My Year in No Man's Bay

1 — Where Not? Where?

The adventure stories that meant the most to me told of a person’s search for the most suitable place for him to live. For example? And weren’t those actually fairy tales? And which ones?

In my youth I wanted to be swallowed up by a metropolis. But none of the Austrian and German cities through which I passed fit that description. Not only the manner of the passersby but also the sounds, the smells, and the buildings made me feel like a stranger to those parts. And at home in the country I had perhaps been everything but that. Being a stranger to those parts also implied the opposite of what I desired: to be swallowed up. Even the springlike fragrance of lilacs in the villa sections of Graz, Vienna, Munich, Berlin could plunge me into misery. At the sight of the palaces of Schönbrunn, Nymphenburg, and Charlottenburg, of the magnificent hanging gardens along Hamburg’s Elbchaussee, of the Cologne Cathedral, even of the great rivers, the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, running through great cities, I had the sensation of dust in my eyes.

The first time I felt I had become one with the wide world was in a town: that time among the limestone blocks on the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula. It was a mild evening between Easter and Whitsun, the same as now, thirty-five years later; I had just taken that examination on Roman law and wanted nothing in my mind but the white-gray boulders rearing up before me, with the gentle harbor waves breaking in the gaps between them. In Spanish towns, the largest and the smallest, I then had a similar experience, for instance during my summer semester in Santiago de Compostela, with the sensation, which always took me by surprise, that these places expanded from day to day, with more and more corners emerging from the shadows, even if today it may be no more than a newspaper stand far back in the dark lobby of an apartment building or tomorrow the wooden ladder leaning against part of the church ruins on an overgrown island in the river.

Yet neither there in Spain nor in Piran in Yugoslavia was there any question of staying. At the time, for my further training, the suitable metropolis seemed to be Paris. That stemmed first of all from the fact that beginning with the moment of my arrival nothing there repelled me or excluded me; that not the slightest element interposed itself between this world-class city and me, who, and I felt I was this, was open to the world. And then again it was a color that revealed the place to me: the light, expansive gray of the asphalt on the boulevards that gave me the impulse to set out, to walk and walk — something I had had no desire to do everywhere else — and to cover the entire city, in all directions. Here was my future; here I would later on live as well as work. And at the time I could picture doing both only in the center, where I actually did have an apartment — at least it seemed central to me, which, indeed, gradually became true of almost every part of Paris; I never had to go through even the smallest lifeless stretch between my lodgings and the lecture halls, the left bank of the Seine and the right, the laundromat and the movie grottoes; and besides I had got away not only from the lilacs and the jasmine but more importantly from the whole Western European great outdoors and was quite content with the unchanging gray trunks of the plane trees.

When I had to return to my country for my year in the Viennese courts, and after that a position in the legal department of the Austrian Southern Railway, it occasioned a pain similar to what I had experienced in childhood when I was dragged away from the village of Rinkolach to that horrible boarding school. I sat with my suitcase in an outdoor café by the Gare de l’Est, the asphalt at my feet showing the innumerable overlapping imprints of bottle caps from the hot times of year, and I felt as if I were experiencing all this for the last time. As if along with the gray of Paris I had to take leave of the world. A few drops of rain fell and were gone at once. At the thought of the coming years in Austria and my profession as a lawyer, I became aware for the first time of that black cloud, of which I could not tell whether it welled up inside me or on the horizon, which was poisoned by it, the cloud that meanwhile, I imagine, is merely resting, always ready to become active again. But a decade later I was living back in the metropolis where I belonged and working in the profession for which I am halfway suited, if for any. Working? Profession? I embarked on my project.

Not until I began to look for a place to live did I come to know the outskirts of Paris, along with the gates leading out of the city, arranged like the markings on a clock. There had been no real gates for a long time, merely streets, which as a rule widened into squares at the point where they crossed into the suburbs. The apartments I saw in the inner quartiers were usually more beautiful or more elegant, often even quieter. But I chose a place near one of those squares, which, as time passed, came to signify to me more departure than entry gates, unless I was away for weeks and somewhere else entirely, for instance in the mountains: thus I returned once from a hike in the Pyrenees, dozed off on the evening bus from the airport, was surprised in my sleep at the unexpectedly more powerful and at the same time more even noise of the engine, finally appropriate to the wheels and the enclosure of the bus, opened my eyes and saw myself turning onto one of those well-lit boulevards that lead straight from all the provinces of France into the center of this city, for which the word “metropolis” seemed fitting as for no other in the world — and behind us, as a broad outlet into the blackness of night, the square of the Porte d’Orléans.

And there I also lived for a couple of years with the woman from Catalonia and our son. All the rooms except Valentin’s, which gave on a small walled garden, were dark and with no particular view; from one of the windows I could see the city bus depot at the gate. From her Iberian childhood Ana was used to darknesses of a very different order in houses, from the front doors far into the interiors. And I actually appreciated the lack of a view. From my years in the vineyards, with a view of Vienna, the hills of the Vienna Woods, and the Pannonian plain, stretching to infinity, I still felt ill at ease with any panorama or belvedere (the street in Sievering where I lived in a rented apartment was also called “Bellevue”). Sometimes, when I sat facing that view for a long time, I could feel the pain, agony, and death struggles in hospital rooms down below, all mixed up together, and I understood that neighbor who during the winter months saw the bare stakes up and down the hills of the vineyard outside his picture window as the crosses in a cemetery, and likewise that other neighbor who, to get away from the distant and even more distant horizon of the lowlands, including the magnificent sunsets, finally moved to the most confining hilly moraine country, from where he wrote me that the lines of the landscape crowding in on him had cured him of the fear of death that had haunted him on his “Bellevue” property.

So it was also a blessing to be shielded at my desk and elsewhere in the apartment from wide-open spaces and boundlessness. When I raised my head, there was water at eye level, close enough to touch, running in the gutter; or a truck, with a load of sand and a shovel stuck in it, drove by. I often worked there, and the hours with the family could be surprisingly festive.

By compensation, wide-open space entirely different from that of my bird’s-eye view awaited me when I stepped out of the house with its dark nooks onto the square at Porte d’Orléans and began walking. In the beginning I still headed into the city, going from one center to the next: Alesia, Montparnasse, St.-Germain, whose fraternally broad tower I could always rely upon to give me a sense of arrival.

For a good year I did not get past the city limits, at most crossed to the middle of the bridge over the beltway and immediately turned back. All the harmony characteristic of the metropolis, not only in the buildings but also in the movements of the passersby, seemed abruptly to fall apart over there in the suburbs of Gentilly and Montrouge, the former to the left of the arterial road, the latter to the right, the two indistinguishable at first sight. Just as the houses lost their common features, so, too, the pedestrians, far scarcer than inside the gates, without so much as a by-your-leave lost their character. They seemed slower to me — an inelegant slowness like that of people who are lost — also more awkward. Although there were few of them, they avoided each other, as I saw from above from the vantage point of the bridge, on the much narrower suburban sidewalks, turning in the wrong direction and not infrequently colliding with each other, while on the other hand the people of the metropolis filed past each other in the heaviest crowd with the grace of dancers. And the slower the pedestrians moved, the faster the cars went there beyond the gate, where the avenue with a name turned into a national highway with a number, “Nationale 20.” They no longer glided, but whizzed by, and the stretch of highway that followed was also infamous for its accidents. I understood those who translated the word banlieue as “place of banishment.” Even the sky above, no matter how blue it may have been, lost its Parisian materiality (which of course came into view again when one glanced over one’s shoulder). It became clear that the appearance of the sky took its cue from what was down below and happening on earth. At the time I felt the sky was not operative above the suburbs. It did not reach down to the ridgepoles and streets, and outside the city limits no longer extended into the splinters, pores, and bubbles of the asphalt. Extra portas its gray no longer had color value.

Nevertheless I felt drawn more and more powerfully out into this nothingness. Soon, long before my fortieth year, I had recognized that city life, even on the edge of town, was not for me anymore: for all the casualness it lent me, to the point of a redeeming self-forgetfulness, for all the verve (with which, to be true, I often no longer knew what to do), almost nothing from this environment gripped me, and without being gripped by something, something before my eyes, I was deprived and felt lifeless, or at least not at my best. Over the years, things in the metropolis had stopped having a lasting effect, cafés and movie houses, the boulevards, the Métro, even water flowing in the gutter, scraps of paper blowing across squares, cats dashing between the rows of graves in the great cemeteries, clouds passing overhead. As pleasant as things in the metropolis could continue to be, they had become meaningless. They no longer signified anything, no longer gave me intimations, no longer reminded me of anything (did not connect with anything in my childhood memories), had ceased to make me dreamy or inventive — and that was all necessary for feeling enthusiasm or even an everyday sensation of life. Although I was still young, big cities no longer held any charms for me. In my eyes they were dominated by inconsequentiality; and my days were not supposed to be inconsequential. And in the meantime I have realized: in the metropolises, just as in the sun, I easily lose my memory; in the shade, in the dark, it comes back to me, indefinite yet monumental. In the time of Gilgamesh the gods still belonged in the capital city of the land. And now?

But it was without ulterior motives that I then ventured beyond the Porte d’Orléans into the suburbs (I later read in a book by Emmanuel Bove that for one of his heroes, who moved, initially still in a cheerful mood, from the edge of Paris out to Montrouge, even the flies on the walls gradually lost their luster).

And with the very first step over the line my curiosity was transformed into a sense of peace and my uneasiness into amazement, and the two produced great alertness. All the houses in the suburbs continued to look either too large or too small to me, the noise on Nationale 20 had something hostile about it, and the few people who had crossed with me on the overpass promptly fell out of step and became isolated from each other (whereas those crossing toward the city were picked up by a common tailwind as soon as they set foot on the overpass). Even the splendid and luxurious articles available only in the metropolis, with which they were loaded down, like border crossers from an underdeveloped country, promptly began to dangle from them, and rubbed against them like ugly and useless trash.

And yet I felt I was in territory that was not merely different but also new. A special realm began there, as when one enters a forest, when the world through which I have just been moving — one step among the trees is sufficient — draws back and in its place an entirely different one opens up, surprising, infinitely more sensuous, its first effect being to make me listen more attentively. That is followed by looking, smelling, tasting, perceiving as a mode of discovery.

That was what I experienced, to my amazement, with my penetration into that region outside the city limits. A new realm only for me? No, I felt altogether as if I were in a realm of the new: like the people, things there on the outskirts presented themselves in isolation, which meant that although they might lack the grace and brilliance of their counterparts in the capital, they appeared fresh as the morning. That was not so clear to me at first; I merely sensed it — but how!

These things and this area had to be something solid, different from all the phantoms with which I had fooled myself every time, in my lifelong pursuit of the place that was right for me, a blind believer who over time had become almost an unbeliever. I had an intuition that in such suburbs there was something to explore. I glimpsed, scented, sniffed it out. Finally, in accordance with an early dream of mine, I could view myself as an explorer in my own way. And I scented and sniffed out, beyond the roar and rumble of the Route Nationale, an as yet unheard silence, which was there as soon as you turned off the road, tangible, to be fingered, licked, and savored, silence as an as yet undiscovered and undescribed wind.

After that I made my way every day to the suburbs — without this excursion my day felt incomplete — and not only the ones to the south. But my main route remained the zigzag back and forth between Montrouge and Gentilly, crisscrossing Nationale 20, into the silence and back again into the racket, as far as Arcueil and Cachan, where, as I had learned in the meantime, Eric Satie had spent the last decade of his life all by himself (the cemetery on the slope above the Bievre, with the stone aqueduct higher up, was sometimes my destination).

Satie was one of the few composers who did not strike me as alien beings, inwardly warped and inaccessible. His pieces came across to me as a quiet, clear conversing, in which a particular voice never rose above the others, and that was musical enough for me. After all, I wanted to be stimulated by something other than music; stimulation by music was not good for me. Or: music that is supposed to open me up must already be inside me.

And I learned furthermore that Satie had also had the habit of walking through these suburbs. Except that he went in the opposite direction, to Montparnasse in Paris, where he might meet his friends at an outdoor café during the years between the wars. I imagined us passing each other now and then, on a side street or by the railroad line that crossed the valley of the Bievre. Apparently he always dressed properly for his excursions into the metropolis, in a dark suit with hat and bow tie, and I, too, was in a period then when I wanted to look more everymanlike than everyman: in custom-made things, including my shirts and even my shoes — which proved excellent for walking — necktie and a broad-brimmed hat, which took the place of an umbrella, and hair as short as I had been advised on every occasion to wear it during my earlier days in society. Sometimes the hallucination of encountering the composer was so powerful that I saw each of us on his side of the street tipping his hat to the other. If I was enamored of an image, a series of notes, a series of sentences, it always meant something to me to be in the native region of the person responsible for it, and even more if this person was long since gone from there, and most of all when he had not been part of an entire group or horde of like-minded others, as happens almost everywhere in metropolises, but had been the only one in his region.

There in the suburbs I also became friends with the painter, whom I had known for some time from the center of town without our growing closer.

Again it was the particular place that altered our relationship. I did not know that he had a studio in Bagneux, still farther to the south, already up in the hills overlooking the Seine. One day I saw him there, coming out of a bistro in the palpably different light and wind. At first sight he immediately seemed different from my Paris acquaintance, who, if not worldly, his glasses propped on his head, at least appeared official (perhaps because he was also a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts). Here he hardly stood out from the tradesmen and local white-collar workers, who, like him, were on their way back to work after a quick lunch. He appeared as inconspicuous as they, and just as formless, or rather unassuming, and yet on closer inspection he had an added air of vulnerability and melancholy that revealed itself to me in the almost humble way in which he held the door for the others, who took it quite for granted. I sensed in him the shoulders, neck, back of the head, and eyes of a child lost to the world, who — I followed him secretly as he went on his way — was visibly becoming high-spirited.

And then he was also delighted to see me. We hugged each other, as happens only with two people from the same village who hardly had anything to say to each other and suddenly, each of them alone on a long journey, really become aware of each other for the first time on a dock in New Zealand or at a trading post in the Yukon in Alaska.

I experienced the painter outside the city, far from our usual meeting places, in a moment that had to bond me to him. And it was mutual. He urged me to go with him, wanted to have me along that afternoon when he went on with his work (though invisible behind a screen), and accompanied me, since I had to pick up my son at his school in Paris, many kilometers back to the Périphérique, where we took leave of each other only after a great deal of back-and-forth, as later became our custom when saying goodbye.

Many streets in these suburbs bore the names of resistance fighters or opposition figures killed by the Nazis. Along one of them, rue Victor-Basch in Arcueil, I was acquainted with a particular tree. It was a cherry tree that stood not in an enclosed garden but in a turnout on a street in front of an apartment building, right by the rail line. First came the blossoms, without a single leaf greening, and the trunk was dressed in a swirl of white, dense and lightly flared, piled sky-high and glowing up above more brightly than any spring cloud. Then the blossoms floated away, one day with the April snows or hail, another day with the suburban butterflies. At the beginning of June the fruit was ripe, not tiny like that of a wild cherry but of biblical proportions, and where earlier everything had been white, now everything was a rich red. And on each new day of that week, when I got to the tree, the fruit was unharmed. No blackbirds fell upon it (did the trains streaking incessantly past the tree frighten them off, as elsewhere strips of foil might?). And the occasional passersby there did not help themselves either, although the lowest of the cherries almost caressed their heads; no one even stooped to pick up the plump balls, some of which had split as the wind knocked them to the asphalt, which became dark and darker from the squashed fruit. Only I ate and ate, first the cherries from the ground, since I had no way of knowing whether an owner might not appear from somewhere, and later those within reach of my toes and fingertips.

Then it was clear that the tree was common property, and once, when I saw a painter’s ladder in the wide-open lobby of the apartment house, I promptly borrowed it and climbed up to the crown, where the cherries are said to be tasty as nowhere else (and that turned out to be true).

In the village of Rinkolach there had been just such a generally accessible cherry tree, in the middle of the village, or, conversely, was the middle established by the tree? Not only the taste from those days but also that special feeling at the top — more powerful than being high in the air on a mountain peak, along with the swaying that is probably unique to a cherry tree — this I rediscovered in the foreign suburb; rediscovered? no, for the very first time this becoming aware of the past occurred: a becoming reflective, a recognizing of something from before, taking its dimensions, a sort of precision — memory! It was the semi-shade in which I saw the world so much more clearly and astonishingly (and that remained true from suburb to suburb, out into the forest bay here).

At home we had picked the cherries with our lips, also because with the violent swaying of the branches we had no hand free. And even outside of the fruiting season that tree meant something to us, an unspoken place of asylum: anyone who fled to it could not be harmed in its precinct, and as soon as the pursuers entered, too, it meant that a reconciliation had to take place. And the public cherry tree of Rinkolach still exists; I pass and walk around it at least once a year. It is alive, despite several lightning strikes, it bears fruit, now somewhat sour and watery; except that each time it seems more orphaned (or who is the orphaned one?); no more children, either around it or in it, and if in the meantime another spot has become the middle of the village, I do not find it; but perhaps I do not stay around long enough.

And now I sat, who? in the tree in Arcueil, hidden, in my custom-made suit and necktie, felt my thirst for cherries diminish at the mere thought of the Bievre down there in the valley, though it had long since gone underground, scraped my fingertips on the fissured, especially sharp bark of the old cherry wood and sniffed them, to make myself more receptive, receptive just as I still do today on my very own cherry tree, dead except for one branch, here in the bay between the hills of the Seine, in fear of becoming numb and number, starting with my extremities.

I thought at the time, no differently from now, that everyone’s eyes and ears had to be opened by these things as mine were, and so at the beginning I occasionally invited one person or another from the metropolis, who I thought would have a sense of place, to join me on my pilgrimage beyond the city limits.

Either this was never taken seriously, or while we were out there together hardly anything emerged having to do with the particular region. The region lost its value; did not even begin to reveal it. First of all, as soon as the other person was at my side, I had to fight off a bad mood, as if by his mere presence he were displacing our surroundings, and then most people, and not only the dyed-in-the-wool city dwellers, after at most a brief period of alertness, stopped paying attention, were somewhere else entirely in their thoughts, and what they said neither had anything to do with the landscape we were passing through together — which was almost all right with me — nor was affected, guided, or inspired by it in the slightest (which then enraged me against my companions).

In my imagination they should have stood up straighter, moved their whole bodies, looked around them, spoken in a calmer, deeper, solid voice, and instead they fell in on themselves, stumbled repeatedly, kept their eyes on the ground, and now and then one of them lost his urban-sophisticate tone, which turned out to have been an affectation, and spoke in a labored way, without emphasis and resonance, precisely as one imagines a lifelong resident of the suburbs.

And I was infected by it: I mumbled, hobbled, and stumbled along just like the man next to me, and we two formed a pair that was not merely ludicrous like Bouvard and Pécuchet but also out of place.

Walking with others, I usually experienced something similar to what I had earlier experienced when I read aloud, to a person to whom I felt close, something I had just written: although I had been glowing with pleasure as I set out with my manuscript to see him, and he, too, had been eager, it was as if each of us scuttled away into a corner, farther and more apart than ever before, and I still have those stranger’s eyes before me whenever, after reading aloud, stumbling more and more, I with effort raise my head.

Thus, with rare exceptions, I stopped taking others with me to places where for me, and, as I realized, for me alone, a new territory opened up — where my personal field of exploration lay.

I even kept my forays, pushed farther every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, an unusually long one; had played billiards at the Place de Clichy, had crashed a reception at the Austrian embassy and drunk an entire bottle of wine, had got into an argument with a policeman in front of Les Invalides; with the woman from Catalonia I even used the lie that for professional reasons I had spent hours following an unknown beauty, a “worldly woman,” from the Pont Neuf to God knows where; I went so far as to lie to my son, unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.

But for me that disappearing day in, day out into the suburbs was the first good habit I had acquired up to then. Here was finally a habit I could be happy about; never would I want to be rid of it.

The morning after a trip the first thing I did, under the pretext of going to the doctor’s, was to plunge into the bushes on the far side of the Périphérique overpass and head for the wide-open spaces in the no-man’s — land between Malakoff, Laplace, and Fontenay-aux-Roses. The first tree beyond the city limits, no matter how scrawny, rustled at me more tangibly than the more luxuriant exemplars of its species on the other side. Drinking coffee, more bitter than anywhere in the city, in one of the cavelike bars, I tasted a more penetrating reality, and the sight of the old aqueduct stretching high above the Bievre Valley, not just one monument among many like the monumental structures of Paris, gave me a sense of monumentality different from that in the city, as did the similarly scattered churches in the region, often lower than their surroundings, also sunk deeper into the ground, as if forming part of the ruins behind them, where I regained possession of the past and of history, which in the course of my life had made me skittish, regained it for instance in the stone figures around the arched portal of the church in Bagneux, made easier to overlook by the fact that the devotees of progress who participated in various revolutions had thoroughly smashed their faces and limbs, leaving only a few curves of shoulders, heads, and toes: never again, was the message that came across to me from that scratching-out of eyes and smashing of skulls, would the perpetrators go back to the saints, whose stories had been told to the end. They had stood there as the idols of a power that had become illegitimate; this had to be hammered into the world with each blow.

I was increasingly suffering in my metropolis — and it seemed to me it would have been even worse in New York, let alone in Rome — from something that had already menaced me in childhood, since my time in boarding school: from loss of place, or space deprivation. (The prophet of Porchefontaine, who originally, before he became an innkeeper, going from one bankruptcy to the next, in suburb after suburb, had been trained as a philosopher, uses the word “dereification.”) And my suffering was not improved by stays in the country, even in the most remote villages, which, after all, should have been familiar to me from childhood.

Those suburbs, on the other hand, no matter how ailing they might be themselves, became something like my healer. I needed them, urgently, imperatively. “Dull in the head” is for me the same as “ill.” And then there were times, in Paris, and even close to the edge of town, when I became so dull and ill that I wanted nothing but to get out. I felt at once locked in and locked out. The sounds, which my son, whom I otherwise believed unquestioningly, found quieter and more uniform than in small towns, hemmed me in, just as I experienced the absence of sound in the middle of the night as a sort of trap. Sometimes, on my way out to the suburbs, I suddenly broke into a run, as if I were fleeing, all the while scolding myself angrily for not setting out much sooner, and spreading my arms wide, in all seriousness, once I got out there into the empty spaces. More than once tears even came to my eyes, as when a pain is cured all at once, or rather is transformed into something bearable, something sweet.

Thus I welcomed the widening circle of the suburbs: to the east, windy Ivry-sur-Seine, where more crimes occurred than just those that were always solved in the books of Simenon, which were often set there; to the west, Vanves, furrowed and difficult to take in; spreading up the mountainside, Chatillon with its scattering of buildings, from whose highest point in 1871 Prussian cannon had fired down on Paris, and occasionally even those towns with which nothing could be done and which, along with those responsible, deserved to be blown up. My greeting was silent, and at the same time somewhat resembled an exclamation, and it was directed at the three-dimensionality I had so greatly missed and had now found once more outside the gates, in the form of an apple crate, a dwarf palm, but also for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is. And day after day, as I was walking through the suburbs, although I myself did not always know exactly where I was, I was trustingly asked by the many people lost there, especially in cars, for directions.

I made up my mind to live somewhere out there, for a time. I felt a powerful urge to experience the nights out there, and to expose myself to the nights. I thought it would not be forever, just as I pictured myself as married only temporarily, sort of playing at being a father, and also not writing forever.

So from people who wanted to go to Africa for a couple of years I rented a house in an area still unfamiliar to me. (Even today, when I consider myself knowledgeable about every corner of the departement, almost daily I find myself standing, to my surprise, in a completely foreign world, often simply because I have approached from a slightly different direction.) The house was still occupied by the owners, but how impatient I was for them to get out and disappear to Senegal or wherever. Was that possible, for a person to be crazy about or infatuated with a place to live, and, what is more, with one that tended to reduce every one of my friends to monosyllabic responses when I rushed to show it to them, proudly, the minute the lease was signed?

One could also see the house, as one of my companions described it, as an “oversized stone grain bin, empty and gutted,” in a row with very similar lumps, roofed in tile, slate, or tin, with a sidewalk in front that barely had room for one person, yet snaked toward an infinitely distant misty vanishing point, of a color that another of my companions, barging along with me in the rain, called “oxblood red”—even my child was alarmed by it, as I could feel through his hand — on a street of the same color where every second car belonged to a driving school, no store and no bar to left or right, and all that in a suburb which, if anyone knew of its existence, stood for monotony and gloom, as witness the newspaper headline intended to spur people to take long trips to palm-lined beaches: “Oublier Clamart [forget Clamart].”

I remained infatuated with my future home; was burning to move in. The woman from Catalonia thought at first that I liked the place only because, as usual, I wanted the opposite of everyone else; I felt comfortable only in the role of the loner, the solitary understood by no one, wronged time and again even by those closest to him, with the whole world against him; for otherwise why, when I had it out with her, my wife, would I regularly berate her with the reproach “You all!”—even more significant in Spanish: “Vosotros,” “You others”: “You others are …,” “You others have …”?!

But I had no desire to position myself in contradiction to anyone else, to my surroundings, to my times; I was simply filled with enthusiasm, and then I managed to find the words to win over the woman from Catalonia (my son, on the other hand, merely seemed to obey, which for moments at a time undermined my certainty about the direction in which we were going). “Look how transparent the house is!” I said. “Through the front door and the windows overlooking the street the lawn behind the house shines through, with the apple tree there, under which I shall dig up the ground next spring to make a little vegetable garden, so the blossoms will fall white on black.”

And in her presence I patted, tapped, and circled the plane trees of this suburb, which, standing there pretty much on their own, seemed like the advance guard of the plane forest in her native Gerona; I called her attention to the sounds from the nearby railroad station, which changed according to the type of wind, also to the vibrations of the trains shooting by, already at full speed, toward Brittany, toward the Atlantic; I pointed out the tip of the Eiffel Tower, which she would see from her room or study, through the chimney pots of the houses next door; I reminded her that our street was named after the philosopher of law Condorcet, perhaps the first proponent of equal rights for women, on whom she had written a paper; he had been arrested here while fleeing the radicals of the French Revolution; in my exhilaration I even lied to her that Joan Miró had painted in this very place for an entire summer and fall, up there where the forest began, in a hut belonging to the pea plantations that used to be typical of this place, the spot marked now by a footpath overgrown with blackberry brambles, and then I convinced myself, along with her, that Miró had actually been hard at work once behind the thorns and was still there today, a figure floating in the air.

Yet on those first evenings in the house out in the suburb, outside the city walls, I was overcome by uneasiness, of the sort familiar to me from childhood when someone in the household was even a little late getting home.

So here I had similar fits, though everyone was there. I put away the owners’ things or pushed them all into a corner, the African masks, for instance, turned on the lights in all the rooms as soon as dusk began to fall, was afraid to go down to the labyrinthine cellar (sent the woman from Catalonia and our five-year-old son on ahead; neither of them feared anything in the world), frenetically sawed up firewood, far more than we needed, in the farthest corner of the backyard, and on those mild September evenings built a fire in the fireplace; while my wife sat by the fire for hours, gazing into it in silence, her eyes glowing, I grew weary and irritable at the flames I myself had lit and could not bear her and my hypnotized idleness. This sense of desolation accompanying new beginnings is part of me and is also necessary.

And one morning, after another night of being utterly petrified, I pushed open a window and found myself, and us, as in a fairy tale, in precisely the place I had wished for. The hostile zone had dissolved in the early-morning air. Now I lived there, and the living was mysterious, as it was supposed to be. And that was to remain the case for a time. What does “for a time” mean? For a continuation, for a moving forward, for a staying in place.

How comforting and strengthening these fairy-tale-life moments were. From them I learned what freedom was, as on that first day after the eight years of boarding school, except that this time it was immensely more powerful, under the shoulders (a word that in French seems to be derived from the word for wings), in the nostrils, in the fingers, under the soles of the feet. I had time. Go. Up. Out. Do it.

Every step in that house in the suburb seemed to be that sort of doing or shaping. Whether I was going shopping, taking Valentin to the local school, or hanging around the house: I was doing something, simply by being present in the region day and night. I kept seeking out different ways of getting places, observed, differentiated, compared: the bread in the various bakeries, the gardens, at that time, two decades ago, more vegetable than flower gardens, the cafés, supermarkets, and shoe-repair shops in the upper and lower suburb.

I read histories of the place and acquired a geological survey map of the region — I had to go to the national institute in Paris for it — so as to have firmly in mind the base, layer upon layer, on which I was moving around.

I found particularly appealing the houses, almost without exception unstuccoed, especially in the lower town, built of the local sandstone, most of it obtained at the beginning of the century from underground quarries, which, long since abandoned, invisibly pock the landscape; half a century later, a new high-rise building collapsed into such a cavern, which the builders had not wanted to think about; the collapse caused as many deaths as an earthquake, and since that time anyone who buys a house in the affected area receives a certificate: no mine shaft below; the ground at this location is solid. I concentrated on the façades, which were laid course upon course out of these unequally sized stones, so obviously extracted from the local soil, each in its apparently accidental form and yet all of them fitting together so perfectly; in this way I honed my ability to perceive color, sometimes calling on my son for help with characterizing the shadings.

The blocks, and also blocklets as small as a child’s fist, were a light gray, in which you could see on closer inspection a tinge of yellow, as if from clay, shot through with darker veins, which with time could go slate blue or moss green, also glassy bulges, unexpectedly sparkling in all colors, ranging to coal black, also pure white grains, such as you find in the sand of a brook, the size of ant eggs, and like them oval.

As a result of the prominent yellow, all these façades could give an appearance of sunshine, even on a rainy morning, a very odd sunshine, coming up from below, which is otherwise a peculiarity of clay landscapes, deserts, badlands. (The woman from Catalonia, on the other hand, felt mocked by this phenomenon: for what stretched before one out in nature in the similarly colored familiar Spanish meseta here flickered before her as a structure.) The closer I came to the stones in the suburban house, often bumping them with my nose, and examined them, the more I had an entire planet within my grasp, embodied in this one thing, as once before, very long ago in childhood, the sight of a drop of rain in a yellow-brown-gray-white bit of dust on the path had made the world open up to me for the first time. And it was not some strange planet but here, the earth, and one that was peaceful through and through.

In similar fashion a crater now opened up in the building stone, fresh for the touching with the tip of a finger; ridges formed, and the observer, moving above this scene at barely an eyelash’s distance, was showered with a sense of shelteredness brought on by the barely perceptible crumbling of the tiny weathered bits, which recalled the strangely meaningful glow along the eroded edges of the sunken roads back home.

Another feature of this world in miniature was that when you looked closely it turned out to be inhabited, if only by a tiny creature, the size of a pinhead, dangling here on a thread from a cliff, and a shimmering something like a one-celled animal on the opposite slope, beyond the seven mountain ranges, the two of them reminiscent of Robinson and Friday.

All my life the unapproachability of the world, its incomprehensibility and its inaccessibility, my exclusion from it, has been terribly painful to me. That has been my fundamental problem. Belonging, participating, being involved was so rare that each time it became a great occasion for me, worthy of being recorded. Every time the world, the peaceable one, became a world, nature’s and civilization’s bending, extending, taking on color, was not only an event but a moment of recognition: with this recognition there would be no war.

There, during my first stay in the suburban region, at the midpoint of my life, for a good two years, such events fell into my lap almost constantly, on some days there for the plucking every other moment like the cherries in the treetop in Arcueil. The planet took on shape and became good to the touch. During that period it seemed erotic.

That applied also to eating, which began, along with the walk, drawn out as much as possible, to the restaurant, together with its spaces and vistas, to awaken a barely discovered pleasure (though immediately attenuated when the dinner table was not located in my new region). And of course I had drunk previously, primarily to be a part of things — see above — but it was here that I first realized what it meant for wine to be delicious. I often withdrew to the most remote corner of the house with a glass, after midnight, turned out the light, took a sip in the pitch darkness, and then, when I could feel the first sip actually rising to the tips of my hair, another.

And in their first years the woman from Catalonian Gerona and the man from the Jaunfeld Plain in southern Carinthia had certainly found their way to each other quite often, in passing, in brushing by each other, like sleepwalkers, as if the exciting element were more the air between them, each other’s presence, their mutual strangeness. But not until we were here did we have each other personally in mind, and this marriage, although it may have lasted only through one late summer and a fall, appears to my memory more complete and eventful than all that had gone before — of epic proportions; with a horizon.

Always in the same spot, always in the same corner, with the same gestures, in a never varied tempo, a sort of spaciousness emerged, different from that of all the countries and continents from earlier: we created this space and were its center (and likewise felt stronger there than ever before, two who were lost for all eternity, as if we were coupling far off on the moon). “I think this region is good for love,” she said one time, her words as usual spoken more to herself than directed at me.

Only a third party could do justice to our history as a couple, and, since no such person is at hand, I must play the role myself, or at least take a stab at it.

So this was the only era in which a person and a place became identical for me, or in which a person meant a place, took me in. Even the most intimate connectedness with another person — this or that ancestor, my son — did no good when the place we inhabited together was fundamentally unhomelike to me. All the love in the world could not achieve anything if I did not have the place.

This existed independently of my family. At home I felt like myself the minute I set foot in my region, but not, however, with my mother or my grandparents. And later, when Valentin and I were living alone together, if I returned with him after a long absence to a place that was not my own, even on the approach I could try to persuade myself as much as I liked that the person at my side meant more to me than anything else in the world, and, and — still, all the blood would drain from my heart. And even now, when I have the urge to visit him, my repulsion at having to go to Vienna to do so is even greater.

The place always gained the upper hand. My near and dear and my places always failed to coincide except, in particular moments and in a nowhereland, with a friend, and that time with the woman from Catalonia — when she, to be sure, did not substitute for the place but rather potentiated the existing place and gave it elan. For the first time in my life I came home to a person, to my wife. For this period the house and wife belonged together. In her I came home to my house-within-the-house.

As far apart as we were in years, we became the same age. For the first time ever I saw myself as young, as I had not for a moment seen myself in my youth. And being faithful became a source of pleasure, and at the same time was nothing special.

Didn’t our spontaneity and complete absorption in one another also result from the setting of the house and grounds in that gentle hollow, as if at the bottom of an abandoned quarry, or in the so-called depression of the Dead Sea, where we had begotten the child? Now the two of us lay together like two long before a child; and as if we still did not have one. Would anything similar have happened between us on raised ground? Has anyone heard of a couple who were flooded with desire in a storm on a mountaintop? And as we lay there, one floor above us our child talked in his sleep, the pedestrian cycle switched on and off at the night-shrouded railroad station across the way, the chains of hills huddled behind us, and there was a rustling of leaves outside our window.

That was the time when I could touch another person, when I felt a powerful urge to do so, and simply for the sake of touching her. For hours I wanted nothing else but to feel every part of this woman. I wanted to grab her from the top of her head to her heels and take her between my fingertips. In bending her, tapping her, plucking at her I convinced myself of the two of us. And on the other hand it was as if I were supposed to measure her for something, an additional, very special, amazing dress. And even in my dreams, as I slept at her side, this fingering, tying, hooking, cutting out, continued. I felt fulfilled by it: that was it. And I saw myself smiling secretly and silently to myself, turned away, in profile, like my son in his hiding place when he was very small. And rested against her rib like a mountain climber in a trackless waste.

For the continuation of the story a flesh-and-blood third party would be appropriate here, a person who would not merely make a pretense of distance, a chronicler: “In the first days of winter the woman left the house in the suburb.”

I have my own opinions on the matter, as on more and more subjects (O harbor of Piran, and me at twenty, with no opinions on anything), yet what I think resists taking written form, or, for me, being written excludes the former. And I have the same problem with all rational explanations, deductions, and parallel examples, however clever, even if for a moment they made sense to me orally, and occasionally even do me good. Faced with being written down — with authority — even the most profound understandings have gone up in a puff of smoke every time, leaving me temporarily at a loss for words. I could then make a fresh start only if I had no idea how the few remaining fragments fit together, if at all. From the moment I set out to write, the path I took was different from the previous one, fundamentally so, a stumbling path.

And so I feel the urge here, too, to have no context, and to remain that way to the end of the following paragraph.

The woman from Catalonia was divinely carefree, in the sense I once found in an epistle of Horace, seemingly directed at me, where he says I should shake off the cold compress of cares in order to achieve divine wisdom. And when she was delighted she delighted an entire circle; a sort of cordiality communicated itself then to almost all the others, whereas I remained alone with my delight, shut it up inside me and brooded over it. And likewise her happiness shone forth and disarmed others; put to shame my occasional incredulity, healed my disintegration; beautified along with her also the person near her. I, on the other hand, did not know what to do with my happiness, or, overcome with awkwardness, at least did nothing good with it; seemed to lack an instinct for happiness, came across as abrupt and unloving.

And then things would change drastically again. She trusted no one, distrusted every moment. Even in her radiance there was a constant checking to see whether the person on whom it shone was actually receptive to it and was in agreement with her; if she observed the slightest contradiction or even a momentary distractedness, her face became an evil mask, without any change except the loss of its characteristic soulfulness, perhaps in a single quick glance over her shoulder, with which she thought to trap the other in not being in agreement with her. Nothing about her startled me more; with the passing years I feared nothing more, and in the end nothing sent me into more of a rage than this ever-ready suspicion in the midst of her glowing, followed by sudden mood swings, when a huge tongue would be stuck out at me, while her lips remained tightly closed. Often all I had to do was leave her alone when I went to do an errand, and on my return she, who had just been rejoicing in our closeness, would be staring hostilely at a spot on the wall, feeling let down, indeed betrayed. And every time I had a sense that she was right. Although I came to her without ulterior motives, captivated by her cheeriness and also her cordiality, at such moments of sudden reversal our relationship appeared as unfounded and meaningless to me as to her. I was the wrong person. I was not the one she had been waiting for; I was a surrogate husband. To be sure, I was not yet unfaithful to her, and nevertheless I understood why I was suspect to her, just as I have always understood why, wherever I go, a patrolman eyes me and then detains me as a possible thief, terrorist, child murderer: I have never done or planned anything truly evil, and yet from the time I was very small I have felt worthy of suspicion — for what? For whatever the case of the moment might be, the current outrage. Even when things were this way between the woman and me, I still considered every other man wrong for her. Strangely enough, the hours, and, in that period, days and weeks, of harmony merely heightened her expectations and at the same time her fear: just as she trusted no one, she also did not believe anything could last. A dream could separate her from her lover; our merely sleeping side by side, without any particular incident, after an evening of fulfillment, could spark dissension overnight.

And then, when, like the previous times, something not worth mentioning had happened and she again lost her “belief” (her last word to me) in me, but this time as if in a gush, and from then on just went in circles, alternating between staring at me contemptuously and making imploring gestures to some unknown being, it came to me that the right person for this woman could only be a god. But what kind of god, and where was he? Certainly he would not come from heaven, or in the shape of a cloud or a rainstorm, but rather in human form, like you or me, only more radiant, and he would blow away her primeval distrust by finding it amusing.

But as it was, both of us, one as stubborn as the other, allowed our relationship to go to pieces, and without consideration for our child, who at the beginning silently stepped between us as a mediator and then just as silently retreated from the field of battle. Without her belief in us two, I also lost mine. Just a moment ago I had been carrying around her image within me for life, and now: the image was gone.

And as was almost the rule whenever I broke up with someone: the separation seemed to me, in contrast to our being together, the higher reality, likewise the struggle, fierce, body against body, that preceded it.

The harmony had seemed like someone else’s experience, a fairy tale, and it has not been that long since I came to think of the fairy tale as embodying the highest of all realities. I saw the real me only in the person affected by the loss. I was at home in sorrow and dissension, in absurdity. Catastrophe involving those close to me was the place where I belonged. If, in the midst of happiness, I seemed gloomy, inaccessible, and frightening to others, it was in pain and helplessness, in despair that I began to glow and inspired general confidence.

And in actual fact I never felt so close to the world as when there was no one and nothing left for me. “Serves me right!” was a thought that warmed me through and through. “You have a drive toward nothingness,” the woman from Catalonia told me, and not only during that period. But who was saying what to whom? Did what with whom? Of the two of us: who was who? It seems to me as though, in order to get close to the truth, I would have to tell the story of someone else, of others, which I suppose I have been doing in any case for a very long time.

There was something great between us, and she went, and I let her go. Finally she went. Her last glance, over her shoulder, was hatred, so pure that everything round about seemed dipped in white, a white that was intent on destruction and also had the strength for it. I had to turn away immediately, feeling my skull on the point of exploding in its rays. (Fratricidal wars, it is claimed, especially those in which the participants have no emotional stake and are also not convinced of the necessity of the struggle, are the most cruel, and in this sense a fratricidal war broke out between Ana and me.) And at the same time, in my turning away as she was going, I got caught up in observing, found myself absorbed in the television antenna on a nearby roof, which in the evening sun appeared to me as a gleaming arrow, and likewise I felt the presence of a distant friend as he sat quietly at his daily work somewhere, while here the drama of my fate was playing itself out. My head was buzzing, felt as heavy as a boulder, and that was all right. There was a raging storm between the woman and me, and I was in good spirits. Things were not all that bad. I could study them.

Afterward, alone as never before, I lived without any conviction that man and woman belonged together. In my eyes there was nothing that connected anyone with anyone else. Later on I experienced with one woman or another days of ecstasy or merely of exaltation, which both of us mistook for adventure, even happiness. Each time, observers, friends as well as strangers, saw the relationship as beautiful and found our pleasure contagious. Especially older people, no matter how grumpy they normally were, became cheerful at the sight and gave us their blessing. Only children eyed us without comprehension, or disapprovingly, and I myself felt almost constantly queasy.

But such episodes actually entailed a freedom that I experienced at the time as progress. However discreetly this casual, blessedly superficial flowing into one another occurred: we thought we were on the cutting edge of our era, its avant-garde and secret protagonists, and with our physicalify — which was a sort of soulfulness, wasn’t it? — were writing history.

At the time, even more than “I” it was one woman or another to whom the whole thing meant “onward!” To them, these tireless couplings represented a goal for the entire human race next to which every other activity shrank to insignificance. And any man vouchsafed the image of such a being — transformed into a queen? a guerrilla? the woman from Revelation? — had to feel allied and complicit with her. These women had right on their side, for the moment and for the future.

All the more terrible, then, my letdown when the magic faded, the first time and likewise the times after that. The woman and I would be laughing heartily at the coup we had pulled off against the stick-in-the-mud rest of the world, and two floors farther up in the elevator I would find myself trapped with a stranger inside the most impenetrable cliff. After a cheerful parting from the next of these huntresses, at an international airport, both of us convinced that over the last few days we had inscribed each other feature by feature into the book of eternity, I was sitting on the plane, with the sea far below, the foam on the crest of the waves still visible, and wishing the window would give way and hurtle me into the abyss.

In these situations my sense that I deserved to be executed became stronger and stronger, and I was also grimly accepting; saw myself stepping in front of the firing squad and tying the blindfold over my own eyes, as tight as it would go.

But all of this happened in another country, not a trace of it in my home, in the suburb.

That was taboo. I did not even work there, hardly wrote a line in the years that followed. First of all, my books had brought in enough so that for the time being I could afford this, and then I felt, unlike after a period of letting myself drift, neither the desire nor the need (both had to be present) to sit down at my desk.

My chief occupation for years was leisure, which, however, was not the same as doing nothing. I was taking time off, though in a different sense from working-class people when they take time off. At the beginning of my residence in the suburb, I still looked to the great city of Paris for evenings out or special occasions. Then, disappointed by my cosmopolitan acquaintances, all of whom found the area where I lived lacking in interest — otherwise they would have followed my example!? — I no longer had the slightest idea what to do there, and took my leisure alone, going from one suburb to the other during the day, in summer as in winter, and in the evening stayed at home.

What absolutely had to be done I did myself, hit or miss. I let the grass in the yard grow until only the top of my son’s head showed above it, even when he was standing up, and then I cut it with a scythe. Likewise in winter I pushed the snow, which tended to stay on the ground longer than down in Paris, off the sidewalk, and in the process exchanged my first words with a neighbor who was doing the same and who had until then always seemed, in his silence, the epitome of a small-town crook, yet now turned out to be the soul of innocuousness and gentleness. I went shopping, cooked, ironed, darned, sewed — here my years in boarding school came in handy — washed the windows, at least before Christmas, Easter, and the birthdays of those living in the house, scrubbed the floor, also to smell the water drying on it, and promised myself to be the first in my family not to let himself be bent crooked and stooped by physical work, but rather to use it to straighten my back permanently and inheritably. To be sure, my activities were not the same as the grinding labor they had done as hired men, which even the strongest will could hardly transform into something positive.

But primarily I walked the entire area; lived with my son; read.

And I thought I was close for the first time to the right life, and not just for me. Vanished from society, gradually forgotten by my former world, I felt as though I could finally be pure there, and even now I still wonder sometimes why I did not stick with it. Then again I tell myself that in that period I was near madness and that this life was as wrong as it could possibly be. And even then I knew: as it was, it could not bring fulfillment.

Yet that was something I always had before me, day after day. It was an utterly serious life, very different from the interludes, elsewhere, with the new breed of women. Busy with nothing but leisure, I thought at every step that I was entering an advent period, which I scented and sniffed as a child does snow in the air. Today I see myself there, off the beaten track, behaving more like my own god, in proud anticipation of perdition, which at the same time would mean ascension. What did come seemed at first exactly the opposite.

I often walked through the hill forests extending as far as Versailles, which, seen from Paris, began in my suburb.

Curious that Marina Tsvetayeva, who had lived in Meudon and then in Clamart and was a person in great need of walks and forests, should have complained so bitterly in her letters that there was no forest in the vicinity. Yet I also understand her. For the forest out there began fairly surreptitiously, and a stranger to those parts standing on its edge was more likely to be repelled. As a Russian she was used to the evergreen forests of the east, while here a pine or even a spruce among the oaks and edible chestnuts was a rarity; and her birches, less rare, seemed in size and appearance to conform to the predominant varieties of trees, their trunks unusually thick and their bark more black than white because of the cracks. The white showed up only at a distance, in the depths of the forest, when a swaying passed through the dense ranks of trees there, which then brought the birches’ whiteness into view.

Yet the wooded borders of these suburbs hardly allowed such glimpses. A person coming from elsewhere would often hardly even see them as borders, but rather as mere outcroppings of dense vegetation, between houses, with barriers in front of them, mere hiding places, strewn with litter as in no other country, the dog feces, always forming a little pyramid, a sign for turning back at once.

If you manage to overcome your distaste and push onward, the beaten track does widen into a path, the bushes draw apart and shoot up into trees. But nowhere the depth and spaciousness that creates the feeling of a forest. A stranger to the country has the sense instead of being in what remains of a forest that was gobbled up — it gives this impression — by the suburb’s structures, which, wherever he looks, are so close that here and there they seem to cut the last tree trunks in half.

Nothing would be more understandable than for a person to give up once and for all, coming to the conclusion that in this country, tidied up by the Enlightenment, propped up by reason, systematically planned and unified by grammar, there is no room for a forest; the unchanging sounds of civilization, of cars, trains, helicopters in this remnant of forest seem to offer confirmation.

But as I kept walking — who knows why? — it happened one time that there among the trees I could feel the deep woods as much as ever before. As I turned off, once, and then again, a door gave way, and after that the area in which I wandered for hours was nothing but a forest, or woodland. (Similarly, time and again in dreams I am in a house I have known for years, and I stumble upon an unfamiliar, empty, yet comfortably furnished lower story that has always been there, ready for me, and then each time for the length of the dream I wander through the adjacent, still-undiscovered suites that open up around every corner.) Even with a few highways to cross in between, along with occasional hammering, rattling, and rumbling from the world outside, the silence gained the upper hand and kept it, up and down over the hills, along the sunken roads, on the paths along the embankments, on the paths along the ridges.

At the time I had the sensation of being constantly shoved and carried along, whether simply out walking or collecting chestnuts to roast at home in the evening, and continuing when I stopped at the inn at Fontaine Ste.-Marie, whose clearing marked the middle of the forest.

As never before, nature revealed itself to me as my measure. To take in nature’s sounds and finally become completely immersed in listening was what constituted for me at the time fulfillment. And it even seemed to me I was in the process of pulling it off.

When I nevertheless felt drawn to my desk, I already hesitated in the next room. Having been out and about for all those hours, permeated by the silence, its modalities, creations, styles, and examples, I had already done my work! I felt reluctance about writing it down, which seemed to me an unnecessary, and an unseemly, variation.

Such silence I experienced not only out in nature but likewise on the paths that ran along the rail line between here and Brittany. And the sounds of the suburbs formed part of it. Sometimes I would have liked to live even closer to the tracks, and every time I walked by, I peered at a certain grayish-yellow sandstone house that stood directly by the embankment just before that railroad bridge, at the height of a dam, that linked two suburbs. I wanted to see if the house, with the whirring of passenger trains and the crashing of freight trains right outside its windows, might be for sale someday. Not a few of the older people living along the tracks in shacks, with one main room and a kitchen but with oversized yards, kept chickens, and my ears were more attuned than decades ago in the village of Rinkolach to the crowing of the different cocks, which I could tell apart while still in half-sleep in my bed before daybreak. The occasional barking of dogs, quite far apart, created, not only when I was out walking but also in the nocturnal stillness of the house, along with the trains, a further sense of spaciousness in the landscape.

Most silence, either rural or urban, had oppressed me up to then or made me restless. But this type of silence suited me.

As a result of my long time abroad, away from speaking German, I had fallen into the habit, without noticing it, of using the various foreign languages even when alone with myself. In the suburban silence I noticed how often these idioms found their way into my monologues, indeed already predominated, not as a result of my personal watching and listening but simply as standard phrases. And I realized what had given me that soothing sense of my snapping into place every time I had picked up my pen: it had been a homecoming, to my work and, just as powerfully, to my native German.

If I ever thought I could achieve harmony with — with what? — no “with,” simply harmony, it was in my early years there, when I was unemployed, unsociable, out in the primeval forests and the cultural desert of the suburb.

Having only fleeting contact with others, surrounded by a peace I wanted to defend and cherish just as it was (at any rate not phony), I saw myself as leading a life of epic proportions, despite its uneventfulness, along with my son and several ancestors, long gone yet dreaming on in me.

The harmony went deepest for me in the face of those happenings that, in and of themselves, seemed mainly without resonance. From the motion of a suburban cloud, the way a snowflake hit the red asphalt of the sidewalk and turned into a cherry stain, I could pick out a sound and listen to it fade away. And that was all? Yes. And at the same time I knew I was in a phase of preparation; I intended to use my walking, observing, and reading to sharpen myself into an arrow.

Another little metaphor on this subject (which again will not fit perfectly): the Brittany line ran along for a stretch in a concrete-walled cut. Despite the slight distance from Montparnasse, their station of origin or destination, the trains whizzed through there as if already out in the open countryside, and the air current they created always buffeted the luxuriant vegetation that hung down over the steep walls of the cut. The same thing happened with the occasional bushes twisting their way up from below. Even the ivy, which had managed to worm its way into the concrete, was torn loose in the course of the years by the gusts, and floated after the trains as they sped by.

Time and again the vegetation was removed, and then, before new vegetation maybe took its place, a pattern of rough semicircles was revealed on the wall, often layered on top of each other, light patches scratched and etched in the concrete by all the bunches, fans, trailing streamers as they brushed back and forth. If that stretch of wild growth had earlier appeared random, when it was cleared away the half-ring or half-moon forms left behind in its absence appeared entirely orderly. They differed only in size, and were rounded off either at the top or the bottom, depending on whether the plants had been growing up from below or hanging down from above.

And from time to time, when I stood there by the railway cut and no train was passing at the moment — if it remained that way for more than a minute, it could mean only that there was a strike on — contemplating at my feet these chalk-gray, swooping etchings of something no longer there, something from before, so much more powerful than if the growths themselves had actually been present, being whipped back and forth by the trains, I had an experience of massiveness, tension, movement, wild goings-on. In that pattern of shrubs and wind at the railroad cut, past, present, and future became interwoven and spoke to me.

The ornamentation on the ancient city walls of Ecbatana in Persia would have revealed to me something great, as it did to Flaubert when, dreaming of an epic, he became lost in contemplation of it, but unlike to him, the wall would have seemed to me ineffable rather than epic. Here and now, in the ordinary world, grandeur and beauty finally appeared to me describable, as they had not been in the Gobi Desert, at the Lion Gate at Mycenae, at the pilgrim’s portal in Santiago de Compostela. And a few steps later they became completely inaccessible again. What had I seen there?

And the more I tried to brood it back, the more meaningless it became, and at the same time more uncanny. Don’t try to make something of it, I resolved. Experience grandeur and beauty and then leave it in peace. It does not want to be described. Or not by you. It is not material, not narrative material anymore.

It was fine with me that during those years I was not merely idle but also experienced no pressure from imagination or inventiveness. For the way I lived there seemed at certain moments close to perfection, especially when I stopped and became all ears. All that was missing was a little push, a mere wisp of something, a pinprick — but of what? — and it would have been the longed-for merging with the surroundings, with the treetop, with the curved space, the bay between the wings of the swallow.

But by way of compensation for having not the slightest spark of a conception of the future, I now wanted to know things. In the evening I would wait impatiently for Valentin to fall asleep so I could make headway with my studies. I had a telescope there, good enough for an observatory, and with it I looked at the sky, which even there in my first suburb, closer to the periphery, was less polluted by light than in Paris; I traced the deserts of the moon, dotted in Orion’s belt (and in between lowered the instrument and counted up the day’s receipts with the pharmacist, who, far away at the other end of the street, was staying late to balance his register).

Above all I studied from books. I read word for word and picked out only works that lent themselves to such reading. I soon set aside the local chronicles and histories because they made the region seem sadly diminished in contrast to the greatness, however undefined, of which I daily became conscious there. What was merely worth knowing or interesting did not satisfy me.

On the other hand, I was filled with a steady warm glow from studying the earth’s forms and their interactions, no longer merely those of this place; and I could follow best when the textbook contained only key words, rather than complete sentences.

Mountain cirques, alluvial terraces, shifting dunes thus became living images. Coming to understand them lifted all my weariness from me; I felt absolutely clear in the head, as previously perhaps only when I was studying Roman law, and I felt at one with the planet, and vice versa.

Sometimes, late at night, when I was already asleep, I was filled with such burning desire to know more that the urge itself woke me; I switched on the light, and, sitting up in bed, went on puzzling out the explanations.

It was sheer pleasure. I understood the term “morphological diversity”: the morphological features on which I was reading up, including those at the ends of the earth, were waiting for me, tomorrow, and each corresponded and responded to an as yet undiscovered vein in my body.

It happened more than once that the sheet I was lying on, with its folds and bulges, took on the relief of the landscape I was studying just then. The landscape seared itself into my memory by way of the sheet. Then I wanted to lie without a blanket, with the light on. And something similar happened to me on those nights when I sat there deciphering old books from classical antiquity. It was in fact a kind of decoding, for with the help of my boarding-school dictionaries I was cracking the Latin and Greek words to make them yield a sentence, and that alone, before any particular meaning emerged, could vitalize and refresh me as much as any adventure. I saw myself as a hairsplitter and since then have never viewed that as a defect in anyone.

But there was even more in the verses of Homer and Heraclitus; it was no accident they had survived the avalanches and floods of history. One phrase after another brought me face to face with a sun that did not blind me, and also never set as long as someone was reading that way. And if I opened a newspaper or turned on the television afterward, I could follow current events effortlessly. Completely alert, I took an interest in what was going on, at the same time without being surprised at anything, unmoved, prepared in advance for the worst. Afterward I sat in the dark, with a goblet that I held at the very bottom, by its foot, as I had seen it done in paintings of French peasant families from a century long past, surrounded by the suburban night’s silence and the presence of my son asleep upstairs, at the heart of time.

Why couldn’t my life go on this way indefinitely, the life of an anonymous person in an anonymous suburb, with my crisscrossing the area during the day, my hairsplitting and contemplation of word-suns in the evening, with my sitting bolt upright, and with the small, quiet sleeper for whom I performed an easy night watchman’s service? Now that certain branch is brushing the window on the west side again, the uppermost one, in the gable. Now the furnace is switching off until the next morning. The wind must be from the north; otherwise the mail train, all its cars windowless and painted yellow, would not rumble so through the house. This now is the moment of the piles of coal way in back of the railroad station, now, with the falling moon. And tomorrow I shall again do nothing! We will go up into the forest, past the standing stone, from under which the spring may be trickling again, after the rain, and then, on the other side of the highway, check to see whether the strawberries are ripe at that particular spot. We will eat, my friend, by the ponds of Villebon, and meanwhile observe what is happening on the water. Then I must not forget again to pick up Valentin after school. And in the evening, my dear fellow, we’ll experience the bifurcation of the Orinoco and then work through twelve more hexameters in our Odyssey.

Incidentally, it did not strike me as at all strange to see myself, perhaps more than ever, as someone from an Austrian village, then as now almost completely untouched by the outside world, and yet to have found the way of life most suited to me in a hinterland like this, more foreign than the most remote place from my years of travel. In this sense I viewed myself as a modern, one of the first in a series, in an avant-garde.

In various parts of the world I had run across one person or another from this avant-garde, almost always a stranger, and each time I had seen this person as my model. One time perhaps he was sitting in an outdoor café by a railroad station on the border, and amid the natives and the foreigners he stood out as a third type, who, without specifically looking at anything, was entirely caught up in what was going on; in spite of his large knapsack and his ankle-length coat, he seemed to be in camouflage (he was the one whom the patrolling border guards gave a wide berth); and with his untouchability I felt I was in good company with him, and went looking for it, though in vain, the following evening as well.

Years later I encountered my model again in the form of someone else, on a bus trip through the Yucatan, and knew afterward only that he came from Australia; we were on the road together for no more than a day, in a small, cobbled-together tour group. When the bus stopped, he was always the first one out, as if he already had a direction charted inside him, and involuntarily I followed, though whenever possible choosing my own path; I simply felt the urge to have him in sight, for wherever he went, away from the Maya pyramids, toward ash-darkened and glowing-hot present-day burned-over rain forest with almost nothing else, there had to be something to discover, and without attaching myself to him I wanted to see it from a distance.

A third time I even came across my model in the form of a fellow countryman, from a neighboring valley. He still spoke its dialect, though only when he slipped briefly back into German from English. Otherwise he had become a well-adjusted resident of the American Midwest, at the same time remaining the spit and image of a Carinthian villager, whom I could imagine pulling the rope of a church bell, a heavy one, or as an adolescent suffering from raging hormones, spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth as he stood before the girl of his dreams during the “begging-in” customary in our area, at least in those days. He seemed perfectly at home in Minnesota, so established in and familiar with the place, and also in charge of his domain, to judge by his outstretched arm and the space between his firmly planted legs, like a local lord. Yet he did not exaggerate or imitate anything. I just saw him as more alert than the natives, more on the make (without being called Schwarzenegger), at the same time more thoughtful than his fellow Americans and more contemplative, like someone leading his life on a sort of rampart or fort, a quality indeed possessed to some degree by his house, far from Minneapolis, alone on a prairie, on top of a little mound of fill, with an almost endless view in all directions. And in the city of millions where he worked as a physician, “more or less with my left hand,” but what a left hand, he remained just the same. At the time we were both young, and I was convinced he would make a great name for himself. “I escaped from home, and it’s right here!” he said. “With the smallest sip of coffee I drink, far from my Maria Rojach, not seen or thought of by anyone in the village, I make a contribution to the future of the world!”

I have not heard from him again. Where is he? It has been a long time since I last met the modern person in whom I thought I could anticipate a new world. And I, too, have not stayed the same as during my years in that first suburb.

Without especially holding myself aloof or participating, I learned just enough about people to have life brush me in passing and hardly exert any pressure. During those few years I did not hear bad things about anyone (it was quite different for my son in school, but he did not tell me about that until much later).

The settling, spreading uphill, hardly noticeably yet steadily, was dense and at the same time scattered, and I felt as if my house were protected by the many harmless strangers and their almost constant presence, as quiet as it was palpable; I often forgot to lock up.

The majority of the residents were older, yet quite far from being frail; primarily former retailers and railroad employees, who lived for their inconspicuous, yet on closer inspection practically sculpted, vegetable gardens, and otherwise, too, seemed to be constantly out and about, going for cigarettes or the paper, betting on horses in a certain café, then streaming together from every direction for the Sunday market in front of the station (as now in the bay), knowing in advance and in detail what would be there, and where; I once heard two local people exchange in passing what still echoes in my ear as the customary greeting of the place: “We have it good here, don’t we?” — “Yes, we have it good here!”

In my memory at least I have only people like that as neighbors, and there was a similar couple, a man and his wife, who took care of Valentin when I was away, with whom I sometimes sat for a while after I got back, and not merely out of politeness, also enjoying the apples from their own trees that they served (while on the other hand my son later told me story after story about the mustiness peculiar to their house, a different kind in every corner).

In my imagination they are all still alive, even though most of them meanwhile are probably in the ground, and when I occasionally venture across there, over the two hills, I no longer encounter a single one of them; the greeting, if I get to hear it at all, is different from before. The descendants of the Portuguese, the largest foreign group there, often no longer use their language with each other, or speak it with a French accent. The graves of the Armenians and also the Russians increasingly display, under their own, far-traveled script, lines of the locally customary Roman script.

And the few people from that population of whom I had perhaps a less good opinion during my time there must be doing worse things today, yet even they cannot have turned into complete villains, but at most, appropriately for those suburbs, stock types or minor characters from gangster comedies: for instance, the doctor, the only one in the neighborhood, who filled out prescription after prescription, never really looking at the patients, and in the same breath wrote out a bill, to the bottom line of which would be added, as I said to myself, the profit from the volleys of medications, especially for small children, shared, according to a secret agreement, with his accomplice, the proprietor of the pharmacy, two streets over and around the corner, where, even without my telescope, with the naked eye, I could see the parents of the district coming out, laden as if for all eternity with accordion-sized boxes (and at least once I was one of them myself).

But what do I really know of that place today? Other than that the brooms of the still mostly black street sweepers are now made of plastic rather than of twigs; that the photo automat at the railroad station now takes colored rather than black-and-white pictures; that the one homeless person who used to sleep up in the woods has meanwhile become several?

All that time the shelter up on the railroad platform had no glass in its door, and once, when I went to push it open, I tumbled into dead air. Now glass has been installed. And from the upstairs apartment where I dragged my son to his piano lesson no tinkling can be heard now.

I, too, did no one any harm there, did not get worked up even once, and wanted it to be that way always.

On the other hand, I gradually came to recognize that I also did not take anyone seriously, and this was true not only of the local residents filing past but then also of my absent friends. I hardly wanted to hear about them anymore. I was dissociating myself. My going it alone, in my place and domain, seemed so much richer in content than any togetherness. I barely skimmed my friends’ letters, and then did not answer them. The simple fact that they were constantly doing things and appearing in public made me indifferent to them; if one of them had appeared before me with his activities, I would have scoffed at his scheming.

Yes, from a distance I was unserious, and at the same time hardened toward my friends. And at the side of my son, too, toward whom I outwardly seemed so attentive and patient, I quite often caught myself merely feigning interest. Certainly I listened to him, but I had no heart for the child. Did that not become clear from the fact that I would forget him if he was away for more than a couple of days? Why did all the world treat me in his absence as a single person, someone without attachments who could be enlisted for the craziest adventures?

If I seem to be making myself out as worse than I was at the time, my intention is not to ask to be refuted but rather to have something to tell. Can it be that this was the only way for me to get started? When I was in boarding school, crammed in like a sardine with the others at Mass, didn’t I invent sins or upgrade venial failings to atrocities so I could slip away to the confessional in back, from which I would emerge energized and proud of my stories?

But then I did become more closely acquainted with someone in the region: the later petty prophet of Porchefontaine.

At the time he was proprietor and chef of the restaurant in the hollow of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, by the clearing in the middle of the woods, as now at a restaurant by the railroad embankment in the suburb of Versailles: since then both of us have moved our base of operations two valleys to the west in the Seine hills, and each of us still finds himself at about the same distance from the other. Between our houses there is a similar set of foothills to cross.

In that period in my lire — which, for all my idleness, was a time of preparation — he became for me something that meant more than friends: an adversary whose acumen awakened my own; a misanthrope on whose rationality I honed the substance of my illusions; a tester in the face of whose deliberate heartlessness my own heart opened up as if in the presence of a secret.

The entire person attracted me as just such a secret. He was as he was; in contrast to me, he did not merely feign disgust and distaste; and yet that could not be all there was.

Even though he was my double as no one had ever been before, and finally the one I welcomed, there had been a time when he had made entirely different choices. At moments I was convinced my thoughts mirrored his exactly, yet when I articulated them, the tone was wrong. Only when they came from his mouth did they sound authentic. Again unlike me, he stood by his condemnation of the world. No, he was not my mirror. And at the same time, when I was by myself, I experienced — a word that otherwise only my friend the priest can use without embarrassment — longing for him; likewise for his place.

The stone cabin there on the edge of the clearing, long since gone without a trace, is still for me the most charming tavern on earth, the epitome of an inn. The first time I approached it, after a two-highway, three-secondary-road, four-forest route, I took it for a snack bar, or, with the ponds nearby, a fishermen’s pub. But then there was a door, of glass, with a lace curtain; and the Egyptian standing outside, seemingly moving in his motionlessness, like a dancer, in combination with his black suit and white shirt, transformed the barrack, and my long journey there contributed to the impression, into a caravansary.

Its proprietor did not, to be sure, return my greeting, and I had to go around him to enter, and same with a Doberman that unexpectedly, soundlessly, rose from the threshold on long, gangly legs. The dining room, one step beyond, was bathed in green from the forest outside all its windows. The few tables stood well apart from each other, with light tablecloths and napkins artfully swirled in the glasses, in which candle flames were mirrored, although guests were sitting only in a corner in back (in any other restaurant they would have been given a table by the window, also to make it look inviting to passersby).

I stood for a while, and when no one came, I picked a table. I waited patiently. No matter what happened now, I knew I was in the right place for a meal. If not today, I would eat here another time, and then again and again. Unlike in other nice places, I felt no immediate urge to ascertain the particulars. I simply waited, deaf to the conversation at the table behind me, tired from my long walk and happy.

The patron appeared, the man with the Egyptian profile, coming now through the swinging door from the kitchen, and wordlessly set before me bread, wine, water, and olives with stems, and had no sooner given the bread basket another turn toward me than he was already out of the small room. The bread was warm, saffron yellow when broken open, with a fragrance of the Orient that went with the pattern of the dishes. The courses that followed, likewise presented in silence and without my having ordered them, on ordinary plates, were classic French cuisine, and yet they seemed different by a degree. There was something more to them; later I noticed that, on the contrary, this effect actually came from something’s being left out. Besides, each dish, served by the chef, the proprietor, was sliced and arranged in a way that brought to mind the story of a Chinese butcher: this butcher had learned how to carve in such a way that in faithfully adhering to the original shape he created entirely new shapes.

Thus it was as if I found myself sitting down to a meal that would have been equally suited to the Mongolian steppe or to a salmon river in Alaska, and as if I were also that far away, out in the open. I had not been particularly hungry. But even before the first bite it occurred to me, just at the sight of the modest dish, simply presented in the right light on the scratched cafeteria plate, that something had been missing up to now. Why else should I heave such a great sigh of relief? Why else should I have to keep such a tight grip on myself so as not to cry? Did this mean I had been miserable all this time, and had not realized it until this moment of nourishment?

Then the proprietor’s voice made itself heard. He admonished the guests behind me, whose clothing hardly differed from his, to laugh less vulgarly, also to speak more softly, and about something other than food, wine, politics, business, and winning games, for instance about the eclipse of the moon last night or the biography of Pythagoras, which he strongly recommended for the way of life it depicted.

The group seemed accustomed to hearing such things from him and hardly paid him any heed. Nor did it bother them apparently that he then remained standing by their table, arms crossed, as if to speed their departure from his place, and, while they were still making their way to the door, was in a hurry to set the table while still clearing it, to eliminate every trace of them.

And no sooner were they outside than he laced into them, as if talking to himself: They were like everyone nowadays, synthetic human beings, placed in the world to wreak havoc and cause commotion; conceived without love; instead of being born innocent from a mother’s body, extruded somewhere, ready for use and for molding; their youth devoted to sharpening murder weapons; their maturity, behind their human masks, an endless massacre; and in the end they would just splinter, unseen and unheard, canceled out, wiped off the radar screen, neutralized.

I only half listened, not knowing whether I should take this seriously; objected, feeling it was my duty, that an innkeeper was there for everyone and should keep his opinions to himself. I did not allow myself to be deflected from my enjoyment of the meal, my delight in this out-of-the-way spot, and I thanked the chef and proprietor for it. Without looking at me, he said that it was not for the sake of me, the chance guest, that he had served up this meal, but rather to pay homage to the good things to eat and to celebrate the day as it came. And after he had poured me mint tea, in a high arc from an oriental-style onion-shaped pot, I had no sooner stood up than he slapped the seat of my chair with a thick waiter’s towel, as he had done with the others while they, too, were still there.

After that I stopped in there regularly, also because of the view.

It was as if the dining room had neither walls nor a roof, and as if outside, amid the heavy foliage of the mammoth oaks, dots of the sky shone like bluing onto the set table, and as if the clay path under the trees were the picture into which not the painter entered, but his people, and without disappearing into it.

Once, when a light rain was falling, the patron barked at me that I should go out onto the terrace; because of the trees I would not get wet, and besides, looking and listening, in combination with his dishes, slowed down one’s breathing and kept one warm.

And in fact his inn in the hollow seemed an oasis of summer far into the autumn; as one came up the path, a curiously dry air crackled through the oak leaves, now riddled with holes, which apparently dropped only in the middle distance.

Since in the meantime the proprietor had offended his usual guests for good, and the most recent edition of the restaurant guide now warned people about his gruff manner, there were only a few of us left. Yet even if the place had been packed, running at full steam — which I sometimes wished for — the experience would always have been the same for me there.

The sound of the trees in the clearing, a seething, swelling, blazing, made me understand why one of the auditory ossicles is called the “stirrup.” I felt something tugging at me; gratitude galvanized me, followed by an exuberance that wanted to go somewhere and then nowhere at all: I was there, and I was innocent.

And one day the proprietor stood next to me and said, his hand on the back of my chair: “Sometimes when it gets quiet in the clearing, a fist seizes me by the scruff of my neck from above and hoists me off the ground like Habakkuk in your Bible, one of the minor prophets. I, on the other hand, am the petty prophet, and insist on that.”

From then on we no longer dealt with each other as host and guest. From time to time he sent me handwritten invitations to his place, with descriptions of dishes and wines. Or, when I could not get away, for instance because my son was sick, the restaurateur from the clearing would come to my house, in the evening, on his (very flexible) days off, bringing his pots and pans, and would cook and serve a meal. He would lock himself into the kitchen, and except for faint Arabic music we would hear not a sound from him, and he always took a very long time. Afterward we would play chess in silence — something he nowadays always invites me in vain to do — he with grim intensity, I casually, while inside us, it seemed to me, it was often actually the other way around. He was a stern winner and a laughing loser.

I admired him for his implacability, just as I was annoyed with myself for my readiness to relent after an initial burst of rage. To this day I have not fathomed his secret. And I always feel a kind of uncertainty toward him, going back to our very first shared moment, or perhaps the opposite thereof, that time at the door to his caravan stopping place.

And soon he had to move, after going bankrupt, to another cabin, beyond the next knoll of the Seine hills, by the upper pond in Villebon. And where this second little restaurant stood, there now grows, like the grass on the site of the first, a tangle of stinging nettles and wild blackberries. From its windows I could see the wind rippling the water down below, just as now, in his third place in Versailles-Porchefontaine, I can see on the embankment the long-distance and local trains speeding and rolling by, overlapping and blocking the view of one another.

Sometimes I set out for there for dinner, taking a roundabout route through the forest, and each time get up disappointed, without having had any complaint with the food or the table by the window. For sitting, resting, meals, pursuing my thoughts, I am constantly on the lookout for an inn like the one at Fontaine Ste.-Marie. And I do not intend to stop looking. Perhaps my friends on their various journeys will tell me about finding one.

But as for the clearing, with the bulldozed terrace area, I now avoid it — like all clearings, by the way. It seems to me that nothing more can grow there: as if today’s clearings, even including the jungle of the Yucatán, belonged to the runners, gymnasts, fitness freaks, dogs, bombing squadrons, and poisonous mushrooms. All the entrances to them could be called, like the one here in the bay, “Allée de la Fausse Porte,” the avenue of the wrong door.

And at the same time I think at least once a day of my inn in the clearing: what a lovely, eternal, simple sitting one could have there. All the things that had been studied and understood the night before forgotten, and yet close at hand. The breath of wind moves the space between one’s fingers — a snapping. Reminiscent: only this word for it comes to mind, an introductory word that calls for a noun, in the genitive, the generative case. Reminiscent of what?

And of course there was no staying there (although the solitary proprietor had his room over the kitchen, as if for the long haul).

Those were the years when, without working, I was riding high as never before and hardly ever afterward, and at the same time feeling more threatened and on borrowed time than ever.

Each time I went to bed after midnight, I had the distinct impression of having survived another day, and I actually painted the date of the new day, the only thing I entered in my notebook at that time. I understood the complaints of various involuntary (unlike me) residents of the suburbs, who saw themselves cut off there from the world as it flowed by, consigned for a time to an evacuation or pre-death zone — particularly on certain evenings when, beyond the gates of the metropolis, an un-contoured brightness settled over the streets, on which the newly leafed-out trees shriveled into wilted cemetery plants, and far and wide a queasy silence reigned, the window shutters closed tight on every side, abrupt chirping of sparrows, the wail of car alarms, and the barking of watchdogs.

That became perhaps most tangible in those suburbs greatly in demand as places to live, on the slopes above the meanders of the Seine, where one had a view of the whole city of Paris, as in Garches, Meudon, or St.-Cloud. From Paris down there in its basin, scattered over the landscape as far as the horizon like millions of bright, crowded dice, only a rustling reached the silent hills and panoramic terraces above. Down there was where everything was happening. That was where it was.

The metropolis shimmered, glowed, and way down there, inaudible, was a steady, nest-warm thrumming, and the person who had moved away, way up with his hanging gardens in the fresh air, must have felt he had no hope of ever returning there.

And even I, in my much humbler suburb, in the house from which only the tip of the Eiffel Tower could be seen, found myself thinking at night, perhaps in view of that magic triangle sticking up far off in the gaps between the houses next door, where the lights had been turned off long since, and their dark and dreary cabbage gardens, whether it wasn’t an outrage to be away from that light over there.

It was very fragile and threatening, my grand time, back then before the midpoint of life, in my first suburb.

And then one day I really did go mad. My madness remained inside me and did not last. But if it had broken into the open, there would have been no going back for me. I would have murdered my son — and was afraid I would do so, fled from myself into the remotest corner of the cellar — would have set fire to the house and would have run out on the street with a knife and an ax, striking blow upon blow against strangers, until the end. It was as if I had to destroy one thing after the other, just because it was there.

At intervals I was overcome with ghostly calm and thought all the rage of my serf ancestors, which never had an outlet, had collected in me and had now been transformed into the ravings of a madman. I went to my son, caressed him, pushed him to the ground. The child understood, and avoided me for the rest of the day, but he also did not lock his room; otherwise I would have broken down the door.

When I got to the clearing the following day at noon, having groped my way there step by step, gasping as if I had been short of breath for a long time, and told my patron about it, he responded that I had just had an ordinary tantrum, the kind that made one’s appetite return with fresh vigor. And yet I was sure that I had been in a state close to a new kind of madness, as yet not described in the literature: an interminable raving, wall-to-wall disaster, and at the same time, in distinction to the megalomaniac figures in history or drama, lacking any variation, completely monotonous — the peculiarly modern feature of such insanity being the fact that it was so boring.

My one-day insanity in the suburb now lies almost two decades behind me, and it has never recurred. And nevertheless, in contrast to other guises in which I once appeared, in my memory this one has not become a stranger — the one in which I went around and around in a circle, my hot head in my correspondingly colder hands, to be jolted out of it only by a series of violent actions, and yet far too weak to so much as lift a finger. This is one I I will never put in quotation marks.

2 — The Story of My First Metamorphosis

Something had to happen. Something had to be done. What I was experiencing in my idleness cried out for that. I decided to take the plunge and write a long story. Was this really the only way I could accomplish something?

I sent Valentin, my son, to my childless sister in her small town in Carinthia and prepared for my work by crisscrossing Europe.

Among other things I made use of my friends, who at the time were pretty much the same ones as now; for a long time I have not added anyone to the list.

I remained without a permanent residence and accompanied the architect on one of his observation excursions, in the course of which he now and then earned some money as a carpenter, or even just as a day laborer.

With the singer I went over my first song lyrics, which he wanted to try to make singable (the phrases were too short for him, or, I am no longer sure which, too long; the song did not suit him).

With my priest I parsed the epistles of the Apostle Paul, who according to his own words was a difficult writer, his clauses more complex than those of the Greek Thucydides and even the Roman Livy, and in contrast to the two historians, he did not even have anything to narrate, only something to preach, and that had never been my thing, had it?

I stayed away from my woman friend, as indeed from every woman.

From the reader, who could often go for days on nothing but air, I received his “Survival Catalogue”: showing how I had to make my way alone, at war with the world.

And with my painter I went out drawing in his various regions, but spent more time sitting in his studios, especially during his protracted periods of getting ready to work, also during his periods of distracting himself, very thoroughly, by dint of shining his shoes, sweeping the floor, trimming his toenails, carving a walking stick, until suddenly he would pick up a brush and start painting, undeterred by chain saws, jackhammers, and bluebottle flies.

Likewise I conditioned myself physically, convinced that to design the New World I also had to be armed in this way.

In the European countries that were still Communist at the time, there were already Western-type fitness courses, on which you could have seen me running and jumping with the best of them. I, who as a child had never got beyond clinging to the broad back of a draft horse, now even tried to learn to ride, but appeared to myself so odd up there that I felt as though I should dismount for every pedestrian, and at least, if one came toward me on the path, always greeted him first (the same thing happens to me now with horseback riders here in the forest). And for the first time since the Gobi Desert I drove a car, across the summery tundra, and after a few days skidded off the crushed-rock track into a swamp, my head striking the windshield, which cracked in the shape of a star, while I merely bled a bit on my forehead, yet immediately had a thick furry covering over the blood from the mosquitoes. And while hiking in a ravine on the karst I looked for a shortcut, went in the wrong direction, and could get out only by climbing, increasingly enjoying the necessity of keeping my wits about me, and since then I have not actually taken up mountain climbing, but when I am out walking immediately feel myself becoming completely alert in unanticipated tight spots where, in order to get to safety, I have to rely for the moment entirely on my sense of touch, my body vitally connected from my toes to my fingertips as in no other situation.

When I swam upstream in the bright, clear upper reaches of the Alpine rivers, occasionally poked by the cartilaginous mouths of fish, the mountains and the sky moved in very close and seemed, together with the waters, which streamed, like Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Tigris and Euphrates, “from Paradise,” elemental and epic as they could hardly be in a dream. Once summer snowflakes swirled around the swimmer. Once perpendicular arrows of hail plunged into the river next to him, making fountains spurt sky-high (the former in the Inn River in the Engadine, the latter in the Tagliamento near Tolmezzo). In the Val Rosandra, surrounded by the limestone mountains of Trieste, I stood and stood under the waterfall there and let the stream of water, not great in volume but falling all the harder, drum my brain clear. Back there soon!

And one late afternoon beyond Tamsweg, when I was making my way uphill on skis, in my exhaustion I saw the white of the snowdrifts as that brilliant reflection in which Faust tells us we capture the world, and over my shoulder, the Austrian town far below in the dusky valley, with its oversettled outskirts, seemed to have levitated to my eye level, and both of these sights were not hallucinations.

And most of all perhaps, and everywhere, I practiced for my epic outdoors in the night, pitch-dark if possible, unknown, confining, through which I moved as if nothing were wrong.

And finally I had my teeth taken care of, had new heels put on my trusty shoes, had my hair cut to a stubble, celebrated at a little farewell party with my friends in Rinkolach, and in the fall withdrew to the place I had long ago chosen for my work, the Spanish (Catalonian) enclave of Llivia in the highlands of the eastern French Pyrenees.

I took a room in what at that time was still the only hotel there.

My room was the highest in a large new building on the edge of the settlement, which had called itself a city since the seventeenth-century Treaty of the Pyrenees, and was both more and less. Against my better judgment, I had once again chosen a view, without streets and houses, a view of the open highland countryside, with the meadows and trees along the Río Segre, and beyond them the desertlike faded reddish-brown badland cliffs of Santa Leocadia, and beyond that, as if in another world, the jagged Sierra del Cadi as the vanishing point.

Not until I was there did I buy myself a typewriter, for which I had to leave the enclave again and go over the border to Puigcerda, the only real city in the Cerdagne or Cerdanya: a machine with the Spanish arrangement of keys, on which, since some letters were not in the accustomed place, I constantly made typing errors. The foreign accents also disrupted my rhythm, likewise the upside-down Spanish exclamation points and question marks.

What did not merely trip me up but threw me off track, after the very first sentence, which I had written down, reaching in all directions, with the stored-up elan of the past months, was something else entirely. I should never ever have been allowed to know the first sentence of my epic project in advance and carry it around with me for so long. This sentence made a continuation, of whatever kind, impossible.

You have seen this, no doubt: I cut a figure like that slalom skier in an international competition who goes shooting out of the starting posts with total concentration and in that very moment wipes out at the first pole and is out of the race — yet remains on the screen.

But this analogy does not work (and it seems to me there are simply no even moderately accurate analogies for the vicissitudes of writing): for I did not want to admit defeat. First came a dazed feeling, then alarm, then a new start, although, according to the prevailing rules of the game, this seemed impermissible.

I crept out of the light and tried to continue in the dark, just as in childhood, when I had failed in front of others, I would imagine that off somewhere by myself I could cancel out my failure by starting over (and this analogy, too, is wrong).

At any rate, I started again and again in the days that followed, absolutely without hope and equally stubborn, and with the tenaciousness of a descendant of small farmers.

And yet I never got beyond my preconceived first sentence, which I could not or would not give up. This sentence, at first a simple main clause — subject, verb, object — now grew from day to day, called for additions, concessions, boxed itself in, bulged out, sought to break out into the open with a consecutive clause, came to a head, sharpened its focus, strove for lightness, also for fading, for inarticulateness, demanded, above and beyond narration, to address itself to someone (no one in particular), in a little twist to one side, then already in a subordinate clause, until the entire sentence looked like something between the onset of the long story I had planned and the convoluted salutation of a Pauline epistle, although certainly not addressed to a community, or even to an individual, and I, unlike the apostle, had not the slightest awareness of having been sent forth by anyone.

And when, on the evening of the third or fifth day, the sentence stood there without any continuation in sight, it was clear to me that the world-embracing epic for which I had prepared so thoroughly in spring and summer, as I had never prepared for an examination, was a failure, a bust. All the strength I needed for it had abandoned me. The notebooks I had filled in the previous months, piles and piles in front of me on the table, were utterly useless, as were the detailed maps, some of which I had drawn myself, held down by chunks of the yellow-and-gray stone from the area around my suburb.

I lay down on the floor and slept, or lost consciousness, until the following evening.

Then I casually followed the windings of the one and only sentence that went on for several pages. When I took my eyes off it, absently, a few very short, almost unconnected sentences presented themselves quietly, like “He went shopping. The tree was very beautiful. The summer came,” which I immediately added.

And then I realized I was going to have to write something entirely different from what I had planned: something for which I was not in the least prepared and also felt quite unsuited: the story of, or the research report on, something that did exist inside me but was untouchable: my religion, or, as the resulting work then turned out to be called by others, “a prayer in narrative.” And although I considered such a thing hardly possible in this day and age, not amenable to being expressed in that rational language without which, in my eyes, no writing and no reading could take place, my few sentences inspired a kind of trust, entirely unparalleled, as never before, in words, in myself, in the world.

As I then went out walking in the evening landscape of the enclave, there swept through me, as novel to me as the word that went with it, ecstasy. The low walls of cut granite that bordered the roads there glittered, and bathed my face. I was looking forward to my one-man expedition.

And with that began what was called at the beginning of these pages a metamorphosis.

It was the loveliest time I had experienced up to then, month after month, then on through the years, and my most difficult. It was the struggle I had always wished for, the war of which the reader had spoken, yet not against an external enemy, out there in society, but rather against myself.

I sensed the existence of rules almost impossible to satisfy, of which I furthermore had no knowledge, except perhaps that the process had to be very different from my usual writing, which, for instance, required that I repeatedly make blunders in order to get on with the story and maneuver it toward my original conception. Here, without an initial conception, without any conception at all, my trusty technique of doing it wrong would not help at all. On the contrary, a single wrong word that I let stand would block all progress on my project.

To put it another way, I could neither have recourse to my experiences, dreams, and facts nor invent action, plot, or conflicts. The book, or whatever it would turn out to be, had to be created out of nothing.

I was in suspense. The struggle seemed unwinnable; at best it could be drawn out as long as possible. And yet I was often also hopeful, could feel myself, as my own enthusiastic opponent, closer to myself than ever before.

Thus I sat from morning until usually late at night in my warm, quiet, bright writing room above the Pyrenean punch-bowl landscape around the enclave of Llivia, in the light of autumn and then already winter.

I ate less and less, often only zwieback with the tea I brewed for myself now and then. There were hardly any people in the “city,” which consisted chiefly of vacation houses, whose owners at that time of year, since there was no snow for skiing yet, were in Gerona or Barcelona. And the few local people, in the morning in the bar or sometimes driving the cows home toward evening from the pastures on the highland slopes, were so laconically cordial that they made me look forward even more to getting on with my work.

This was not to involve anything more than narrating happenings, peaceful ones, which themselves were everything, and taken all together perhaps constituted the event itself: the streaming of a river through the seasons; people moving along; the falling of rain, on grass, stone, wood, skin, hair; the wind in a pine tree, in a poplar, against a sheer stone face, between the toes, in the armpits; that hour before dusk when the last swallows swoop across the sky, while the bats begin to zigzag about; the traces of different birds in the mud of a puddle on a dirt road leading through fields; the simple coming of evening, with the great ball of the sun still visible in the west, that of the moon exactly opposite in the east.

It was that fullness of the world, as I had known it during my years off from school, so to speak, in those suburbs of Paris, except that, contrary to my plan, it had no dramatic plot or particular incidents, purely variations, nuances, more and more of them. And nevertheless all that was supposed to appear as interconnected and vibrate, with the intensity of a treasure-hunt story.

Nor were heroes lacking, a group of friends, men as well as women, who, embarked on a common journey, primarily had to serve as eyes, ears, and language for those other stories of the world. In between, the most that would occur would be things like playing cards, dancing, sewing on buttons, or someone sleepwalking, singing an original song, perhaps suggestive of Eichendorff’s Ahnung und Gegenwart. They all had names from classical antiquity, jumbled up by me so as to seem contemporary.

I transposed the quintessential events from the populated hills of the Seine to the region of the Orinoco in Latin America, which I knew only from directories of subject headings. Snowing in Clamart now turned up near the springs in the mountainous region of Guyana, although there, so close to the equator, it had probably never snowed. Borrowing from the rivulet that emerged from the woods at the foot of the menhir — and immediately ran dry again — I described the origin of the mighty river. The people on the clay path near my inn in the clearing became Indios following a trail through the rain forest.

And the journey on foot was to end at that bifurcation of the Orinoco that obsessed me even in my dreams, where the river, in midcourse, for as yet unexplained reasons, split and went rushing off in opposite directions.

Never during the writing had there been any thought of its earning money. And here, after the first sentences, it became unimaginable that this story, if I ever brought it to a conclusion, would be read by so much as a single person, and that did push me into forlornness. As I forged ahead, all the more stubbornly, I forgot this thought at first and then found myself enjoying a new kind of freedom.

For a long time I continued in this way, sitting at my table. Even when I did nothing but wait, there was this sense of symmetry, with the snowflake dissolving on the edge of the balcony, with the strip of condensation behind that. It seemed as if I were ridding myself once and for all of my impatience, and finding my own speed.

And because it was so unprecedented, I can say this: I was there, word for word, in time, as if this were my place.

Quite often, too, the thought came to me that no one had ever experienced any such thing; with me something altogether new was beginning.

In place of my forgotten body I felt a sensuality that I liked because it was simply there, without wanting anything. And then again I became strangely conscious of my body, as a whole, the way usually only a part of the body, a tooth, an ear, a foot, enters one’s consciousness, as a bothersome weight, or sometimes an absence of sensation, just before an incredible pain manifests itself there. Along with this freedom I experienced daily an equally new type of anxiety.

What made me anxious was my impression that in the process of being written down the material I was narrating was not expanding, but shrinking more and more, not what I had been accustomed to up until then. And besides, I was treading water with my story: the tour group that was supposed to have set out after only one day at the sources of the Orinoco was still stuck there, with half the rainy season gone and almost two hundred pages. The sentences with which I was circling around them, wanting to do justice to each happening — heat lightning, the sound of the rapids, the shifting sill of the river, marked by the first shadows of fish downstream — were becoming thinner than the air in those parts.

But it was not permissible — that was one of the rules that had emerged in the course of my work — for a single sentence, once it was on paper, to be revoked, at most a word or two. If there was to be any progress, then only by following the thread of the sentence, becoming more frayed from day to day.

I hoped that simply from fingering and fanning out the phenomena that nature presented I would come to a decision that would enable my heroes and me finally to take a leap and start anew. But another rule was that I could not invent such a decision, whereas every other time I had felt firm ground under my feet only when I was inventing.

The decision then turned out to be this: one day, in midsentence, my material ran out on me. And with my material for writing, my material for living. I keep brooding over that moment, and to this day do not know why the certainty suddenly came crashing down on me that I had blown my chance and that it was all over. Who can explain it to me? (No one, please.)

Those prayer books in boarding school had covered every single day, one saint after the other, and for each a miniature biography in the smallest possible print was supplied: these I had always read all through the Mass, not because they were about saints but because, compressed into all the prayers and invocations of the Lord, whose meaning remained closed to me, were, quite simply, stories. That shows how much I have always craved storytelling.

And now this, too, was closed to me. Even now I still do not know why I received this breaking of the thread as a verdict of annihilation, executed immediately.

And again I fell to the floor, but this time did not go to sleep; instead, I had to get up at once and sit down at my desk.

And for the following months that became the last of the still-usable rules. Even when I did not get out a single line, merely this staying at my desk provided a little bit of certainty. When out walking I epitomized the psalmist from whose abyss no tone issued forth. Running water, always such a reliable help in the past, whether out in the meadows along the Rio Segre or in the shower in my hotel, made me gag. Among the trees in the meadows down by the river wandered the beasts, and in the eyes of the people on the street below lurked yellow-and-black hornets. Wasn’t Spain the land of death?

I set out for the so-called Chaos of Targasonne, a desert of crags, intending to get lost or even fall off a cliff, for all I cared. But I did not succeed. I did not get lost, not at all.

And equally in vain I wished I would get sick, or the Third World War would break out, so that I would at least not be so alone with my very own war (previously I had thought that even in a world war, even if my child died, I would go on writing).

And the others sensed the state I was in. My current publisher, who blew in on his way from a book fair in Barcelona to a skiing vacation farther up in Font-Romeu, beat a hasty retreat, fled from the despair I exuded (to that degree he had a good nose), and patently gave up on me — which for an evening allowed me to take heart again. I understood him, too, in fact could smell the odor on myself.

Then something changed, with the couple of sentences by which I eventually moved on.

First of all a new title for my book thrust itself upon me. From “Prehistoric Forms” it was renamed “The Chimerical World.”

What a wonderful aura or addition emanated from a mere two words when they presented themselves in context. Holding firmly on to that, I was circling far outside with the eagle above the highland plateau.

And moments later, when again nothing happened, I became the fly lying on its back in the corner of the room and spinning in place. I had just been at the core of the world, and now I was catapulted into an outer space that was really no such thing. One morning I was thinking again that no one had ever experienced anything as glorious as I had, and in the evening of the same day I would have given God knows what to take the place of anyone else, the boil-studded beggar outside the church in Llivia, or a man condemned to death: at least he would have been declared guilty properly.

Hour after hour I sat motionless, facing me only that cloud with which there could be no conversation, filled with viper’s blood that darted its tongue into me from time to time, and unexpectedly I sat up straight and then traced out word for word the source, still so uncertain, even to the explorers who go out looking for it, of the Orinoco in the mountainous region of Guyana where my story continued to spin its spirals.

A mid this constant back-and-forth, my longing was focused only on the smallest, most ordinary, most everyday things.

All I wanted was to be able to bring my son to school again, stand idly on the suburban railway overpass, take my place in line at the post office, the bank, the movies. For the first time I felt a need for salvation. And I visualized it as embodied in everydayness, in its services, manners, and commonplace expressions.

I cursed myself for running away, seeking out an exceptional situation and exclusivity. If my work required that, something was wrong.

But now I likewise had to stay here, could not leave Llivia. Never again will I get out of this damned enclave, I thought again and again, and yet, with the next sentence that got me off dead center, I would have loved to give a party for this heavenly place and all its blessed inhabitants.

As I fought thus for life, in my own way, day after day, I came to accept myself as never before. I discovered something like a fondness for myself, a kind of brotherliness or friendship with myself.

It seemed to me that I was no I, no body anymore — which at the same time was uncanny — and had finally received, as one in need of salvation, what I lacked: a culture; precisely in my near-helplessness a spirit.

In this way much that was unthinkable became possible and playable, such that I once even let an itinerant soothsayer tell my fortune. She did not manage to lie in my presence, and foretold for me, holding my unabashedly needy hand in her own warming one, even worse and more worrisome experiences.

And once I sat all day at my desk imagining that at my back a camera for a blockbuster film was set up, and each of the letters I was to type would be projected onto a gigantic screen, before the eyes of a mass audience on all continents. I felt the suspense with which the completion of a word was awaited, groaned in relief with the entire theater when finally the connecting word came, and then, when long after midnight the sentence was concluded with a period the size of a planet, I jumped up from my seat, together with the rest of the world. Nothing could be quieter than another sentence after that, a transition, a ford: no sweeter silence.

I simply had to follow this method of finally forgetting any audience, nodding and rocking my head, so that at the first light of day a page was covered, as had not been the case for weeks, an image in writing. I washed myself in the water of the Pyrenees, full of enthusiasm for this me-without-me, and animated by love for my lot, which was something fundamentally different from acceptance of fate or inner tranquillity. (The peace so indispensable to my work was not foreign to me; yet I have not learned to this day to hold on to it, once achieved.)

Occupied with writing, I shuddered at the thought of going out into nature. The clanging of the river against the granite sills made me anxious, then even snowflakes bumping against my ear.

The very isolation of my study, with its view of the Sierra blue in the distance and the red earthen pyramids in the foreground, also became threatening to me. I moved to a room overlooking the highway, and opened the window, no matter how cold the weather, to the sound of the — unfortunately too infrequent — trucks and buses, preferably with the rattle of snow chains.

My daily walk, by roundabout routes through the enclave to make it longer, took me not out into nature but instead into the church of Llivia and even more often into the enclave’s little museum next door. It was as if I expected to find a sort of way out through contemplation of the objects, for instance the centuries-old apothecary’s cabinet displayed there. At least these handcrafted objects made me forget how things stood with me.

And likewise I wanted only light-colored foods; I had a horror of dark ones, for instance venison. For a time my only beverage was milk, with the thought that the viper-blood black would be forced out by the milk white.

But all that worked for only a day, and not even for that. I was cradled by the world, and went to hell. I conjured up a god ex nihilo, and then could not find the right word and the consecutive clause for him. I expected help to arrive, kept my eyes peeled for anyone, on earth, in the sky, around the corner, and then I was again the one who said to himself, “Look here, there goes someone who doesn’t need anyone!” I wanted to be taken away by one of the airplanes flying over the highlands, then found myself, in order to get another paragraph done, as I had wished, in the cockpit, which, the next time I got stuck, turned out to have no pilot and no instruments. During a storm I placed the manuscript pages by the open window and went off, hoping they would be blown away forever, then rushed back in a panic. At the sight of a butterfly I felt the fluttering of the wings all the way into my heart, at the sight of the next one, the dusty body between the wings appeared to me as that of the perished caterpillar. Who or what was chimerical: the world? the era? I?

Then a clarification was achieved after all. (If not, I either would still be sitting there at the scratched hotel table, having just reached the place where the first black-water tributary flowed into the Orinoco, or would be part of the musty air up in the crevasses of the Puigmal, the “Evil Peak.”)

It was the fault of a day after which I thought I was finally out of danger with my book. After over a hundred days, often spent from morning until late at night at my table, I decided to let the writing go the following day, and merely polish my shoes in my room and then immediately set out across country.

It was a clear day in early spring at thirteen hundred meters above the level of the sea at Alicante, which is how the altitude is measured everywhere in Spain, and soon the high plateau of the Pyrenees stretched at my feet, a sparsely populated scene in a natural amphitheater, whose terraces I mounted, going up the mountainside from one granite block to the next. I moved in a daze, as if released suddenly from intensive care directly into the sunshine.

Yet I could not achieve high spirits or pleasure. And with every step it grew worse. It was far too late to return to my writing table, and not merely for today. The deferment had run out. I would not even make it into the evening on this day.

Although I pushed on, with the world panorama below me, it was a mere wandering in circles. My pencil fell from my hand. My story did not continue. In just this way a person I had seen die was still moving his lips to draw in air long after he had died, or kicked the bucket.

I, who knew of nothing more worthwhile to strive for than to become a part of the world, to see through the eyes of another person, to land with a drop of rain on the dust in the road, now experienced myself, no matter where I turned, as such a part, but in a completely opposite sense. How sweet and kind the planet showed itself to be, and at the same time I gagged at any phenomenon. And it gave me not the slightest relief to tell myself that this was nothing compared to the children dying at this moment around the world. I saw down below in the distance, from the city of Puigcerda, the smoke rising from the highlands hospital, found myself transplanted into the bone-hard suffering there, and even so would much rather have been lying there myself.

And just as little was achieved by the rebuke: in view of the millions of years represented by the granite cliffs at my back, what did I count for? And I also knew that even in a merry crowd, even among all my friends, I would not be any less on the brink than alone here by the garbage dump on the mountainous steppe of the enclave of Llivia.

Twice in the past months I had been thrown to the ground. Now I threw myself down, face to the ground, and experienced a previously unknown masculinity. But the earth did not help me. She did not take me in. She even pushed me away. She had nothing for me.

Eyes open, look, straight ahead! And I had no choice but to look straight ahead from where I was lying on the ground, at eye level the ruins of a house of the steppe. And my gaze did not let go, and did not let go, and did not let go, and surrendered all hope, and was no longer waiting for any sign.

A rusty stove was lying among the ruins, with an oven from which old newspapers and books stuck out. I eyed the book on top, actually more a large brochure with a picture on the cover that still had some faded color, a princess surrounded by dwarfs, with the Spanish words “Los cuentos de los Hermanos Grimm,” The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Venerate the unfathomable in silence. But isn’t the act of circumnar-rating it an essential part of that? Suddenly I was seized by the certainty that my book would remain a fragment, and that that was as it should be. And that was not yet all: it was not even a fragment, but, unbeknownst to me, narrated to the end.

New lids grew over my eyes. I leaped to my feet. For a while nothing more could happen to me. I ran up hill and down dale, my first time running in how long? And at the same time I remained rooted to the spot: everywhere it was the same, one place. The little brooks in the pastures, together with the granite-glittering fence posts along their banks a sort of signature of the Cerdanya highlands, were rushing, wherever I looked, as though just thawed, and the randomly scattered turret blocks of the Chaos of Targasonne, above the tree line, likewise looked as though they had just been melted free of the glacier, long since gone.

And I swore fidelity to such a picture of the world. Never again should it change suddenly into a chimera, and that was within my power. It was my gaze that made it this way. It was my blinking that divided it up and organized it. But now I had to get going, down to where people were. From now on, that was my place.

Without suffering any harm, I let myself drop that day from a cliff higher than I, stuck my hand into the thorns of a juniper cypress, waded through the icy waters of the Río Mahur along the border. On the last stretch, going uphill again to the terrace of the sturdy little capital of Puigcerda, I was accompanied by a shaggy dog, which then kept close to my side until late that night. In the local movie house, the Avinguda, more roomy than almost all movie houses in large cities nowadays, I saw a sequel to Jaws, whose adventures, so harmless or peaceable compared to those I had just survived, gave me a warm glow around my heart. Afterward, with the dog tagging along, I followed in the darkness a woman who I thought had given me a sign with her hip, and at the very moment when I had decided to accost her and broke into a run, I fell flat on the street, tripping over the dog or a loose shoelace. Satisfied, I then dropped into the municipal casino, at that time still a traditional male stronghold, black with men’s suits under white neon patterns on the ceiling, and, standing beside a stranger, I played pool with a sureness of aim and a casualness such as I otherwise have only when I am throwing something or sometimes selecting a word. I kept one eye on the always busy television screen, felt as caught up in the advertising images as in the reports of terrible events from around the world, absorbed it all with grateful gusto. Then I invited my partner to dinner, whereupon, on the terrace of the Maria Victoria Hotel, with a view of the snow-glowing highlands and the railroad station at the border, with the dog between us under the table, he told me his entire life story, including the bombardment of Puigcerdá in his early childhood, in which the casino was almost the only building left standing. I decided that if I wrote anything at all after my book, it would be simply as a chronicler. And then we went down the steep slope to the station. I had the choice of traveling from there either to Barcelona or to Perpignan, or, by way of Toulouse, to Paris or God knows where. In any case, I would leave the enclave the next day. Extraordinary how the world was open to me, into whose neck, just a few hours or moments ago, that string had still been cutting by which, according to an old custom of Cerdagne, killed moles are hung up in a row. That was the first time I felt balls of air swelling in my armpits.

It is another story altogether that the mutt ran off on me as I was making my way home in the dark, that when I passed the lonely border station in the no-man’s-land just outside Llivia I wanted to be there in place of the uniformed guard watching television in his bare room under the stars of the Pyrenees, and that I choked on the final sentence of my book all through spring and summer, from one city in Europe to another, with the last line finally typed in Munich or somewhere or other, on the day of the Blessed Virgin’s birth or some day or other, in the garret in the house of my reader, who later told me he had just made up his mind, after days of silence behind my door, to break it down, when finally the typewriter started up, then again nothing for a long time, and then Gregor K. with a packet of manuscript and his traveling coat asking where the nearest post office was.

And it is also another story that for at least the following year I considered my salvation or release into a new freedom, or this change, a delusion; I thought the verdict on me was still in force, and now, right now, the time to execute it had arrived.

That this relentless pressure finally let up I owe to reading, not Holy Scripture, but the poet Friedrich Holderlin, who filled my veins with new blood, and then Goethe, who could be counted on to raise my spirits. This reading provided me with roots in the air and the light; and only on this basis did I then develop a sense for the Gospels, and not only the Christian ones. And simultaneously, although at the time I clearly understood religion, no matter which, as a given, even in previously incomprehensible variations, I still felt it was the highest calling to be a storyteller.

As for my book on prehistoric forms, alias the chimerical world, I thought during my relapses that I had ended it wrong, and was thus a failure and at the same time finally in the place where I belonged, and then again that I could build the rest of my life on it, or at least a piece of my life.

My notion that no one would read it was not borne out. To be sure, many people, especially members of my own generation, distanced themselves from me and my project, wordlessly as a rule, almost considerately, and when someone did say something, he said he found the sentences too long, the words too archaic, the focus on nature too exclusive. But then, with the passage of time, new readers turned up, younger ones, and, something I had always wished for previously, above all older ones.

The reviews were nothing special. Only one of the critics, the cleverest and at the same time the most limited, a man who presented his limitations as simplicity, sniffed out something and offered the opinion that the longing for salvation that presses on one of the heroes’ eyelids was an infelicitous image, and wondered whether falling to one’s knees, which happens to one of the characters in the course of events, provided a suitable position for thinking.

During the following year I remained in my birthplace, Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, taking shelter like a child in the cottager’s house that had belonged to my parents, recently bought back by my successful brother, my almost-twin, the uncrowned king of our family, and yet again and again the loser (at the appointed time perhaps I shall write my first play about him, with the title “Preparations for Immortality,” a tragedy?).

Earlier I had thought of the house, which belonged to us three siblings, as my last refuge. Now it felt as though there I would finally make a real beginning. In my ancestral region, the world in the form of details now opened up to me as it had revealed itself to me in the suburbs of Paris. The way of seeing I had developed there had become so much my own that it persisted in this area, similarly simple and unpicturesque, as I now realized. At last Austrian objects, along with the spaces between them, showed themselves to me, and spread out to form an environment.

None of these things forced themselves on me any longer (which in my childhood had often made the impression of hypertrophy). Now on the plain the pines and firs stood there, and Globasnitz Brook and Rin-ken Brook flowed as all over the world, as above them much more than a purely Carinthian sky hovered blue.

And thus the place names in my more immediate homeland also acquired resonance and rhythm, even if only those of the villages: Dob, Heiligengrab, Mittlern, Bistrica, Lind, Ruden, and of course Rinkolach. The names of the towns, as small as they were — Bleiburg, Völkermarkt, Wolfsberg — remained mute, not to mention Klagenfurt or Villach. Only on the other side of the borders did it continue, with Maribor, Udine, Tricesimo.

And likewise the natives, though again only those in the villages — which in any case were almost all I saw during that year — struck me as people from anywhere, with the appropriate horizon as a backdrop.

All this I took in, and yet for a long initial period I was utterly incapable of having dealings with anyone. Even with my brother I could hardly get out a word. It was a kind of violence that forced me to hide myself from him as from the others, or to turn my head the other way.

And even the simplest daily tasks I seemed to have to learn all over again: to put my jacket on a hanger, to make my bed, to get on a bicycle.

Once, when I was swimming absentmindedly, I paused and almost went under. Another time, when with my brother I had set out after all for the town of B., he sent me off to do an errand, and secretly watched me from outside on the public square, and afterward described how I had suddenly stood there with a package of butter in my hand, not knowing what to do next, and the cashier had had to reach into my pockets for the money, and, when I finally found my way back to him, the butter had melted between my fingers.

That I finally got my bearings can be ascribed, I believe, to the location of my bed or sofa, in the back corner of the entrance hall, under the stairs leading up to the former granary. My brother had hung a lamp for me there, with a switch next to it, and a table and stool also graced my little realm. Here, while reading, looking up through the cracks and knotholes, and likewise while sleeping, I was plainly gathering strength for the world outside. What a relief, simply to have the top of my head touching the underside of the stair treads when I sat there.

During the day I then sat more and more at one of the windows, which as in all the old southern Slav peasant houses was very close to the ground; leaning one elbow on the unusually broad windowsill, the grass of the little orchard in front of the house at eye level, I was merely an observer; I did not touch a writing instrument once during that year, and even longer.

And just as on that evening among the blocks of stone along the harbor of Piran when I was a young man, I had forgotten all knowledge and also no longer had an opinion or a judgment on anything. My brother teased me for having become so tolerant. “Where’s all your anger gone?”

And it was a fact that my way of just staring resembled that of a village idiot. Whatever I saw, I liked. And in the same fashion I accepted everyone and everything I could. In this I felt not limited but slow-witted. Only as one who was slow-witted — this I had experienced again and again — did the person I was awaken in me.

It implied no contradiction that I continued to enjoy studying, even if that was confined to the leaves and blossoms of the weeds in the area, which altogether, the longer I bent over them, swung into motion in a marvelously varied and yet symmetrically delicate round dance. They had names — spurge, valerian, hemlock, plantain — yet for now I wanted only to take in the colors and forms, all intermingled. “Remain impressionable” …

The out-of-the-way and rather inconspicuous vegetation was almost the only thing in which I became engrossed during this time.

So how did I define my metamorphosis? There was hardly anything from earlier, from childhood, to see anew — this I recognized. The old mushroom places in the woods, for instance, were bleak and bare, and the clearings, if any forest was left, had shifted, like moving sand dunes, often without the strawberry and raspberry patches that had previously been there. Even the field paths, along with their deep dust, had disappeared or now took an entirely different course; on the other hand, they had cleared even more logging roads through the hills. The Crab Pond was now that in name only, just as the Inn on the Bend was now located on a straight stretch of road and is supposed to be renamed the Trout.

And in spite of all that, in my eyes nothing about the area had changed. And just as before I was reluctant to block my view of these things with historical reminiscences. Of these, practically the only story people still told was the business with the American soldier, a black, who was dropped by parachute almost at the end of the Second World War, and got so hung up, head down, in a tree by a field that people came running from all direction with flails, scythes, and sickles. I went only so far as to examine, in the rectory, that turn-of-the-century chronicle in which house by house the occupations of the inhabitants were noted. Again: what was Gregor Keuschnig’s metamorphosis?

Since during this year he understood everyone, even the former SS man and the future one, he soon enjoyed an uncanny general confidence. He joined in all the celebrations, was a favorite partner at card tables, and the fact that later on he often confused himself in his memory with one of the others—“Was it me or was it you who was drunk and fell off that ladder in the apple tree?”—proved that he really was part of the village community. (On one thing he even became the expert: on lost objects, in particular the small and smallest ones. He could be counted on to go straight to the right spot in the general area, bend down, and even in the thickest gravel come up with the lost bead or contact lens.)

In his black rubber boots and floppy blue pants, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, he more and more resembled a native, one from earlier times, and he himself, when he sat there with his palm turned upward or sternly looked up and inspected the person facing him, sometimes saw a double image of himself and his grandfather, which the third party then also noticed.

In this region, as out-of-the-way as ever and lacking a middle class, he became a sort of authority, and not only as a finder of lost objects. Finally he was even offered an official position; don’t ask me which.

At the same time he remained aware that he did not belong among people. The same thing would happen to him as in elementary school when he had his only role in a play; as a dwarf among dwarfs in the background, he had nothing to do but sew, and kept pricking his finger (which, to be sure, only his mother noticed), and then in boarding school, where he was chosen to make up the rules for a new game, which turned out to be completely unplayable, and then as a magistrate during his year in court …

But only the children caught on to his chronic unreliability, for instance the child next door, to whom, while in the next room the child’s father lay dying, gasping for breath, to calm the child down he read a fairy tale in which someone’s heart was torn from his living body.

The person who at that time understood almost everyone, disarmed, reconciled, convinced people — that was not me. So, for the third time: That was supposed to be a metamorphosis?

Certainly, all that year I felt an authority in me, but far from the community, alone, as I remained for the most part, and often half asleep. If a metamorphosis, then one without deeds; without external consequences.

And at the same time it was the year during which the Rinkolach chess club won the Jaunfeld championship, during which in Carinthia a former partisan was elected head of the provincial government, and the Blessed Virgin appeared to his defeated opponent in the Bärental, during which, on the other side of the border, representatives of the youth of all the southern Slav peoples gathered and sang “Jugoslavija!” again, during which in Germany part of the population committed mass suicide, during which Japan erected its Great Wall, during which the world acquired a second moon, and at the end of which, on the highway bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso, U.S.A., and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for the second time, after exactly a decade, one and the same Austrian from a South Carinthian hamlet and the same Spanish woman from Catalonian Gerona, after both had in the meantime gone or stumbled their separate ways, were reunited.

It had become time to leave Rinkolach. Now my place of birth was to be only a temporary stopping place. What else could I do there, aside from whitewashing rooms, chopping wood, picking fruit, except let the sun shine on me, let the rain splash on me through the open front door, let summer and winter come (although I had a special liking for all that)? What did I write there except perhaps, and that merely dictated to my brother — anything but touch a writing instrument! — one report for the community news bulletin on the annual meeting of the local water company (although I had a hard time with it, cold sweat and groping for words as always).

And the villagers, despite their tactfulness, a characteristic of small farmers, were relieved to be rid of me at last (although one — the innkeeper — then sent word that the village seemed empty without me). At last they, even the priest, even my brother, could be by themselves again. My presence made me the superfluous one; I was all right in their eyes only when absent. Even Filip Kobal in the neighboring village of Rinkenberg, already a popular figure there, found it embarrassing after a while, despite all the cordiality with which he received me, not to be the only writer in the region, and I could understand his feelings.

Only the dead seemed to need me there at home. At any rate, every time I left the cemetery they fell upon me in the form of an angry swarm of flies.

I had a wife, and now I had to go back to her. Without her as my Other, it was all over; this was my thought, an entirely new one for me.

I asked my sister if my son could stay with her a little while longer — or was it she who asked me? — and set out to find the woman from Catalonia, who in the meantime was back at the United Nations in New York. She knew of course that I was on my way to her, but not that I would take a detour by way of the bridge over the Rio Grande, which I did with no purpose other than to catch my breath before our reunion, just as with everyday appointments I had the habit of loafing around beforehand. It was always as if I wanted to gain time that way, but for what?

And why even now, when our reconciliation was overdue? All this while, I had been enthralled by the thought of my distant wife. Compared with her, even my childlike son was only incidental. I had very persistent dreams about us, in which we made love and just stayed together all night long, in majesty and affection. Similarly, during that period of separation, I often felt the woman from Catalonia there with me, invisible, for days at a time, and whether alone or among others, I would again and again turn toward her, looking over my shoulder into the empty corner; unlike in her presence, I made an effort not to do anything that might displease her, and when I did not succeed, my look over my shoulder became a plea for understanding: “Look homeward, angel.”

Later, when we were newly together again, I had such a conviction that she had been with me in certain situations that when we wanted to recall them together I complained each time about her poor memory.

And now our first exchange of glances was repeated when we met, a day before the appointed time, far from the appointed place, I coming from Mexico, she coming from North America. Although preoccupied with her in my thoughts, I did not recognize her at first, and turned to look at her perhaps only because this woman appeared to me so amazingly “pale and young.” But afterward: heaven help us! And she, too, she told me, had recognized me only when she looked back for the second time at someone who, literally, “looked so pale and young.” How tired each of us was then, how tired.

But only her return banished the last vestiges of the crotchetiness I had developed during my period of solitude. She loosened my knotted limbs and relaxed my false fists, and through her new presence I learned to be there with my entire body in every movement, a forcefulness that at the same time could be as little as a gentle touch.

In the Japanese imperial city of Nara we made up for our skipped honeymoon, and then I lived in her two rooms high up in the Adams Hotel on 86th Street in Manhattan, with a view of the reservoir in Central Park. Our harmony there had a trace of amiable irony about what had been done to each of us by the other during the previous decade, and that seemed to make it durable. (And yet a decade later we lost each other for the second time.)

Toward the end of winter I then had the courage, with her in the next room, to sit down at a desk again. All the snowing in New York also made me want to write, especially in the evenings when the lights of the constantly landing airplanes were switched on and in them one could see from my skyscraper window the snowflakes whirling from the potholes in the street up into the heavens.

It turned out to be my shortest book, also because at that time I expected the narrative to unfold more from my groping my way back and questioning myself than from a masterful windup and playing of my trump card, with all the components that had seemed to me to have been part of my repertory far too long.

My piece, although ultimately it was supposed to be nothing but a story, was called “Essay on Neighborhood,” and was a sort of description of the life of one person through the voices of the various neighbors with whom he had had dealings since childhood, and then, privately published, under the pseudonym Urban Pelegrin, by my friend the reader, a printer by trade, it became my worldwide success. The Peking People’s Daily called me a progressive humanist focused on the here and now; the Osservatore Romano (Via del Pellegrino, Città del Vaticano) recognized in my language something related to the gaze of a rural laborer, to whom, sitting on the edge of a field after many hours of toil, the only pleasure left is to gaze at the sky; The New Yorker printed it in English translation before the book appeared, and invited me to a party at the Algonquin Hotel (except that by that time I was long since here in my Paris suburb bay, and did not want to leave anymore). Only The New York Times, swollen with daily reality, could not find its reality in mine, and on the other hand saw my way of writing as too emotional, or too cold, or too subtle, or too old-fashioned. And my enemy in Germany, who meanwhile had become the much-flattered first-name buddy of my former publisher (but even before that, whenever I went to see the publisher, my chair would still be stinking hot from the other man), exclaimed, when I crossed his path — no, he had no path, he was everywhere and nowhere — as he deviled by, with the rolling eyes of a mad dog that to his chagrin was kept away from the object of his rage by a fence: “So, Herr Pelegrin-Keuschnig, how’s sales?” (Once again he thought he had outsmarted me; what he did not know was that Keuschnig was also an assumed name. And as always he, otherwise so adept at sniffing out and tearing to shreds, lost the scent when it came to things that mattered, for these have almost no smell.)

I had actually written my little book simply by lying down and snapping my fingers. All the sentences took shape when I was half awake or dozing, drifting in and out of consciousness, and whenever a sentence came clear, I would jump up and write it down. Word after word emerged as soft as it was immutable, and up to the final sentence, when in the next room, where my wife and lovely neighbor was sitting, a summer wind already wafting through the open window was rolling the pencils back and forth on the table, not a single one needed to be changed.

When the woman from Catalonia and I, on the evening of the same day, were waved by the elevator operator on the top floor of the Adams Hotel into his brass cage, and on floor after floor during the leisurely trip down, more of the monthly and yearly guests got on, until at the end all races and ages were represented, it was decided that the moment had come for us to be with our child again.

New York at that time was the last big city in which I felt at home.

But in the meantime every town offered itself as the hub of the world — much as more and more individuals, without particular deeds or natural gifts, took on the roles of heroes and srars — including Sp. on the Drau, renamed on the signs Sp./Millstatter See, where I went to pick up Valentin, while the woman from Catalonia, who could break out in a rash at the mere sound of Austrian dialect, waited for us in Paris, deserted now in August.

My sister lived in one of the satellite developments in Sp., built in what had once been the meadows along the Drau, now officially called the Drau River, and with her husband operated the only restaurant in the area, located in the next block.

On a late afternoon, in unwaveringly harsh light that reflected blindingly off the densely parked cars, having reached this wasteland, covering the last stretch on boards laid over mud, after I had got lost again, the same as every other time, and had asked myself why in such places, despite the impressionability I was always cultivating, I immediately lost my keen eye, I saw, sitting under an umbrella on the concrete terrace of the Blue Lagoon Bistro, the only guest, a young man whose face from a distance immediately came within a finger’s breadth of me, as sometimes faces do that bend over you in the moment of waking up, and only when he jumped up, with a long-contained cry of dismay, did it turn out to be the child’s. It was the last time up to now that at the sight of me Valentin came running, and from a standing position, and how he ran. (Much later he told me that at that moment he had finally seen me in my weakness; he could never stand it when I acted strong; even when I held out my arms, he wanted to push them down.)

He was wearing glasses, and the once-dark gaze of distrust had been transformed into the calm, watchful gaze of a researcher. My sister stepped out through the beaded curtain in the doorway, invoked the name of the Madonna, and disappeared, for much longer than necessary, and that, too, was something new: that she, so alien to every tradition, having renounced any origins, voluntarily and self-confidently nothing but a figure in this no-man’s-land, here manifested the ageless behavior of Slavic village women: in her surprise and pleasure she first went off and hid. It accorded with this image that she then returned with bread and smoked ham, served up by her husband, a former ship’s cook, whom my sister constantly put down in my presence, so much so that it was only from quick looks they exchanged that I could tell how much they loved each other. (Though he later left her alone in her hospital room on the day she died; he said she had already long since been unconscious — but I am certain that she was conscious to the last, that all the dying are conscious up to their last moment.)

While we sat there together, until long after the first bat — they had them even there — the first mosquito, and the first star, I secretly resolved that if “my sales” allowed, I would help her buy another eating place, on a public square, like the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, or, if she preferred, at the end of a dock on the Wörther See, with Udo Jürgens as a regular guest arriving in his motorboat and with me as silent partner.

And once during this evening I asked my son, “Where are you?” and he, who in between was serving the few guests, pointed by way of an answer at himself, with both hands, but not at his chest but into his armpits, and even stuck his fingers in there.

And then he described, with my sister as a witness, how I had done everything right as a father. But I knew better.

What has always suited me best is to narrate from one day to the next, as the Odyssey goes from dawn to the rising of the stars, and to continue this way the next morning, or in general just to treat a single day in this fashion.

But how to narrate the decade from our reconciliation to the beginning of this current year, since which I have been sitting here at my desk, and in the briefest way possible, for the story of my seven friends scattered over the world, as well as the chronicle of my year here in the bay, has been crowding in and knocking all this time, at every threshold? I shall try. I will do it.

As my, and our, future landscape, now mine forever, only the hilly suburbs here, open in all directions, could even be considered, with their unstuccoed clay-colored sandstone houses, the settlements poking like long or short fingers into the forest dunes that defined the visual image, and with a silence that made one prick up one’s ears.

Nobody would know us there, and we would be all the more available to each other. The woman from Catalonia wanted to be separated from Paris by one more range of hills than the previous time, my son wanted to go to a “school in the woods,” and my final choice of a place satisfied even my stern ancestors: on a day early in the spring of the following year, instead of falling upon me again as a swarm of flies, they peeped out at me somewhere among the hills in the form of pussywillows overhanging the path, and amiably reached out to shake my hand as I passed.

That was the day on which, after a fall and winter spent searching, I had found the house, but was still in doubt, not because of the house — I had immediately felt at home in it, along with its hollow, as the only right place — but because of its more immediate surroundings. It put me off that houses of the sort that attracted me were so much in the minority. Only en masse, one next to the other, street after street, did these fieldstone structures, in their slight geometric variations, retain a powerfully fairy-tale-like, very immediate character. Here, however, where they were few and far between, they seemed like leftovers from a bygone time, set apart from the mostly stuccoed, yet grotesquely different blocks from the periods between and after the world wars, many with names legible from a considerable distance (although I immediately scraped the name off my house, in the meantime I have come to be fond of some of them after all, for instance “My Sufficiency,” “My Cottage in Canada,” “Sweet Refuge,” “Family Ties,” “My Horizon,” “Our Sundays,” “My Parachute,” and recently I dreamed of a house in the bay with the name “My Births”).

And once during the decade a crow’s feather landed on the Absence Path; the older men in the bar called Fountain without Wine smelled snow one wintry evening, but it did not come; my petty prophet, who had meanwhile moved to yet another restaurant, scared off his guests with a tin cutout of a Moor by the front door, which blew over in the slightest wind; the Three Stations Bar was gutted by fire; a military airplane crashed right nearby in the forest before it could land at Villacoublay — beforehand its huge shadow over the house; I boxed the ears of my almost grown-up son after I had picked him up at the police station, where he had been taken for shoplifting; I threw a burning branch over the fence of a neighbor, the noisiest of all; during the Gulf War no trains passed through the tunnel to Paris for so long that the suburb seemed cut off from the city, as if at the end of time; my son left immediately for Vienna after his last examination at the Lycée Rabelais, halfway into the forest of Meudon; my sister died; the frozen-over Nameless Pond pinged from my skipping pebbles by myself; the woman from Catalonia left me for the second time; having reached the top of the transmitter here, the highest vantage point around Paris, for which I had special permission, I confirmed for myself that my suburb actually did cut into the wooded hills in the form of a bay, more remote than a village on a fjord or a research station in the Arctic; and this morning, in the construction fill of the Absence Path, I came upon the fragment of an inscription with the very words I recall from a tombstone, meanwhile disappeared from the graveyard, back home in Rinkolach: “Returned to His Fluid Ancestral Home.”

That was more or less the story of my metamorphosis. When I reflect upon what I have experienced in my existence up to now, it was neither the war during my childhood nor our flight from Russian-occupied Germany home to Austria, nor my youth-long imprisonment in the boarding school, nor, after many feverish attempts, that first quiet line that made me certain I was now on the right path, nor being with my wife or my child, but only that metamorphosis.

Why does it seem to me that this is the only thing I have ever experienced? I do not know, just as after writing this down I do not know any more about it than before. At any rate, the other happenings came about like something that had been foreseen, while the metamorphosis seized hold of me — like an accident? an assault? — no, as a completely unknown force it seized hold of what was deepest inside me, which only in that way became distinguishable, like something in the dark lit up by lightning. There was no deeper inside than that.

And what else? Nothing else. Even the word “metamorphosis” came only long, long afterward. But then why am I convinced that it is the only major thing worth telling about that happened to me in my fifty-six years of life, on five continents, on two moons, on the highest peaks on Mars and in the hottest springs on Venus, and why does everything else, no matter how inspiring or devastating, strike me as incidental?

How wretchedly cut off from the world I found myself time and again, how blissfully at one with it, and yet only yesterday I thought: “I have never deserved to be hurled to the ground except back in my metamorphosis period!”

At intervals I continued to view myself as the only one with such a story, for otherwise wouldn’t it have been told long since, and have become a classic? Or had I, on the contrary, had innumerable forerunners, and was I perhaps merely the first who had not perished in the process?

But didn’t my story therefore cry out all the more urgently to be told? Or, again on the contrary, had all those who had had this experience survived and yet found nothing to tell? Or were they afraid to try?

Hadn’t I, too, felt a great deal of resistance to continuing the narrative, as if it were somehow improper? And is it not true that I got into this only against my will?

What I do know: that metamorphosis, or expulsion, or merely a new orientation, has been used up. It seems to me that I have lost or frittered away all of its benefits: patience, mental acuity, magnanimity, boldness, empathy, receptivity, tolerance, ability to disarm, to forget. Or have I just muddled along halfheartedly? Failed from the beginning to make the right start?

This morning I saw the first hazelnuts of the year here on the edge of the woods in the bay. The little ovals in their pale green neck ruffs reminded me of the same hazelnuts from my metamorphosis period, as one of its visual images, and I thought: “That was a time of freshness! Now is not a time of freshness anymore, and not only for me. But who knows? What does a foreigner know?”

On to the story of my friends! Let them surprise you.