a rescue craft over the ocean. Up in the glassed-in control tower, a man was sitting at the radar screen; he had his headphones on and he was reading the paper.

In the restaurant, I chose a table by the window, with a view of the western villages and mountains. In the middle of a fenced-in grass plot, a feathery brown spruce tree glimmered beside a chapel-blue fire hydrant. I ate light-colored lamb and drank burgundy, which in the bottle was as black as belladonna and in the glass barberry red — they brought out the colors of the landscape.

I spent the afternoon in the village of Loig, at the excavation site (which had been partly filled in). In the pits that were still open, children were looking for mosaic stones that might have been overlooked, and an elderly gentleman with chunks of clay clinging to the soles of his shoes — he had no doubt walked across the fields — was sketching the ancient water conduits in a notebook. A fruit tree, all pink-and-white blossoms, stood by itself in a muddy enclosure; a plump hen and a titmouse were perched on two branches, one above the other — living proof that such diversity of forms and species cannot be mere chance.

Later on, in the air terminal building, where the sun had begun to turn orange and the unoccupied ticket windows seemed extraordinarily massive, an early passenger or greeter was sitting alone in the waiting room, which suggested a bus terminal more than an airport. Later the room filled up. The people standing there had long shadows. The windows were manned, the baggage conveyor belts running. And in the Rent-a-Car stalls — those of one company red, of the other yellow — the mascaraed lashes, the bleached hair, and the hands with lacquered fingernails resumed their places. A uniformed guard with a submachine gun crossed the room, his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half closed, as pale and stiff as a corpse.

Something drew me to all these people, even though the air inside was close and smelled like fermented stale bread.

The sun went down. In the parking lot, which had been deserted all afternoon, long lines of cabs were now waiting with their roof lights on. A movement ran through the leafy plants that twine through the whole lobby, as though in accompaniment to the song pouring from the transistor radio that a young fellow in the shell chair beside me was holding up to his ear. A dog barked and the glassed-in lobby transformed the sound into the wailing of a pinball machine. The plane that was just landing would fly on immediately to another country. It was the end of the holiday; an unusually large number of passengers got out or pressed toward the entrance on the other side. Newly arrived passengers, waiting for their luggage, were unrecognizable shadows behind a frosted-glass door, while friends and relatives crowded around a narrow opening to wave or to signal in some other way. A traveler emerged from the automatic double doors, walked over to one of the Rent-a-Car stalls, where the girl in charge, leaning over the counter like a seller of lottery tickets, held out a finger with car keys on it; he grabbed them in his mouth and at the same time snapped at her finger, which the girl did not pull back but thrust in a little deeper. While the man rushed out to his car, the girl unfolded a piece of paper he had tossed to her, and slipped it under the telephone.

I sat bolt-upright, my legs close together and my hands on my knees. Outside, over the road to the city, a strange new signal shone amid the usual traffic lights, billboards, and cranes: the rising, fiery-red full moon. Inside, between the wings of the door, a young woman appeared. Half hidden by the people in front of her and darkened by those behind her, she was visible as a line from neck to hip. I stood up and took off my hat. In disengaging herself from the crowd, the woman stumbled and described a semicircle. Then, standing to one side, she turned away from the exit, as though wishing in that way to attract someone’s attention.

No one came. The last cab drove away. The plane took off. As it rose into the air, the din it had just made in speeding over the runway bounced back from the Untersberg. The whole rocky mass was still rumbling and roaring, while the plane was already far in the distance, no bigger than a dragonfly. Had the woman’s back, along with the triangle of her scarf, come closer in the meantime, or had they receded? The lobby was almost empty when at last she turned around. Her face revealed a thoughtful beauty; of all beauties, the most thoughtful.

First, she looked out at the fields through the plate-glass front; then at the hat in my hand, as though this were a prearranged sign of recognition; and, last, into my eyes. It was a two-way glance that nothing could cancel out, though after it we blinked into empty space as if something terrifying had happened. She said something in an indeterminate accent, but the accent may have been only momentary. I went over to her and took her in my arms. I was overwhelmed by the one word that was spoken between us: “Du.”

We went slowly up to the second floor; or possibly we ran. I took the key from the untended reception desk. The short corridor seemed to have widened into a suite of rooms. The spotlights in the ceiling cast a procession of circles on the carpet. There was no sound but the soft whirring of the lamps.

She jostled me with her hip, intentionally or perhaps not. She laughed at the room, but the look in my eyes made her grave. She stumbled, or pretended to stumble, across the threshold, which was only a strip of grooved hard rubber.

Seen in the slanted windowpanes of the control tower, the headlights of the cars driving straight on the road below were moving in curves. On the abandoned tables of the workers’ cafeteria stood glass sugar bowls, their lids all casting identical round shadows on the white crystals underneath. In a dark room to one side, an electric iron and a baby’s bottle were discernible on the windowsill.

Through the dark hotel room, whose only light came from the airfield — a multicolored dotted pattern on the walls — ran a shudder, followed by stillness. Does an individual, doubled up in dying, circling around himself, not sometimes feign to be two hostile beings locked in a life-and-death struggle? Here, for once, the reverse was true: two beings quietly side by side, not dying. Far enough apart to bring them close. Someone asked: “Do you remember?” as though there were a memory in common. Someone said: “Then ‘weakness’ is another word for ‘being in the right.’” No one said: “Save me”; at the very most, “Help me.”

The room was cramped, yet the two bodies made space for themselves. We fitted nicely into one of the beds, at the foot of which lay a white, towel-size mat. Looking for her in the dark, I sensed her presence all the more deeply. No, no need to look for her. She was there. Moved to the core by her body’s being there, I hesitated — and by my hesitation she knew me. Yes, it was the woman who recognized the man; and it was she who with a resolute, majestic gesture united with him.

In passion, our bodies did not diverge but remained together. They consummated the act, which was not a frenzied struggle but a mighty game, the “game of games.” In that night of love, another time reckoning and another sense of place took over. Now it’s raining (the wet concrete runway is a quiet lake). Now the full moon is shining on a little gondola-shaped cloud with two lovers in it. Now the shower of sparks from the intersecting bus wires is in your body. Now your shoulder is your face again. Now the eastern sky is a Spanish-lilac color. Now for a moment the woman’s speaking becomes a singing. She means nothing by it; she is only singing her beauty.

Dreams came. I stepped out of the story, walked down a sloping meadow by night; the brook at the foot of it shimmered in the morning sun; there were human silhouettes on the bank. Was it another dream when, head tilted back, I looked into a woman’s womb as into the inner recesses of a cupola tapering from turn to turn? When I wanted to convince myself, the eyes of a beautiful stranger rested on me. It must have been a dream in any case that, one with each other, we became a native of the world’s center.

The strange face with the closed eyelids and lips made me think of a primeval stone figure, expressing — it is uncertain which — bliss, mischief, or danger; in the next moment, it might smile at me or spit at me or both at once. Instead, it opened its eyes and looked at me; and a woman’s voice — anonymous no longer — said: “I must leave you now. It’s late.”

Outside, a procession of small cars with blinking lights on top drove along the runway. During the night, the moon had waned a little. A baggage truck rattled; a gate opened in the parking area. Smoke rose from the farmhouse at the end of the runway; in the courtyard, a slowly striding male figure on his way to the barn.

When I asked her when I would be seeing her again, she replied: “Once upon a time there were.” Did that mean that wishes were in order? “Not wishes, but questions.” So I asked her how she saw me. I was in need of being described a little. “Give me a portrait of myself. It can be false if you like.”

Then she replied: “You don’t seem to be wholly present; you breathe discontent. You’re kind of run-down. I desire you but I don’t trust you. You have something on your conscience; not theft, or you’d be on the run. It’s plain that you are outside ordinary law, and it makes you suffer in a way. I don’t trust you, and I do. You are like the man in the doorway. Though very ill, he went to see a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tensed eyes became slits, framed in their sockets as by sharply ground lenses. ‘Goodbye, my suffering Chinaman,’ said his friend.”

“Did they ever see each other again?”

The portraitist said nothing more. Already in the doorway, her only reply was an immensely friendly laugh. I shut my eyes and heard a sort of answer after all: “In the end, the friend said to the friend, ‘At last a Chinese — at last a Chinese face among so many native faces.’”

That morning, I cut across the fields and visited my mother in Wals. She lives in an old people’s home on the large, almost always deserted village square. We sat together in the garden, on a wooden bench under a pear tree with pink-and-white blossoms.

At first she mistook me for the postman, and later she addressed me by various other names. From time to time she recognized me, and then she giggled, keeping her mouth closed to hide the stumps of her teeth. Her eyes were very bright, her face as small as a child’s, her head no bigger than a headhunter’s shrunken trophy. She was eating an Easter egg, more scraping than biting, and the painted shells fell into her lap; she gulped the whole yolk down at once. She studied me at length and then said: “Aren’t these cruel times we’re living in? Even before you went away to the army, I was always sorry for you.” She asked me how my “business,” as she called it, was getting along. “You and your business,” a traditional turn of phrase, which was not meant to be disparaging, but betokened a sort of respectful awe. And then another strange word fell: “If it weren’t for you, I’d be discomfited now.” Whom did she think she was talking to? Once, when she said: “When you were little, I often hit you with the cooking spoon,” she meant me. And later on, she again meant me when she said: “Your father and you are weavy people. You’re always weaving back and forth between home and somewhere else, and you don’t find your place either here or there.”

When in parting I put some money on the bench for her, she whooped several times for joy, and stomped around the bills in a heavy-footed dance, in which she was joined by some of the other female residents.

I then crossed the square to the church; in the memorial chapel there was a big book containing photographs of the war dead. My father was killed at the very beginning of the war and never saw his son. His picture, which is in a plastic sleeve, does not, like most of the others, show the dark stamplike mustache under the nose, but perhaps he was too young for that when the picture was taken.

From the church terrace, one looks down into the hollow where the Saalach forms the border with Germany — a cold mountain stream with broad gravel banks. One could skip flat stones into the bushes on the opposite bank. Everything in me shrinks back from the country on the far shore — as though that were the beginning of nothingness forever and ever.

That same evening, I stood beside another river. In the early afternoon, I had flown via Zurich to Milan, and from there taken a local train to Mantua. A few kilometers to the south, there is a village named Pietole, which was formerly called Andes and is believed to be Virgil’s birthplace. Past the village, behind a dike, flows the Mincio, which Virgil called “immense,” making its way “in slow meanders” through the Lombard lowlands, “its banks fringed with swaying reeds.” Today, according to certain editions of Virgil, the Mincio is little more than a brook. This, I saw when I got there, is not true; on the contrary, the river answers exactly to Virgil’s description of two thousand years ago. In places, it even separates into several arms, with wooded islands in between.

White water lilies with yellow centers rose and fell in the slow current. Little fishes leapt into the air. On one of the wooded islands, a cuckoo called, and a heron glided overhead. Far beyond the river, flames shot into the air from an oil refinery.

It was a warm, bright evening; there was no one about; but a walled-in dog pound gave forth a tumult as of different pieces of music being played backward; and when birds overflew this spot, they would dart vertically upward. I took my clothes off and waded up to my neck into the muddy-brown water.

After dressing again, I went westward into the village and sat down outside a restaurant, the Trattoria Andes. Situated at the intersection of two surfaced country roads, it is surrounded by a large cornfield; almost every one of the half-grown stalks had a sparrow perched on it. This Indian corn was unknown to Virgil, as were the potato plants in the neighboring field, not to mention the tomatoes and the “robinia with its soft little leaves, which rustle more loudly than those of any other tree” (my naturalist son).

On the way back to Mantua, I set off at random across the fields, which are traversed by a number of bridgeless canals. I jumped across most of them; only one was so wide that I had to swim (making a bundle of my clothes and tossing it ahead of me). The weed that we call bear’s-breech and feed to rabbits proved, on closer scrutiny, to be something much more choice, the “twining acanthus.” The elders here were diminutive. The plane trees, “which lend shade to those who stop to drink,” were clipped hedges along the sides of the road; the dried seedpods from the previous year rattled loudly at every gust of wind.

That night, I dreamed that the village of Andes was on a bay along the seacoast. In another dream, I saw my mother’s empty bed. Her nightgown was spread out on it; it showed the precise imprint of her bruised body.

Next morning, in Milan, I took a plane to Alghero in Sardinia. It was in Sardinia, in two successive summers, that I begot my children, and once from a passing ship I saw Alghero as a white city. Since then, the city has meant to me “not having to say anything,” “the possibility of keeping silent.” During the flight, the vacant sea sparkled, and once two ferries passed each other. After the plane landed, there were light-colored baggage checks fluttering on the loaded baggage trucks in the middle of the cement field.

I spent a whole day by the remote Lago di Barratz. Separated from the sea by an enormous dune, it is the only natural freshwater lake on the island. I was alone there. The only sign of other people were footprints. I stood barefoot in the water, over my ankles in black muck, until a tiny leech chewed itself into me, grew fat, and finally fell off. A grasshopper which was almost as big as a sparrow flew onto my hand and I held it between my fingers until its sawtooth legs began to scratch my skin. The shores of the lake were roofed over by tamarisk stalks the color of asparagus, but much taller; their green was in perfect balance with the rippling blue of the water: “the murmuring tamarisk.” In the background, on a sand-colored high plateau, a dark bull stood motionless for hours. On the way back to the bus stop, I saw the stone I had killed with lying limestone-gray in the red dust; the round holes in it were my finger marks. I was still walking barefoot, and in the village a child called out to me: “You got no shoes on,” and the words became a chorus.

The next day — I should have been back in Salzburg teaching — I passed the home for the so-called retarded in Alghero, which is separated from the sea by a shore road and is called Domus Misericordiae. Nearly all the idiots, young for the most part, were sitting on a long bench in the yard, with their backs to the road; a few sat on the gateposts, looking down at the passersby. One held his fingers to his lips like a Jew’s harp and struck them soundlessly. I ventured a look at him. But the idiot on the gatepost won; I lowered my eyes and went away. Toward evening, I went back and again faced the Jew’sharp player, who hadn’t stirred from the spot. We took each other’s measure at length, impassive but without staring. In the end, there was a blinking behind the fence and my opponent turned away, but with an air of easy indifference, as though nothing had happened, not as one defeated. For the moment, not an idiot, but someone cleverly playing the role. “Ugly fool!” he said.

Next day, on a bus ride to the interior, I tried the same game with a baby. His face propped on the shoulder of a woman sitting in the row ahead of me, he evidently couldn’t take his eyes off me; when I looked back, the baby, as though I had seen through him, finally showed his profile and took refuge in his mother’s neck; yet at the same time he grinned as though relieved to be seen through. Mother and child formed a Janus head. On Sunday morning, on my return to the coast, I passed the home again; Mass was being said in the open, under a canopy of trees. Once, a lizard fell out of a tree and landed on the priest’s shoulder. When he raised the white wafer, it was veined with shadows like a setting sun. During the sermon, the acolyte played with a spider. The idiots waved their arms, clapped loudly, and interrupted with inarticulate gurgling, cackling, grunting, and groaning. A sparrow preening itself in a dusty hollow turned into every conceivable animal: a mouse, a crow, a rooster, a lion, a dolphin, a picture puzzle. The sea off Alghero glittered in far-flung arcs, lines, and loops, like longhand script. On a block of salt beside it sat a caged parrot, who didn’t say boo.

It was no dream that, some days late, I reported back to school in Salzburg. My friend in the principal’s office just said: “It doesn’t matter,” took me to my classroom, and opened the door for me. On the way, he had given me a long look, evidently undecided whether to regard me as a lost soul and failure or as a man changed for the better.

The building, formerly an imperial cavalry barracks, is on a bank of the Salzach. The room with its high walls was very bright. I have never seen eyes of so many different colors, and I thought them all beautiful. The class was strangely quiet, until I said: “Why don’t you misbehave? Come on, misbehave a little.” My pupils thought I was creepy, and not for the first time, I imagine.

The whitish steam rising from the chimney of the municipal power plant on the opposite bank showed the direction of the wind. By the sounds on the railroad bridge, one could tell what sort of train was crossing: the passenger trains purred and hummed, the freight trains rumbled, and from time to time one heard the clatter of a shunting engine.

I felt happy to be there; to be there not permanently but for the present. I leaned out of the open window, looked upstream, and saw the spray of an arm of the Alm Canal, which drops like a waterfall into the Salzach. For a moment there was a light over the city, which imparted a pastel hue to all the buildings, even the massive walls of the castle. The whole produced the effect not of a backdrop or façade but of a quiet, festive fairyland. Yet it seemed to me that something was gone forever. A part of me had fallen off the cliff with the stoned man. I was no longer among the players, or else I was playing a different game; or, at best, competing for some consolation prize. Melancholy was in the world; it was the reality which deformed and discolored the world. A monstrous picture from Sardinia came into my mind. A colony named Fertilia, built by the dictator’s henchmen in the years between the wars: today not a single house has a threshold and the doors to the houses are gaping holes. “Stinking rabble!” I said aloud at my table in the faculty room, which had formerly been the guardroom of the barracks. Someone at the next table retorted: “That will do, Loser.” When I looked up, I noticed for the first time that I was one of the older men in the room.

I began my last class of the day by saying: “The Greek word lalein corresponds to the German lallen (to babble, talk inarticulately). But the poet also calls pebbles lallai.” I was standing at the window, I saw the spring flow of the river; the wind had drawn a dense pattern of lengthwise stripes extending to both horizons — a regatta of emptiness. I shall be without love, I thought. Shall I be without love? In any case, I shall never again be secure.

Suddenly my melancholy changed to something radically different: to something unprecedented, legendary, unheard-of, and yet instantly convincing. Its name was loneliness and what filled me with enthusiasm was not loneliness considered as my fate but the phenomenon of loneliness. What made the word convincing was an image: outside a house in the early-morning light, I saw the shortest banister in the world, hardly the length of a hand, made for a single step; but it was curved and brightly polished and sparkled in the clear air.

A few days later, I had a powerful little experience in the Oak Tree Colony supermarket. (It is the basis of the present tale.) No doubt as a precaution against shoplifters, a tilted mirror is fitted to the ceiling, and chancing to look up, I saw my face in it. People are always saying that children take after their parents. But what struck me at that moment was the contrary; it is not, as others have sometimes observed, my son who resembles me, but I, the adult, who resemble my son. Ordinarily, resemblances between forebears and descendants strike me as distasteful, if not outrageous; but this resemblance was the opposite; and it would never be noticed by anyone but me. It had to do not with the features but with the eyes, not their shape or color, but their gaze, their expression. Here, I said to myself, I see my innermost being, and for a moment I felt acquitted. In the far corner of the supermarket, in the meat department, two white-clad women were standing in total silence. A car rumbled over the planks of the canal bridge. Outside the display window, there was a great brightness; a vault of light spanned the bridge. But this gaze, I asked myself a little while later — what was it like? And the answer: Wounded.

The following weekend, I went to Gois to see my family. “Gois, Wals, and Siezenheim are good,” it is said concerning the three villages on the western fringe of the plain — meaning that they are situated beyond the relatively barren bog. No one was home just then. I went to the toolshed and whetted the scythes, which had rusted during the winter; then I went out to the orchard and mowed the first grass.

The orchard with its many trees and their often interlocking branches is a strange setting for the small “teacher’s house,” for which flower beds and a lawn would be more suitable. The yellow front is covered by an empty trellis, on which heart-shaped apricots were formerly grown. The whole house seems to have been transplanted from somewhere, from a suburb or residential area of the city, to this remote village. In the bay tree beside the front door — dark green, with translucent veins — linden blossoms, maple spores, and bits of straw from the neighboring fields have come to rest.

It was a rainy afternoon in early May. I chopped wood in the woodshed, hoed the grapevines, which were already putting forth fluffy leaves. Then, at the far end of the garden, I sat down on a grassy knoll which the trees had sheltered from the rain. For a moment, the setting sun appeared.

First my daughter arrived, accompanied by another girl. She had her own key, and the two went into the house without noticing me. Up until then, the stairway had been dark and deserted; now a light went on and legs ran up the stairs. Two heads propped on hands appeared in the open dormer window; pop music rang out, and was softened by the faces of the two listeners; I myself had once had an ear for such music. The girls whispered, giggled, scolded, enjoyed themselves; their foreheads, cheeks, throats, and shoulders had the bloom of demanding yet modest, patient yet self-confident brides awaiting their bridegrooms. 0 rejuvenated world.

My daughter’s mother’s car stopped outside the house. She had seen me from the distance and waved. She had treated herself, she informed me, to a little trip across the border, to the Chiemsee, and had taken the boat out to the islands. “Nobody ever comes to see us here in Gois.” In the rain, on Frauenchiemsee Island, she had felt so secure that a shudder ran through her. There was a telephone booth in the middle of the lake. A drunk had looked at her “as if he were blind in one eye.” In the rainy mist, “the lakeshore had been something like a northern ocean.”

As she spoke, I recovered my eye for her. Years before, in the days of our courtship (yes, I was once capable of courting someone!) I wrote to her in a letter: “We come from two different Earths. I from the planet Carefree and you from the planet Care.” The present visitor also found a refreshing severity in her face. In confronting most people, I first perceive the Gestalt, the overall picture; in her case, what I see first is the eyes, almost black, and below them the whiteness of her throat. (I know there’s no point in trying to describe people, however one goes about it; and yet I sometimes feel I have to say something about her.)

Knowing my son would be on his way home from the athletic field, I decided to head him off. We met on the highway where it passes through a cornfield. Once on the meadow, I saw a clubfooted roadworker with his shovel over his shoulder, walking “under the sky”; that was how I now saw my son, carrying a soccer ball in a string bag, walking under the sky; meandering from side to side of the road, yet determined; and at the same time I heard the scraping of his jean-legs.

The visitor then became the cook. The family gathered for dinner in the winter garden, which is on the west side of the house. My daughter’s friend sat down with us; she was to spend the night. The daylight lingered on. Blades of straw glittered in the dung heaps outside the farms; a glow came from the grass under the fruit trees. One could hear the Autobahn — a steady howl. The point where it crosses the border is nearby: a flickering-flaring light as of an oil field between the trees of the semicircular village hill, which with its jagged spruce crowns makes me think of a sleeping boar; the dark hump gives the little white village church on this side of it the dimensions of a cathedral.

It was getting cold on the porch. The guest brought logs and made a fire in the veranda stove. A so-called dwarf palm from the Isle of Silence — a species which allegedly existed only there — waved its fan, and a primitive-looking hare sleeping at its feet twitched a nostril. One of the girls said she wanted a house where there would be a room for everything: a room for stones, a room for plants, a room just for school. A roaring in the east, from the direction of the airfield, meant Frankfurt; another, Linz; another, Amsterdam.

The cook washed the dishes. The woman came into the kitchen with a book, and read aloud a passage from the correspondence of a married couple at the turn of the century: “Your constant absence has given me a higher life, a spiritual drive that would otherwise have remained unknown to me.” She added on her own: “One sex says that to another; but mightn’t a human being say the same to God?” Then we all watched the television news together, and afterward someone cried out: “But some sort of immortality must be possible!”

I went up to the attic and knocked at my son’s door. He said to me in a bass voice: “Don’t stand there so respectfully.” It seems he had heard from his schoolmates that I had been wandering aimlessly about the town, “like a lunatic”; one had told him how I’d been seen coming out of a public toilet and the attendant had called after me: “Never let me see your face again.” He himself had once seen me sitting on a bench between two full plastic bags, “like a tramp.”

Only a flashlight was on, and the attic room was in half-darkness. Little knickknacks, mostly metal or glass, gave the wall over the desk the look of a pilot’s instrument panel at night. We now had the whole plain outside to ourselves. Green was the last color, then everything turned black, traversed by chains of lights. I sat down on the stool beside my son’s desk chair and said: “I have a story to tell you. It’s called Threshold Story.”

But before the storyteller began, he paused for a moment and said, addressing himself: “Stop. Everything depends on finding the right order.” While telling the story, he kept his lids lowered; sometimes his eyes flashed, as though in jubilation. He concluded with the words: “I need you as my witness.”

The listener’s answer was as follows: “And I thought my father was just a little rebellious off and on.”

The narrator opened his eyes, unfolded his hands, uncrossed his legs, sat up straight, breathed deeply, and then looked imploringly over his shoulder into empty space, as though waiting for someone or remembering someone; or as though collecting himself for a very different story. (A story meant: it was, it is, it will be — it meant future.) But first he lay down on the floor of his son’s room and slept — someone threw a cover over him — a night, a day, and yet another night. And he had a dream: “The storyteller is the threshold. He must therefore stop and collect himself.”