My Year in No Man's Bay

1 — The Story of the Singer

The singer was about my age, and wanted to go on singing as an old man, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.

And yet there had already been quite a few moments in his life when he would have been ready to die on the spot. This happened to him once after a night without sleep in a one-engine plane over the source of the Mississippi, in a morning blizzard, when, thinking of all those before him who had perished in this manner, almost customary for singers, he wanted to give the plane an additional jolt, as it tossed about in the darkness, so as to hasten the crash and be scattered in all directions, with the snowstorm outside so thick that even in the long-drawn-out flashes of lightning, prolonged further by the whirling snow, one could not make out whether the flakes were falling down or up. Instead, he promptly composed a song, his ballad, which had to be screamed almost from start to finish, with the title “Why Are You Not Serious?”

Another time he had been similarly willing to die in blissful exhaustion after a concert, not even a very large one, in the school auditorium of a midsized city in Switzerland, where (after that unfortunate period when people kept throwing themselves at him, he played at an even greater distance from them, often even with his back to them) for the encore he unexpectedly mingled with the audience, hoping a knife would be thrust into his heart, sensed that one person or another in the crowd might be the one, recognizable by his tense absentmindedness in the midst of all the elation, and even challenged him by stopping just far enough from the would-be assassin to give him room for the windup, and proffering his chest, as if that were part of his song; even at the exit, not a private one but the general one, he looked around, unprotected, in the lingering crowd for the “disturbed yet purposeful face” one could count on in such situations: “And in Switzerland my stalker was a woman every time”; and such a woman actually did pull a knife on him — except that the singer, prepared for this as he was, including dying, in that same breath, not at all bereft of will as he had thought, knocked it out of her hand. (The song occasioned by this incident began with “I’ll die at the hand of a woman.”)

A similar openness to death also took hold of him on that January day during his solitary trip through Scotland, as he was making his way on foot through the hilly fields above Inverness.

He had been working all fall on an album, was exhausted, yet also in a good frame of mind — less or differently irritable than usual — but still had enough breath, as was generally the case after an effort that excluded everything else, for a further undertaking, which promised for once, in contrast to his trademark works — ballads, angry tirades, sung narratives — a pure song, in fact “The Last Song.”

For now, however, he was simply glad to be out of the studios and the big cities. Precisely because of his (powerful, not loud) music, which he wanted to authorize to be played only in places where it belonged, he was elsewhere extremely sensitive to noise, and he found it soothing to be away from the clacking and scratching of high heels on the streets of Paris and London and, after a short visit to his mother in Brighton, to have escaped to this Scottish rubber-boot landscape. Even the women, the young ones, came toward him here in rubber boots, and not just in the fields, and from their footsteps there was a sighing behind him, and accordingly he, too, went about in rubber boots.

It was a mild winter day, then warm as he mounted the slope, and he, in Scotland for the first time, at least out in the country, thought at the sight of the grovelike rhododendron bushes along the path, blowing in a southerly way and greening in the rainy wind, that it was always this way here. At the crest of the hill he spread his arms, turning his palms upward. The ridge was broad, almost part of the highlands already, and he still had to swing himself over several granite walls, chest-high because he was so small, until, in the narrowest sheep pasture, he stood facing the stone circle of the Celtic burial ground.

He did not approach it immediately, even avoided focusing on it at first, just gazed around for a long time. A couple of oaks, the only ones in these bare surroundings, groaned, and in the northern distance, beyond the arm of the sea, or firth, by Inverness, snowcapped mountains shone clear. In all the pastures roundabout were sheep, but in one, just as crowded and of about the same light color, was a herd of swine, munching away, on muddier ground; and instead of the usual dog among the sheep, there were several hares, distributed evenly among the herds.

The singer took off his woolen cap, stepped up to the one stele that stood twice as tall as the others, outside the circle, and leaned his head on it. Against his forehead he felt not so much the stone as the lichen, spreading, rust-colored, and scratchy. The predominant sensation became the beating of his heart, noticeable at the spot where he was touching the rock, filling his entire body, pulsing, pounding, as if passing into the interior of the column, and at this moment it would have suited the singer if the tall stone had given way and crushed him. He even shook it, without success. But this time no line of a song came to him instead, or only a word for one, “present,” or a fragment, “On the road … practice the present.”

When he opened his eyes, two sheep with raven-black faces were staring up at him from the grass. He squatted down at a distance from the circular cairn and shared his provisions with them, bought in the railroad station of Inverness; the apple he ate himself. Thus removed from the burial place, he became witness to one of those tenths of a second from so-called prehistoric times when the main stone, set up by the Celts or someone, became perfectly perpendicular, as it had remained standing through the millennia to that moment. It grew quiet on the knoll, including the bleating and grunting.

Still expectant of death, the singer, much later, set out to return to the valley, again cutting across fields, without paths or even wild-animal tracks. He crossed in a zigzag, from one field to the other, every thickly wooded gorge, where one false step in the slipperiness could have made him disappear, never to be seen again, on the bottom, under the unbroken canopy of leaves over the bog. And on the other hand he took each step carefully, and if he had fallen he would have kept his balance and would, broad as he was, have rolled over and over like a ball and landed softly on his feet.

He moved through the often thorny thicket in such a way that he did not receive so much as a scratch, and in his folk-dancer-like agility he would not even have been prey for one of the descendants of the pumas once released into the Scottish hills and surviving in these almost inaccessible gullies. The singer made his way along his path with the help of only his two legs, for he needed both hands to strike the Jew’s harp, the only instrument besides a harmonica that he had taken along on this hike.

Down in Inverness he fetched his backpack from the locker and took a room in the hotel that formed a part of the monumental granite railroad complex and had a suitably fine lobby with a grand staircase and chandelier.

No one recognized him, and no one would recognize him. That was his decision.

When after a shower he stepped out onto the square in front of the hotel, it was already long since dark, and it was raining, heavily and at the same time inaudibly. Having ducked into a rear courtyard to listen, the singer said to himself that he had never heard such a quiet rain as this Scottish one. All the louder the cackling of the sparrows, which were fighting head to head for a sleeping perch up on the ledge of the main church, or were chattering with each other before going to sleep. Like the plane tree here by the suburban railroad station, in Inverness the ledge was far and wide their only place for the night. There as here the sidewalk underneath was encrusted with their thick white droppings.

In a pub he leaned against the bar like the others and drank a beer, glancing occasionally at the bull’s-eye when a dart landed in it. As everywhere, the singer could not be distinguished from the local people, except that he might be from farther out in the country. When he heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” coming from the jukebox at waist height, he thought that the songs of thirty years ago had painstakingly worked things out, while in the meantime they all sounded so glib, his as well? The beat he tapped on his thigh with his fingers did not fit the song.

He consumed his evening meal deliberately, with a bottle of wine over which he sat for hours, almost alone in the dining room at the window of the best restaurant in Inverness, as the new justice of the peace? architect? soccer coach? directly before his eyes the river Ness, which seemed disproportionately wide for this rather small town. Besides, the river was rising and seemed to be galloping toward its nearby mouth at the North Sea. The water was of a blackness that did not come merely from the darkness outside, and also merely as the color of moor water would not have had such density and brilliance. The rushing from the January rains had to contribute to the effect. To accompany the mighty current, which he felt at the same time in his arms, the singer beat out the steady refrain “Winter — water, winter — water, winter — water.” Then he reminded himself that he was on an island, though not a very small one, and that for him, a person from the continent (with an English mother), an “island river” was a child-wondrous concept, especially one that raged this way.

The waiters, of whom there were several, had meanwhile not budged from his side. Instead of with a credit card he paid in cash, a thick packet of which, damp at the edges, he had loose in his pocket; the clip that went with it was dangling from his ear. He did not want anyone to be able to trace his whereabouts.

On the wooden bridge outside, of a length suitable for a metropolis, staring at the peat-black turbulent water, the singer recalled how once before, after a sort of concert on a cruise ship with a group of rich Americans in a Turkish bay, fairly far out, he had jumped overboard at night in his clothing and shoes and had swum toward land through all the lively motorboat traffic, looking neither to right nor to left, coming up for air with eyes closed, over and over again, in defiance of death.

On the opposite bank of the Ness the suburbs began immediately. In one spot the sky had cleared, with a star so bright it had a ring around it like the moon: Sirius. Below, in one of the huddled suburban houses, a window was open to the mild air. An old woman in a housecoat was leaning out as if for a long time, and out of the silence she and the singer greeted one another.

Up the hill, along the Caledonian Canal that ran along halfway up, he stepped into a suburban pub, still open, though probably not for long; inside it looked like someone’s living room, with a fire burning in the fireplace, on whose mantelpiece stood a collection of books with the Pickwick Papers, one of the books he had in his tower house, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Bobbsey Twins in Echo Valley. He sat down with a glass of whiskey in a wing chair and gazed at the only other guests, a very young couple who kept sticking their tongues down each other’s throats, undeterred by the coughing and choking this caused. Having finished with that, they promptly moved apart, as if their game were over. The girl leaned back in the shadows, and the boy turned to the singer and asked him, out of the blue, in a perfectly calm, also polite voice, whether he was one of the lumberjacks. In response to his nod, the young man told him that he was a Gypsy, had come here as a child from Poland, and was in the process of training as a forester near Inverness. But in Scotland there were hardly any forests left, whereas after the Ice Age the entire land had been covered by the great Caledonian Forest, first bright with birches, then darkened by the Scottish firs, then mixed with oaks. Probably he would be the first Gypsy forester.

Up by the canal, the door to an automobile repair shop was still open, and the singer, who liked to look into such places, saw in the brightly lit bays a few young fellows at work, with a song coming from the radio of a car being repaired, accompanied by the clang of tools. He listened attentively, clenching his fists in agitation, and only when he was back in the darkness again did he realize that the song was his.

Through his sleep whistled the trains down below in the station, and he dreamed the usual dream about his children, scattered across the countries and the continents, who, entrusted to him, had under his very eyes torn themselves away from him and disappeared for good. This time, after a few swimming strokes, they sank in clear water, knee-deep, and remained impossible to find there.

The next morning there was a rainstorm, and although it was part of the singer’s routine to expose himself to something unpleasant, to withstand something each day, he did not set out on foot as planned toward the snow-covered mountains in the north, but took a bus of the Highland Terrier Line, with Dornoch as his destination. In such a storm, unlike in high wind, there were no sounds to be heard while walking. And besides, it was coming from the west and not from the north, where he would have had it blowing beautifully in his face. From Dornoch he would tramp westward.

If he had to ride cross-country, then it should be by bus, and not because he was accustomed to that from his tours. In Plato’s Critias there is mention of the melancholy, who should be sent on a journey by ship to lift their spirits, if possible when the sea is turbulent, so that the atoms in their bodies will be shaken up and can find a healthier arrangement. This effect, and an even better one, could be achieved by a long bus trip, preferably on winding mountainous roads.

An additional factor for the singer was that on the road this way, always in a window seat, either way in front or way in back, drawing the curtain, even in his own tour bus, only to sleep, he could sink into himself, down to a point of complete tranquillity, and at the same time see himself as connected with the surroundings outside, of which he, without even having to turn his head once, could also keep a large portion in sight through the front or rear windshield.

Here, too, he could not tolerate any music, let alone a television above the driver’s head, as had become common elsewhere on cross-country trips. In that sense Scotland was probably too backward, for on this trip from the beginning there was only the landscape outside, seen through untinted glass, and the humming of the engine. The stormy wind, gusting and subsiding, seemed subdued in the rocking interior space. There was plenty of room.

The singer sat, together with one or two other passengers, on the east side, where the windows received the least rain, and from looking out he soon felt warm, although down below rain was blowing in through a crack, and instead of dribbling and trickling, swelled up with foam, blackish, as from a moor. And right past Inverness, on the suspension bridge over the firth, at the sight of the strangely curving, rounded waves down below, on closer inspection seals, he felt as if he had been cast among the animals, and spouted water, tumbled, let himself drift as one of them.

He was alert and feeling irrepressible. An element of pain, an openness, had to be added, and the song would come, he thought.

And then he thought nothing more during the entire trip. Although, besides him, no one on the Highland Terrier was looking at anything in particular, it was as if he were looking in consort with someone else, or as if he were following someone else’s eyes. The region, rolling off into the distance, was so bare that Mongolia came to mind, a place to which his travels had never taken him. The hero of The 39 Steps was fleeing through rain-drizzled rounded mountains, chained by handcuffs to an unknown woman, who was stumbling along behind him. A pheasant fluttered into the air and with its heavy body promptly thudded to the ground in the storm, as if shot down. In moments of clearing you could see, farther off in the North Sea, dusky oil-drilling platforms, like temples. And a year ago on the square in front of the bus station in Cairo there had been a sleeping place for the sparrows just as the night before in Inverness, in a single scraggly, mangy cypress there, and each time, approaching his Nile Hotel by a roundabout route, he had gone toward that shrill racket the birds made as they battled for a spot, audible above the roar of the entire city, so that at least he had something to orient himself by amid the African, or Arab, or whatever chaos. And the one old woman on the bus made him think of his mother, as did so many old crones in the country, although his mother was neither from the country nor a crone, and had not even been present at his first major performance. Whereas his father, who to this day, when his radio in the retirement home went even a week without playing something by his son, would comment that it had been a long time since they had heard anything by him, his mother had been concerned even back then, with his sporadic singing engagements at suburban summer festivals and graduations from Ville d’Avray to Courbevoie, that he was constantly being heard from.

At the sight of the stepped terraces in the craggy landscape, he felt in his own body the jerks with which aeons ago the glacier had withdrawn from there until it was gone from that area — that was how low the Scottish mountains were. All that had taken place unobserved. But someone must have observed it, with eyes that could still be felt? With what eyes? “I’m searching for the face you had before the world was made,” was a line in one of his songs.

Perhaps the singer was also lost in thought during the trip, brooding, bad-tempered, more than anyone else. But that was nothing compared to the moment when he was in song, as another might be in the picture. This being in song was very rare, rarer than a poem. Being in song was the original condition for him.

In the storm a sheep dashing across a pasture now, its damp fleece flying behind it like a coat.

In Dornoch, where the singer was the only passenger to get off, it was almost dark again. The gulls, for whom it was a struggle to fly forward, toward land, appeared black against the sky. The rain had stopped, but the storm from the west would blow all night. The cloud in the band of light left by the setting sun had the shape of a deeply frayed, broad-branched cedar, which, uprooted, came gusting through the air and then disappeared as if in a puff of smoke.

He gave up the idea of continuing his hike today, indeed forgot any plan for the time being. Here in Dornoch the singer felt as though he was already on his way. Was this a seaside resort? a town? a farm village? Except for him there was no one out on the street. Yet in the squat houses and the yards with storm walls he heard heavy steps, echoing, as if on the planks of a boat.

He stood still and watched for the moment when the now-clear firmament would reveal the glitter of the first star. He even knew the approximate spot. And again, as each time previously, in Archaia Nemea in Greece, on Mission Street in San Francisco, he must have blinked at the decisive moment. For there Venus was now, gleaming as always against the horizon, blue-black like a lining.

Below, almost out in the dunes, in the glow of the last streetlight, in front of a flat-fronted wooden house, the figure of a young woman appeared, who, out of breath, as if she had run toward him, invited the singer to spend the night in her house; the hotels in Dornoch were all closed during the winter. He could tell immediately that she did not recognize him, and accepted. He merely said he wanted to stay out until midnight, set down his backpack on her doorstep, and let her give him a key.

Then he made his way, up dune and down, to the North Sea, which came crashing up to the crown of the farthest dune; at first he felt as though he did not belong there, as with every ocean.

He went down into a crouch. Everywhere along the shore little seaweed fires were burning at regular intervals, with not a person in sight, crackling and sparking, intended as light signals out to the high sea. In the glow of such a flame the singer examined a plant sunk into the sand, around which a miniature dune had formed. A single kinked leaf still poked out, lance-shaped, rotated by some storm gusts almost around itself and snapped back into a resting position in between, whereupon the sand around it showed very delicate patterns of the quarter, half, and whole circles it had described, like a wind clock, with the seaweed frond as its hand.

Who in the world needed another song, his song, a new song?

The singer fell into a sort of brooding, trying to picture to himself those who stood between him and his audience — the record company executives, the booking agents, the copyright holders. No, he could not picture them, they offered no image — so repulsive were they to him. He was not a businessperson, would never be one, and thus everything he had done since youth and had intended for his own people belonged to these others, who were not his people. They held the rights, and he was the supplier. Accordingly they were convinced, nowadays more and more, that they were the ones creating the event and its heroes. What had one of them said, the one to whom he had “supplied” his biggest song, around which he had been circling for months in a chaos of words and notes and which he had written down in a moment without sound, between fear of death and joy? “Let’s see what I can make of this!” Jettison the middlemen, the singer brooded. But how? It’s the system, and any other, no matter how different, is still the same. Act as if nothing were wrong. Those people between my creations and the world don’t exist. They aren’t there. With a snap of the fingers I make them disappear. I decide: everything I have done up to now and will do from now on belongs to me and no one else.

And he could say what a song was: “In it the most distant streets flow into each other.” With this line he leapt to his feet and shouted or murmured names into the dark surf, as at the end of a concert he announced the names of his backup singers or band: “Orpheus in the Upperworld! The fish, rain worms, and snakes lamenting the Buddha’s death. Moses piecing together the Tablets of the Law. John Lennon, Liverpool. Van Morrison, Dublin. Blind Lemon Jefferson. John Fogarty. Lao-tzu. Blaise Pascal. Baruch Spinoza, who sang that human wisdom consists not in thinking about death but in living! Marsyas pulling off Apollo’s skin!”

On the way back, again beneath the village streetlights, a storm gust was so powerful that in a series of puddles the rainwater jumped from one to the other, and so on in this way as far as the horizon. And now he had the desired wind in his face, in which it looked more than usual as though balls were rolling in his armpits as he walked.

From the dark building at a distance from the others, tall and narrow, an old folks’ home, came angry groans. At the same time the Pleiades sparkled above, initially all seven stars crowded together in a little heap, from which then each emerged separately, glance after glance. And here in Dornoch he also listened for the birds’ sleeping place: too late; the sparrows, wherever they might be, were silent.

When he had walked around the night-dark church, which stood in the middle of a grassy area, inside the church the stone sarcophagus of the crusader, who lay with legs crossed and his dog beside him, the street was suddenly thronged with local residents, leaving a choir rehearsal. No matter which way one of them went, the same snatches of song could be heard from all directions, and if one of them launched into a new song, another singer over there, already out of sight, would promptly join in, and he wondered why he had never had a singer as a friend, except someone he did not really know, from afar, and why, when he was put in a chorus, he always sang out of tune. But whenever stars were gathered to sing together for some cause, didn’t they necessarily produce cacophony, starting off wrong, one too soon, one too late, each with a different version of the lyrics?

Following those choir members who formed the only small group, he found his way to the village pub, where everyone shook hands with him as if he were an old acquaintance. A drunk, already more falling down than just swaying, was playing pool, and made each shot with hairline precision. Above the wooden floorboards, which had been cleared, with tables and benches pushed to the sides, a tape was fiddling a square dance, to which no one was dancing, and the singer, for whom his ancestors had been looking for the longest time—“Where in the world can he be now?”—saw himself finally discovered: “Ah, so there he is!”

Outside, a few bars on the Jew’s harp brought air into his lungs. The song felt so close, and then again so unattainable, that it frightened him. He had been away from population centers and the news only a couple of days, and already they did not exist anymore, or at most in casual thoughts, detached, never serious.

In his northern Scottish lodgings all was sleep-still, only a couple of lamps to light his way. For what had looked at first like a cottage, the corridor was unusually long, as the room was spacious, the ceiling high.

It was deepest night when the singer, whom even a lightning strike would not have awakened, was shaken out of his sleep by a child crying. It did not stop, and he got up, put on his ankle-length raincoat, and made his way through the house until he came upon the crying child, alternating between the highest and the lowest notes, in a crib on casters, which, being pushed back and forth by the young woman, added its own screeching and creaking.

The singer asked the mother whether she would mind if he tried to quiet the child, too, and she gave him permission. With his hands on the headboard, he did nothing but, without moving it, give the bed tiny shoves, invisible to a third party, at first unevenly but with all his strength; all one could hear was a series of sounds consisting merely of rustling and scraping, which, now longer, now shorter, insinuated itself into the bawling and, when that first paused, could become regular, rhythmic, and articulate, like a piece of music. To make the child keep on listening and at the same time calm down, this sound had to hit the right moment with each note, and the whole time he had before his eyes the billy goat in a burning barn who had not followed him out into the open until he had seized his horns in his hands and neither pulled nor pushed but done almost nothing, yet with the utmost patience and attentiveness!

When the infant had finally sighed himself back to sleep, the mother was long since asleep, and the singer, too, soothed by his own lullaby, sank, the minute he was back in his guest bed and had closed his eyes, into the sleep of a newborn. He lay there with his face close to the window, again amazingly wide for a cottage in the dunes, through which the winter constellations shone all together into his dreams, and thus themselves were already the dream. Orion, the Hare, Castor and Pollux, broad-thighed Cassiopeia, the veil of Berenice, and then as yet undiscovered ones called Weymoor, the Headless Woman, Iron Gate, La Grande Arche, and finally the morning star alone moved through his innermost being with the slowness of the universe and penetrated it. Such a caress the singer had never experienced before.

This was accompanied now by the very high notes of a saxophone, which, when he had opened his eyes, went on playing in another room. The wind had fallen. The sky above was bright, the gulls below still raven-dark, and they really were ravens now.

The woman playing the saxophone sat, the child at her side listening without stirring, in the dune-sand-yellow kitchen at the laid table, in an even longer dress than the previous evening and rubber boots with high heels. He silently joined her, drank a cup of coffee such as he had tasted neither in Italy nor in Hawaii, until she put down her somewhat battered instrument and without much ado, as though she were simply switching from one language to another, told him that in her childhood she had once spent a summer at the ferry station for the Hebrides, Kyle of Lochalsh, about a hundred miles to the west, on the other side of the watershed, on the Atlantic. She came from Dornoch, here on the North Sea, and had made her way halfway around the world, but only at the ferry in Kyle of Lochalsh had people been good to her. “Dover, Vancouver, San Francisco, Valparaíso are nothing compared to Kyle. When I’m an old woman I’d like to lick the salt from the windshield of the ferry in Kyle.”

Not for the first time the singer noted that people who did not get along well with the place they came from did not really long to be off in distant cities; they longed instead for something they had known early in their lives, only a few hills and rivers away, which with the years had become legendary.

And he felt the urge to get to that Kyle of Lochalsh, if possible entirely on foot, even if it would take him until spring, until fall; he wanted to set out at once, told the two of them that, bowed to the child, kissed the woman’s hand, received from her a rain hat to put on over his cap, laid a banknote on the doorstep, and that same afternoon was standing somewhere in the interior, between the two oceans, on a southeastern slope sheltered from the wind, facing the banana palm that he had been sure grew even here in the north of Scotland, hidden in the tangle of wild rhododendron.

The singer continued his westward journey into the spring and summer.

He went astray at least once a day, in spite of maps and compass, often willingly, and when he no longer knew where he was he became all the more sharp of eye and ear.

For an hour he would move along as if on wings, the next hour would draw him, head down, toward the mud, impossible to get past on the high moors, and not only in winter. Sometimes in the evening his head would be bursting from the roar of the brooks all around, and the next morning the racket would draw him anew. Again and again he almost fell, or he slipped and tipped over, and each time the twitching that went through his body was followed by redoubled alertness and mental acuity. He recognized that the apparent obstacles in his path were nothing of the kind, at least nothing significant.

He took an ownerless boat lying by a lake in the moor, seemingly since prehistoric times, with as little hesitation as he headed over a pass that appeared on no map. In the morning, with his sleeping bag rolled up, he struck out from the tumbledown hut, stinking of sheep droppings, set in a wasteland of heather, wiped his behind in the morning with a fan-sized bog leaf, damp from the rain, sat in the brief midday sun with his bread and apple on the throne formed by a stray boulder, stumbled in late afternoon into a hailstorm with stones so hard they pounded down his outstretched fingers, and in the evening lurched like a vagabond, impossible, with that hat over his cap, to identify as a man or a woman, along an illuminated avenue leading through a park toward a highland castle-hotel, called, for instance, Ceddar Castle, where, without his having a reservation, the double doors swung open for him at a distance, showing the torchlit, fireplace-warmed great hall, and then, combed, parted, in necktie and custom-tailored suit, he took his evening meal with the family of the Japanese crown prince on his left, the stars of the Glasgow Rangers on his right, at the head table the great-great-grandson of Sir Walter Scott and the heirs of Robert Louis Stevenson, but he belonged there a bit more than all of them, and the next day continued his game of — what? — of getting lost. And at the same time he never felt alone. “I am with my song.”

And just as he presented a different image from hour to hour, the seasons kept jumping around, winter appearing in the middle of summer, spring leading back into fall. In the last night of January a cuckoo called, then none again until sometime in June. In May on the heath out of a clear blue sky a great many leaves fell, but from where? And in a cold dusk a snake crept toward him on a patch of snow.

Altogether, just as in dreams, at one moment almost nothing was impossible, and then again everything seemed to be over and done with. The torrents, which, seen from a distance, gushed from the crests of the mountains, a host of them, in white, long waterfalls, reminded him today of a medieval, no, of a prehistoric time, which, however, still lay ahead for humanity, and on the following morning the entrails from the nocturnal slaughter of a small animal by a bird of prey at the foot of a lonely church tower were enough, and the only things that seemed valid were the bestial and barbarous, even if only until he caught sight of almost the only reliable thing, the red-and-yellow van marked “Royal Mail.”

I received my most recent picture of my friend after the beginning of summer, when he had finally put the watershed between Scotland’s two oceans and then also Kyle of Lochalsh behind him and, having taken the ferry over to the Inner Hebrides, within calling distance, at least for his voice of thunder, was now crossing the island of Skye, mainly on foot.

This picture again had to do with the Royal Mail, on a day after a day of heavy rain, since his walking until then had been almost entirely a slipping and sliding, initially down in a fjord amid the knee-high shore seaweed, now high above along a treeless alpine slope on a crisscross pattern of sheep terraces, churned into deep mire; he had willingly strayed up there, believing from afar that it was a multitude of mountain paths, all coming together in a single broad path leading up to the peak of Ben So-and-so.

But the network of paths beaten into the mountainside by the sheep hoofs turned out to be even more impassable than that peculiarly Scottish tracklessness, which, with the rounded, disappearing mountain shapes, at first seems as if it can be crossed effortlessly and then turns out to be a highland moor, its steep slopes, where the ground should be firm, as deceptive as the flat areas; the sheep slopes, too, were moor, and before each step he had to test the ground ahead. And furthermore, the animals whose terrain it had been, had, because of their jumpiness, unlike cows, dug or stamped out an extremely uneven, nervous zigzag. Time and again, at the places where the sheep had leaped, the apparent tissue of paths tore, and the singer had to become a moor mountain climber, which, by the bye, gave him a certain satisfaction.

When he reached the top, bareheaded, his cap and hat long since tucked away, suddenly the path led, instead of toward the peak, over flat surfaces, as if into infinity, and on firm, dry, even ground, high above the tree line, with a few pines huddled together.

From them, too, came the unanimous roar that he had previously, when he stuck his head over the crest, taken for a personal greeting from the spirit of the mountains. Winds from different directions met there. One minute it turned cold and dark, the next summery warm. The tooting of the second ferry, the one from the island town of Uig to the Outer Hebrides, was the only sound that wafted up from the foggy depths and seemed at the same time to come from the clouds above. The dots of foam in the grass, which was delicate as only grass under alpine firs can be, puzzled the singer: had they dropped from the mouth of a rabid fox?

Now the clouds took on two different shapes: some, formless, drizzly, drifted in from the west and were rain clouds, and the others, from the east, formed windrows, brighter, with space in between, and carried snow. And at the moment when the two types of clouds encountered each other, they merged into a great uniform glowing haze. And now the western clouds also carried snow, and from both sides a curtain drew slowly and steadily across the entire sky, reaching down to the earth.

The hidden highland birds cackled, barked, neighed. The snowing created a sphere in which colors emerged, the brown of the pines, the green of the heather, the black of the rubber boots. The flakes, clumped together but still with individual crystalline parts, melted on the mountain climber’s nail bed, hot with exhaustion.

And now in the tracklessness way up there, the red-and-yellow vehicle with the postal horn comes rolling out of the curtain of snow, this time a jeep. On every weekday during his journey he had been able to rely on it; out of affection he had even counted the patches on the mailbags; and one time, when the storm over Kyle of Lochalsh had ripped a card addressed to me out of his hand as he made his way to the mailbox, and he thought it would never be seen again, the card actually reached me, though with a few puddle stains.

So was there a house on the plateau at the peak that had mail delivered? Perhaps in a eucalyptus grove? He quickly wrote another card, with the snow crackling on it, to the Queen of England or someone, finishing just as the mail vehicle came rattling up. It stopped, with a robust gray-haired Scottish woman at the wheel who reminded him of his mother. And he placed the card in her outstretched hand, and she shoved it in among the other pieces of mail, held together with a rubber band.

It seemed to the singer as if something in him were beginning to heal, something which, although he had sung about it again and again, he had not even wanted to have healed.

2 — The Story of the Reader

Where had that been?

He was sitting with his girlfriend by a swampy pond in the forest near a city. Dusk was far advanced, and the two of them had not said a word for a long time. Instead, from the small round body of water, light rose, the only bright thing all around, a reflection of the last bit of daytime sky, or of the night sky as above large cities?

His entire life up to then had been marked by a sense of futility. This did not leave him even during this one hour, yet was accompanied by a tranquillity or feeling of safety that was new to him. The girl beside him felt that, and bowed before this realm. The back of a fish arced soundlessly from the surface and dove under again, a dolphin. The muskrat, about to scurry from one hole in the bank to the next, stopped in midcourse and sniffed the air, standing on its hind legs, its tail broadened into the shape of a beaver’s. After all, nothing was happening, with the forest darkness all around, but the light at their feet, the water and the light.

His entire childhood and youth he had spent in Germany, in the Reich, then in the state in the east, then in the republic in the west, in the country and in cities, from the Mittelgebirge down into the ancient river valleys and up into the Alps. But here by the swampy pond was the first time that he had seen a world open up in his country, if not for him then for someone else, for instance his descendants.

Where had that been? And what was her name again, the young woman from that time? And if he had children perhaps, why were they even more hopeless than he had ever been?

And where had that been again? After wandering around all day — while always, in accordance with the traditional German parental admonition, “staying on the path like a good boy!” through high-rise, villa, and allotment-garden suburbs, all equally inhospitable and unreal, as were the forests, the village squares, and even the vineyards or the slopes with apple orchards, he had, again toward evening, found himself in a town whose center was built in a hollow, and suddenly in the stillness — of midsummer or deep winter? — had seen himself generously and cordially received by the solid mass of half-timbering erected there, whose network of beams had struck him until then as the epitome of confinement or narrowness.

The town seemed no less deserted than the villages he had gone through to reach it, and yet from its crooked streets, as he descended into them step after step, something like a cheerful expectancy emerged and leaped the gap to him. And that was no momentary deception. The alley dog, the kind that usually made his neck stiffen with fear, licked his hand as if it were seeing him again for the first time in seven times seven years, and then ran on ahead to show him the way. And there it was: the welcoming garland, especially for him, in the form of plastic flowers in a tin can above the door to the house; the summer or winter garden that had a view of a volcanic cone with a petrified prehistoric horse in its basalt wall, and Condviramur and Percival, in the form of a North Hessian or Westphalian innkeeper and his wife, as his hosts.

Were the German fairy tales in force once more, in defiance of history? Was it in his, the reader’s power, not exclusively his, but his as well, to awaken to life a place thought to be dead? And why had he been successful in doing so in his Germany only that one time, which now had again been “over” for far more than seven years? Was it his own fault that it had never been repeated and renewed? What was the name of that town again?

And where had that been? During a long winter he had gone to his workshop every morning to print a book that was causing him particular trouble and pleasure, and back home in the evening, through a city of millions, though always taking only side streets.

And each time he went out it had snowed, day after day, through the months. It was a light, dry snow that hardly ever stayed on the ground. At most it slithered over the sidewalks and road surfaces, like sand over the ripples of dunes. The system of side streets leading to the central axis, not always parallel to it, that he used, now seemed profoundly silent, and if yesterday it had belonged to the evil Germany, today it belonged to the world at large.

Snow and epic narration. Yes, what opened up before the reader was no longer just a short tale or a fairy tale, but rather an epic, and it was even set in this typically German area. Was set? No, would be set there in the future.

The German epics familiar to him appeared starkly contrasted to the one the reader saw taking shape at that time through the veil of snow, from the Nibelungs, in whose heroes, according to Goethe, unlike in Homer’s, no reflection of the gods was at work, to … And Wolfram’s Percival, did that take place in Germany? And Keller’s Green Henry? (An episode.) And Stifter’s Indian Summer? And wasn’t the location of Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Wilhelm Meister, the two narratives that most closely approximated the one envisioned by the reader during his walks back and forth in the snowy light, instead of a factual Germany, the province of a solitary powerful mind, a province cleared inventively and energetically for development, dramatization, and intensification, even in a tragic mode, of his ideals?

The epic tale of tomorrow — this is how the reader saw it before him in the slowly falling snow — would, as in the work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, as far as a certain Germany was concerned, definitely behave as though this Germany did not exist; on the other hand, it would not locate the events in an ideal country, dreamed up in isolation, but rather in that worldwide Germany, employing a host of German things and place names, the few that had remained untainted as well as those fraught with guilt, particularly these!

At that time snow fell for months around a pub on Schellingstrasse where Hitler had often sat and where at the moment the hand of a young waiter from Bari could be seen, through the almost opaque windows, dicing truffles; it fell on Amalienstrasse around a woman who snapped at her child: “You stay here!”; it fell in the Adalbert Cemetery around the statue of the dancer Lucille Grahn, in an appropriate pose, now mimicked by a young girl passing that way; fell far out by the moss of Dachau around the bench on which the reader in earlier times, as an adolescent, after wandering through the concentration camp, had sat engrossed in Grass’s Cat and Mouse until just before the last train left; fell around a loden coat, the Milan cathedral, the Kalahari Desert, meat hooks, the Three Kings from the Orient, idle snow shovels, newspaper vending machines, on sidewalks as everywhere in Munich, with the same headlines from morning to evening, which in those winter months, in view of the epic narrative, meant precious little to the reader, otherwise so easily distracted by anything in written form.

And where was the epic of Germany now? The books that had talked about the country had again in the meantime, as always before, disheartened him — and precisely, as exciting as some of them were, because of the German names in them. Because of them he could not believe in even the most extravagant flights of fancy. It seemed to him as if there were an epic curse on “Berlin” and “Flensburg,” on the “Weser” and the “Zugspitze,” on the “Black Forest” and “Helgoland,” even independently of his century’s history. And there was no question of his writing himself. He was the reader.

So his winter day’s dream of a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them, had blown away with that snow? No, he was convinced that any day now a new Wolfram von Eschenbach would — not appear, no, simply be there, drifting in from a side street, with a wealth of purely epic place names, of which the first might be, for example, Respond/ Upper Bavaria.

Although my “Writer’s Tour” is studded with South German to West German place names, the reader felt less constricted by them than usual, because for one thing the story is short, and it also looks more like a notebook. He understood, too, that I could not be the one to write the book he was longing for, that demon-exorcising book about the other Germany. First of all, I would have had to spend my childhood there and remain in residence here and there a long time, instead of merely making the tour; I would have had to sit and wait for such an epic, like a piece of property. “And then you’re only half German and decided against your half-Germanness. You renounced your father, very early on, in the first disappointment after your search for paternal salvation, and later, on your tour, you also renounced your fatherland, and have not set foot in it since, have even avoided the river that forms the border, which, with its broad, bright, gravel-covered banks is like something from antiquity, where both of us used to swim, with unalloyed pleasure, avoided it out of fear of crossing the line down the middle and thus ending up in German irreality. At the same time you swore fealty to the German language, and many reproached you for that as a contradiction. What you write in any language other than your German does not have the value in your eyes of something written. What you think in French over there in your foreign land carries no weight for you. To be sure, even if you undertook to return to your fatherland, I do not believe that someone like you would succeed in writing the book of conversion that I envision for my Germany. Not even Friedrich Holderlin, with all the power generated in him by initial concurrence, then near-despair, then sober illumination, managed to get past the Germans in their country and their cities in favor of a larger, more broad-minded, and at the same time solid epic concept. In Hyperion his German contemporaries loom large as the sheer counterimage to his heroes, the Greeks, who immerse themselves in the common struggle for restoration of the realm where the decisive factor is the idea of the sun, embodied in books, trees, a table, a plate. What seemed impossible for him to narrate in prose he invoked in his poems. He challenged German youth to take up the legacy of long-lost Hellas and establish an equally brilliant empire, specifically by force of arms, which his poems now called holy, as previously air, water, the vine. According to Holderlin, after the Greeks it is now the turn of the youth of Germany to take their place in history. They, and they alone, epitomize the world spirit, and they will celebrate their sacred slaughter, on the banks of Father Rhine or on the Elysian Fields, as the legitimate successors to the Hellenes. No, these poems were bad enough, even without being misused in the following century. And anyway: my wish for Germany, which actually seems possible, since I can wish it, is not a poem but precisely that long, long narrative. When it comes to narrative, the rule is: no misuse. An epic cannot be misused. No, it can be used again and again, and the user is amazed each time at what he missed the previous times, and pities the animal at his feet, whether cat or hedgehog, because it cannot read! O narrative, exhaustive, of German lands, different from anything found in newspapers and previous books, where are you? And in my imagination it is not a young man who will presently approach bearing it in his hands, but a saucy, wonderfully beautiful young woman, not blind in the least.”

The reader kept sending me such letters from his travels through Germany, once following the route of the tour described in my occasional story, then again in any direction that suited him; in these letters, in typical fashion, he could not refrain from taking the stance of a prophet, toward me as well as toward the world.

The one just quoted he wrote at the beginning of his travels, still in midwinter of the current year, as he rode in an almost empty passenger train from Oldenburg to Wilhelmshaven, where at twenty I had first looked up my father. And although it is true that even when I think of Germany here, from afar, my imagination fails me and the images refuse to coalesce: when I felt my friend setting out with such anticipation, I was happy to travel at his side, thinking of him instead of the country, suspended in a more innocent, purely momentary present.

I see him in his train, which stands out sharply illuminated against the dusky North German flatlands, high up in the all-glass cabin of a suspension railway, or of a carousel as big as Germany. And besides that I see the dark silhouette of a horse in a pasture, its motionless head bent to the ground, as if rooted to the spot.

In Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay the tracks ended, and when a train pulled out, the loudspeaker would announce, “Attention, the train is backing out!”

The reader went to the hotel right next to the station, which catered to salesmen and itinerant workers. While in the stairwell and hallways only the night lights were on, it was all the brighter in the taproom, and in a silence like that of a waiting room, for instance at a ferry slip, along with a couple of sailors a policeman was sitting, very young, with a voice so gentle that the reader, at the next table, fell to wondering who the patron saint of policemen was, like St. Joseph for carpenters and St. Christopher for teamsters. Yet the other man had merely looked over and asked what he was reading. He held up the book: the Novelas ejem-plares. And as always happened to him with Cervantes, he was not really succeeding in getting into the stories, and not merely because he was reading them in Spanish, one word at a time, and also not because he felt the policeman watching him.

After an hour of catching his breath by the pitch-black bay, while runners still panted past him constantly, and eating his evening meal at a Turkish restaurant in the pedestrian zone, which seemed to be all there was to Wilhelmshaven, he sat on a bench at the railway station, and later, until long after the last train’s departure, on a baggage cart by the bumpers where the tracks ended. The row of shrubs over there was the only thing still stirring around midnight. The rounded, slightly convex bumper beams gave off a calm reflection. A railroad car, which had been standing on a siding for a long time, wheezed. The waxing moon was now bright enough so that the objects on the platform acquired an additional shadow. It was not cold, and the reader had taken off both his shoes, whose oval, blackish openings down by his feet, as he gazed at them, more and more took on the form of mouths opened in a death cry, and then were nothing but his shoes again, at the end of a long day.

The following morning the reader set out for that pond in the Wilhelmshaven hinterland where, according to my story, I had planned, at my first reunion with my father, to let him drown.

The water was still there, out among pastures with mossy hillocks, on the edge of a birch forest. But it could not be seen until he was standing directly beside it, because it lay so deep in a hollow below ground level, such as one otherwise finds only with groundwater lakes in old gravel pits. It also appeared as large as a lake, and beyond a bend it seemed to extend much farther, with an arm in horseshoe shape, like the cutoff meander of a river, peat black, impossible to see into from above.

The only way to get down the steep bank was by two overlapping ladders of white-barked birch, not nailed, only joined. Once at the bottom, the reader suddenly understood the expression I had used, “sound horizon,” which, in the context of my usually rather simple vocabulary, had startled him as he was reading the story. Every distant sound was inaudible in the hollow, that of cars as well as any other machinery, and there was nothing to be heard but the interior sounds, which, however, were amplified down to the most delicate by the restricted sound horizon, such that the silence round about took on audible form — the rolling of a clump of earth, the fluttering of loose birch bark, the lapping of one of the infrequent waves.

It was only the reflection of the winter-black earth banks that made the water seem so impenetrable. From a squatting position one could see clear to the bottom, which, at least as far out as the end of the dock, was lined with the same white pebbles as the narrow beach. Now it made sense to him that in the summer people from town would walk out here occasionally, instead of along their everyday Jade Bay with its powerfully changing tides and often overcast horizons. And there, as if camouflaged under the dock, was also the boat, of which he was certain at once, even if it did not fit the facts at all: “It’s the same one in which you invited your father, who can’t swim, to go for a ride.”

Paddling out himself and venturing into the arm not visible from the beach, he also saw that my murder plan made sense. Today as then there was only a narrow canal leading into an extensive sea of reeds, with so many twists and turns that even if any swimmers had been there he would have been out of their sight in no time.

Yes, in that bayou-like corner, beneath the reeds, which formed a roof overhead, in that closed sound horizon, I had intended to make the boat capsize, in the deepest part, with me and my father. Even today I am surprised at myself, for I was dead serious.

Yet it had begun as a mental exercise, without any basis. For at twenty I did not hate my father. At most it bothered me for a moment or so that he avoided the sun, or that he could not be serious, especially in company. If he was ever the center of attention (“as you would have liked him to be all the time,” the reader wrote me), it was on the strength of his joking around. I saw him as frivolous, and at the same time as a spoilsport. And what bothered me most was to see him as the exact opposite of that father of my daydreams, who until then had been my invisible guiding image, my only one, someone mysterious, my sovereign. And although the Germans’ actions during the last Reich had forever made me the enemy — of whom? yes, of whom, really? — I never held it against my father personally that he, at least according to his role, had been one of the perpetrators. He must have been as unserious about that as about everything else (except perhaps sometimes when he sat on the sidelines and watched quietly).

My decision that he should disappear into the reeds came perhaps merely from a summer whim, born one night when I was on a walk with my father and pointed out to him a cluster of lightning bugs deep in a clump of bushes, massed together into a glowing ball and seeming to revolve in the dark, and he did not respond with so much as a word. But when I invited him to go for a ride with me in the boat that afternoon, I realized there was no turning back. I had to push him overboard way out in the reeds. I had been planning the invitation all week long, word for word, intonation for intonation, and when I finally got it out, my voice was shaking and very soft. So: this would be it! What followed was easy to narrate, for a change: my father was not in the mood, and I felt infinitely relieved.

“But how you missed your father during the years before that!” the reader wrote or transmitted to me from the reeds. “The thought of him was closest to your heart. Your allegedly lost youth: you did have it, you were a youth without a father, and to that extent a young person if ever anyone was young. Your thoughts about the future circled not so much around a wife and child as around your absent father. And your thoughts were directed upward, from far below, such as come only from a son in need of a father. The time when you were waiting for your father was the only period in your life during which, instead of being blissful intermittently, as was later the case, you were consistently devout, almost like the child of Siebenbrunn. The image of your father, destroyed by your mother and for a long time not inquired about by you, was, as became clear as you grew up, innate. If you ever expected salvation, it was from your father’s turning up. At the slightest hint of a father, you would have been ready to set out in search of him. During your time of growing up: your father was it. And his image grew along with you. And one day you told your mother to her face that you were not fatherless, as she and the entire village had allowed you to think, but had a father. He exists. He has to exist. My father exists. Tell me who my father is. And where is he? And your mother burst into tears and said: Yes, you have a father. And your father is alive. And there, in the burning silence that followed, you experienced the greatest sense of triumph in your life and also for the first time pictured your life as an adventure. The far side of Eden was to become the here and now. And part of it was that when your mother admitted to you that your long-lost begetter was not a native, not a Slav, but rather a German, you felt proud of this father from the great, unfamiliar country of Germany, and it gave you a further incentive when your mother, whom he had loved, told you your father was not a villager, always spoke High German — not dialect! — and had always led her as light as a feather when they danced, and lived way up in the north, by the ocean!”

The reader had time. In the following days he not only returned several times to the scene of my near-crime in Wilhelmshaven, where the wintry desolation made him feel less like murdering someone than like hugging someone, but also visited the area on the edge of town where my father lived.

Since the death of his lawfully wedded wife (whom I sometimes think my father poisoned), he had been living alone for a long time in his little, pointy-gabled row house, and the reader watched and followed the old man until the lights went out at midnight (after that, in the stairwell, where the steps could be dimly made out through a high milk-glass panel, from time to time a ghost light would go on to frighten off invaders from the planet Mercury).

My father hardly went anywhere on foot anymore. He rode his bicycle to the Rathaus tavern for his early-evening beer with the two or three pals still alive, and on weekends drove to Oldenburg to see his lady friend, who was his own age, in his Mercedes, the new model of which he had already ordered from Untertürkenheim for delivery in the spring. During such drives he would pull over to the side of the road several times and take a catnap; or perhaps it only looked that way. In the company of his elderly friends, he, although also elderly, seemed by far the youngest, and when he spoke they tended not to register it. Each time he began with a stutter that was not a speech defect; it sounded as though it came from a schoolboy, the type who always contradicts and knows it all. But when they drank he was the one who replenished the others’ glasses, always to the rim. One time he unexpectedly took a young woman in his arms and danced with her through the pub. And one time the eighty-five-year-old mentioned, without being asked and again almost unheard, that he had a son by a foreign woman, his great love, and his son was a joy to him. The reader reported to me that my father had said this without any stuttering.

Keeping himself in the background this way was something at which the reader had less and less success during his travels. Otherwise, wherever he was, he managed with his way of reading to achieve more than merely being overlooked: he created a zone around himself, just wide enough for turning a page, where even guests at a stag party would give him a wide berth. He became taboo, even directed the happenings around him.

But this time, as the days passed, he became downright suspect, except in the vicinity of my father. For he merely pretended to be reading, or he did read, and could have, if asked, recited every detail of the exemplary tale in question, but he remained uninvolved, receptive at most to the elegant structure of the Spanish sentences, and this was not his way of reading. It was like the repeated attempts he had made since childhood to read Don Quixote. He could neither take seriously nor find comical these self-anointed heroes and their flailing around. And yet he kept trying. At some point he had to enter into the world of Miguel de Cervantes. He believed, if not in the author, then at least in his, the reader’s, predecessors, through the centuries. This time he would find his way into the book. The wintry light on Jade Bay, clear, dark, as if from below, would help him.

One time, to make himself receptive for reading, he even swam in the cold February sea, and then thought, with one stroke: “Now!” No. The book remained mute. And afterward, as he ran over a bridge that crossed the locks, he, this corner-of-the-eye person — he picked up things more quickly this way than by looking at them head-on — who had been a goalie in his youth, caught sight of a car following him at a snail’s pace, and the merest thing would have had to snap inside him for him to toss the book into the canal and go after that metal hulk with an iron rod. The car was a police car and in it the young policeman with the gentle voice, who asked if he was still working his way through Novellas ejemplares, whereupon my friend discovered that the person in uniform was a lovely woman.

The reader tried to make headway with the book on Helgoland, and back on the mainland in Delmenhorst, Buxtehude, Hameln, Run-storf am Aalmeer, during Carnival, on Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday, on Ascension Day: Cervantes’s sentences galloped, bounced, and danced, but they did not carry him along with them. Meanwhile he carried on his business, inconspicuous to an observer, yet when the moment came, completely focused, a dedicated businessman.

In a church in Hildesheim, looking at the roundheaded figures from the centuries of a very different Germany, and even looking at the Gothic ones, he wondered how Goethe could have been so disdainful toward such luminous figures and found them distorted and barbarous, he, for whom the human skull matched the vault of the heavens.

But without his reading my friend saw his Germany as more desolate than ever, and himself along with it. Without his reading his Germans appeared to him as usurpers in their own country, either hacking the air space apart with their excessively loud voices or whispering as mythological ear lindworms. When he still read, then under duress: “Liposuction,” “Utilization Factor.” And once, in another German pedestrian zone, he read a sign that beggar children held up to his chest, read it from top to bottom, only to find that they had stolen everything off him but his paperback book.

But he had time, after all. And thus on a day in late spring when he was watching a national soccer match in Frankfurt’s Waldstadion, he saw at halftime, out of the corner of his eye, a person next to him who picked up a book. It was a young woman, in profile. And she held the book away from her, at first still closed, which somewhat resembled the initial position in a wrestling match, also because her shoulders were leaning back and her eyes lowered. The woman’s entire body was involved, and remained so when she began to read. It became just a bit quieter, at the same time more mobile, with the addition of silent exclamations or breaths, as if she were cheering the book on.

“All right, and now I shall read, too,” said my friend next to her, and spelled out in one fell swoop — that was no contradiction — a page on which a Cervantes hero is finally taken seriously by another character in the story, whereupon the reader likewise could finally take him seriously, and read, and spelled out, spelled out and read, on and on. Then he looked up. He had read enough for today and was looking forward to tomorrow, with the book. And he looked at his neighbor, who now, at the end of halftime, closed her own book. Yes, wasn’t it the pretty policewoman from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay? She had been following him all this time!

And she turned to him, and the two readers edged closer to each other, and then watched the ball together, which, when it went in the wrong direction, forced them to pay attention, and when it went in the right direction, on the other hand, lifted their spirits. And that was where? Where am I? And the reader could think there was a Germany still waiting to be kissed awake.

The thought formed such a clear image that he believed in it.

3 — The Story of the Painter

Meanwhile late summer has come, or early fall already, and the painter is lying, his materials next to him, facedown on a bed of flint in the shade of the only bush at a bend in the Río Duero, at his head the steep, high, reddish-yellow sandstone terrace overlooking the river, and up above, already far off, Toro, with its façades of the same color, in the province of Zamora on the meseta of western Castile, about seven hundred fifty meters above the level of the Mediterranean at Alicante, while the painter is lying about one hundred meters lower.

The large birds surrounding the painter now in midafternoon are not ravens; they also have beaks too straight and too long for vultures; are they pelicans? — one of them is holding a fish crosswise — flamingos? no, they are storks, which, with their heads bent over their backs, burst out in squawks, one after the other, so that in the deserted and quiet river landscape it echoes like the so-called Ratschen back home on the Jaunfeld, the rattles that replace the church bells during Holy Week until the celebration of the Resurrection.

At some distance from the painter, down there by the bend in the river, on the almost white, almost glassy expanse of flintstone (I have a few lumps of it here on my desk and can smell the sparks in them), are lying fat dead fish, carp and pike, both gleaming gold from the solid coats of flies covering them; the gills of one of the fish are still pulsing, but they, too, are already swarming with flies.

Every morning, upon making his way down from Toro, the painter wanted to ask the fishermen why they simply left some of their catch lying on the bank, and precisely the finest specimens; to this day he does not know. Although he is a Spaniard — he never calls himself Catalan — there are many customs in his own country that even now, when his hair has turned gray, remain a mystery to him, one he is reluctant to solve.

Meanwhile the fishermen are having their meal at the barrackslike bar under the poplar trees on the other side of the Roman bridge, whose low, squat, round arches let through the Río Duero, here white with cataracts, with a roar that scales the steep banks and penetrates far into the streets of the town, but at the bend where the painter is lying is audible only as some soft, windlike sound belonging to the expansive, bald Spanish or Indian summer silence.

It is already approaching evening, and at the foot of the earthen terrace, hardly visible for a moment between two of its foothills, as in the gap in a canyon, the storm-dark Talgo flashes by, the daily express from Madrid to Vigo and La Coruña, which does not stop in Toro, glimpsed just long enough for the silhouette of a passenger to appear behind the tinted window of the bar car; and then, at the next curve in the tracks, which follow the river, between the cliffs, again that Mississippi-wide tooting in the echo of the roar and whistle of this railway thing, as graceful as it is heavy, from which the entire fisherman’s pub on the other side jingles and jangles; this now you see me! now you don’t! is something the painter has not allowed himself to miss once in all his weeks here; and the way it slices through the alluvial plane appeared to him daily as a plowing up of the entire earth and at the same time catapulted him into a previously unknown loneliness. Up! Back to work!

So was it still possible, now near the end of the twentieth century, to be motivated and stimulated, as once in the age of the great engineers, by a machine, the sight of it, its sound, its speed, undeterred even by the thought of a catastrophe right around the next corner?

Was he still “the painter”? (He allowed himself to be called a “filmmaker” or “cinéaste,” despite his film, long since finished and even shown here and there, only with a modest step to one side, as if to make way for someone else.)

He had begun to paint long ago with a particular notion of distance, which, however, did not then become a feature of his paintings. The distance was there beforehand: his original image — the thing that motivated him — his starting point. It determined him.

And now, as a result of his one role change to filmmaking? as a result of all that went with and came after it? as a result of what? he had lost that distance, his material? Once and for all? So what had this strange phenomenon, about which he had found nothing, not even in the textbook on “psychogeometry,” meant to him in the past?

That distance had appeared to him way back in childhood as the blackness he saw when he closed his eyes.

Yet since birth he had fixed his gaze on the most distant horizon possible: from Tarragona in the direction of the sunrise, out over the Mediterranean, overlooking which, people said, the city lay as a “balcony.” The sense of distance he got from this was, however, one of apprehension, in the face of the emptiness and the height, and the infrequent ships or boats in the middle distance did not suggest safety. The inky or steely or leaden blue also contributed to his impression that in this boundlessness there was no destination, or, if there was, then over in ancient Rome, where, he was sure, one of his ancestors who had been dragged away from his coast had ended his life as a slave or as lion fodder.

With eyes closed, he saw an entirely different distance. In all the blackness something like a harbor took shape, where he saw himself safely anchored.

And it was even more: in the black expanse, which did not seem all that black, but shot through with thousands of variegated little brigh-tenings, without movement, something was constantly being danced, played, sung, narrated, drawn, as a model for him. “Model for,” for it was not a question of images copied “from” anything. Besides, copies consisted only of foreground, and moved, vibrated, shrank, grew, as if on their own, while his stories in the blackness took place in the most distant background possible, and the movement he perceived in them seemed to come from him himself — from his heartbeat? no, for that it was too light, too disembodied — from his lungs? for that it was too quick — from his brain? for that it was too even, too powerful in imagery, too comprehensive, too intimate, too childlike.

It was even stranger that closing his eyes, without crossing them in the least, he could look away from the distant black happenings and then continue to watch them, except that the distance now shifted from its place behind his closed lids into his innermost self and became something whole, “one and all.”

To be sure, that happened during his childhood only when he was lying in bed, as he was waking up in the morning. So were they images between waking and sleeping? No, neither copied images nor images between waking and sleeping. For the distance behind his eyes, he had to have had a good sleep and be well beyond the boundary of dreams, clearheaded, and the distance also did not create concrete images, as the state between waking and sleeping created still lives, for instance, especially of landscapes, and it also dispensed with the succession of spaces characteristic of that other state, indeed with space altogether; the distance itself was enough. And nevertheless it was active, and what it did was to produce an effect. Produce what effect? This constant, marvelously delicate movement in him and at the same time independent of him, without beginning or end, a sort of motionlessly moving repeated figure in the blackness, drawn to guide him.

And then with the years, he could say, paraphrasing Paul Klee, “The distance and I are one, I am a painter.”

Yet it was something else again to get down to the images and get down to work. That was where painting began, art. It was not reproduction that counted but metamorphosis, or reproduction through metamorphosis. The starting point disappeared into it, or was absorbed into it. What was drawn for him, his model, formed only the bottom layer, and with scraping would perhaps have actually come to light sometimes, the mere appearance standing in baffling contradiction to the completed picture. For this he not only had to displace the original image, set it on its head, but also, so far as it was within his strength, invent things to add as well as subtract, so that as a rule something entirely new emerged in the end.

Precisely through such energetic distortions he could then, with reference to the distance, say of each picture: “I have reinforced a presence.” And it had been a long time since the painter experienced his source of motivation only with eyes closed, when lying down. And on the other hand, he still found nothing in just any old distant blue, or red, or yellow. The location of his particular distance was somewhere nearer, could shimmer out at him from a clump of earth, mixed with stones and wood, at the tips of his toes, or when the colors of someone’s eyes transmitted themselves to him from close up, also, in the mirror, his own (Black Sea black).

This distance could be most reliably tracked down, at least before his involvement with film, in a very specific visual realm.

That realm began at a certain remove from the eye, and yet long before what is commonly referred to as distance. The path leading to it was difficult to measure; earlier people would have said, for instance, “a stone’s throw” (how large was such a stone, and who was throwing it?). And then the sense of distance was limited to a rather narrow strip or spot; if he looked out past it, just a bit, that promptly put an end to the distance, even if the high sea spread before him or the grassy lane swept into a savanna.

Thus distance appeared, just begging to be circumscribed and conveyed to the surface of a picture, at the end of a garden, for instance, in front of that wall and the bushes over there, on the ground, in the grass. It revealed itself thus on a pond in the forest, just before the barway on the opposite bank, as a delimited place there on the water, almost no more than a little tip.

And curious, too, that an ordinary meadow was already too spacious for such a unit of distance, while an ordinary backyard was too small. And the same was true of a lake on the one hand and of a mere puddle on the other. To offer material for an image of distance, the yard had to be larger than usual, just as the pond had to extend farther than a pond usually does — both, however, by just a bit, “to be recognized,” “by a factor of one.” And that, to be precise, was the measure of distance.

Only in this way did distance seeing come into being, as was fitting for a law of nature.

At the same time a displacement occurred such as no other distant horizon could bring about, neither that of the Himalayas nor of the Amazon delta: as a result of its limitation or framing, this particular distance drew the painter into a scenery, with a light on the water, on the grass, on the treetops like that in a mirror, and distance literally put in an appearance: there! It will start right there, there is the place to board, it will take place there, it will play itself out there, it will be hatched there, it will become concentrated there, it will catch fire there, it will be spread out there, right over there, in that narrow, limited patch of distance it is clear again, everything is being freshly polished, is gleaming as on the first day of the Creation.

And remarkable again that such distance occurred as if without movement, at any rate with hardly anything’s moving noticeably in it. It seemed to the painter as though quiet was a prerequisite for this effect: that the distant grass tip, the distant coast of the forest pond, the distant interwoven pattern of the treetops had to remain nice and still.

Yet the distance over by the garden wall or elsewhere moved him as nothing else could, even the most remote curvature in the universe, and in its presence he thought, “There the world is at peace!”

And it also set him in motion, not toward it, not to circle the pond, in order to dive like a mystic into the distant glow, but in a sidelong direction to appropriate action, creation, spreading the word.

People, many of them, were moved to reflection by his pictures, at first sight so gloomy, and they were happy, even as a crowd, not merely the individuals. Each of his pictures had the same title, La vega negra, “The Black Meadow.” Their unusual format, much wider than high, was simply about twice that of my slate in first grade — exactly right! was my immediate reaction — and likewise every figure or every squiggle, that is, every darker or lighter shading, clearly had its place, its proportion, its distance, just as in classical paintings.

And yet the painter had long since begun to wonder how it happened that, with the passing millennia of human history, distance and images of distance had become more and more significant in this way, whereas, for instance, imperial Rome, including the poet Horace, whom the painter knew somewhat by heart, had had no interest in such things.

Or was it that the current distantness did not yet exist in the spiritual geometry of those times, or merely as an incidental, or only in slaves (but hadn’t Horace’s father been a freedman?)? Had it become fundamental only today? As fragments of distance? fragments, yet fundamental?

That he earned a good deal of money with what he did was something the painter took for granted. He had it coming to him, and every time a head was shaken at the sums paid by collectors, he countered with his standard “That’s the price.” He was “my rich friend”—and doesn’t everyone have one such, more or less?

And yet you could hardly tell by looking at him that he was wealthy. (Only certain women spotted it immediately, and by dozens of indications, from the expression in his eyes to his socks.) The apparent apartment house in which he lived in Paris was a little lower than the others next to it, and still looked like one downstairs in the lobby, except that from there no staircase, only an elevator, took one upstairs, with the entrance to the living area directly outside the elevator; and only later, when the guest was escorted downstairs by way of a spiral staircase concealed behind a door in the wall did he recognize that this upper floor had been merely the dining area, followed, a flight down, by another floor for sitting, conversing, and reading, then one with paintings by old masters, then an entirely empty floor, brightly lit into the farthest corners, and finally the ground floor, taken up entirely by a palatial white-tiled kitchen, with a cook: from top to bottom the tenement was the urban pied-à-terre of the painter, who finally came out with the admission that at the very top, to be reached by a sort of fireman’s ladder, was the bedroom floor, at the same time his observatory, and the acquaintance who had assumed the chore of carrying the meal upstairs? — “he is my servant”—no, he said “factotum.”

It was similar in whichever of his studios you visited, the urban ones as well as the others. In the company of a visitor he could hardly be distinguished from the former. Like him, he could be a dealer, a buyer, a speculator, a critic, a patron. In a dark pinstriped suit: he stood thus, arms crossed, at a distance from the pictures. In the presence of his guests he did not touch them. The actual displaying was done by stooped young people in gray lab coats, not students but assistants, employees, helpers, while the one responsible stood in half-shadow and with a stream of chatter seemed to want to deflect the observer from his creations as if from some awful deed. Only his sidelong glances at the works, from a distance, expressed something different. And not until the observer voiced an opinion — an exclamation was sufficient — did the painter step forward and acknowledge his work, also join in the enthusiasm, show a pleasure in what he had made that often hardly left room for that of the person standing next to him.

Not the fact that he earned so much, and, when he was without his work, outwardly had something of the air of an entrepreneur or a gang boss, secretly disturbed the painter, but rather the thought, which grew more powerful as he got older, that he had won. Merely to be secure was itself uncanny. And a winner, too: self-disgust. If he ever wanted to do away with himself, it was when he imagined that he had outdone or trumped “the others,” “all of them.” To be sure, for him every “Victory!” was immediately followed by “What kind of victory?”

It was something else again that he had got involved in the film. It was by no means a mere whim or an interlude. For one thing, he was not unfamiliar with the cinema, both as a moviegoer of many years, one of the most faithful, passionate, and knowledgeable in all of Spain and France, and as an actor, trained at a school in Madrid, after which he had performed in a few films, in larger supporting roles.

And then the painter saw his film as a variation on his paintings, or an added dimension.

Instead of with his color, black, on a pictorial surface, he now felt the urge to tell about his distance in a film for a change. He was not the first painter to do this, and his dream was a powerful dream. In it, regions and people appeared with an impact very similar to the shadings and figurations of black in his paintings. And the people moved; above all, they spoke.

The painter had a story to tell with his film, a story rich in both events and images, created for the large screen and a thousand-seat theater (such as still existed everywhere in his Spain, at least until this year, even now in the small town of Toro).

And this story had long since been available as a book, one of decisive importance to the young and also to the now almost old painter, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Time and again he had been astonished that in the almost seventy years during which the farm family from Mississippi had roamed about, having various adventures as they carried the coffin of the dead mother, so as to lay her to rest, as she had requested, in her place of origin, no one seemed to have narrated the film of the story. He, at any rate, felt the need for it. He would have been the first to go to see it. And since the film did not turn up, he wanted to make it, for himself, the moviegoer.

He bought the rights, wrote the screenplay, traced on foot the stations of the coffin expedition, Castile, Galicia instead of the American South, and put together a team consisting of professionals — the technical crew — and nonprofessionals — all the actors.

The problem that arose during the shooting was the painter’s or filmmaker’s decision not to show, as originally planned, the transportation of the mother after her death on a first, long zigzag course through the Spanish interior provinces of Soria, Valladolid, and Zamora, but to jump immediately beyond the Cantabrian Mountains into stone-gray-glittering Finisterre by the sea: for one thing, during that early spring it was raining far more, and also heavily and unceasingly near the Atlantic, which was necessary for it to be visible on film; the rivers were overflowing their banks and thus cutting off the pilgrims’ paths to the grave, as the story required, and forming, like the Mississippi in the book, that great floodplain where the coffin was supposed to disappear in the mud, in danger of never being seen again.

Furthermore, the filmmaker did not recognize until the test shoot in the Castilian highlands that the light there differed in some decisive way from that in his dream. To be consistent with that dream, an entirely different light had to prevail in the next sequence, after the family set out with the corpse of the mother — which, like the living, joined in narrating one phase or another of the journey, from the coffin; the light was to be that of the “Land Behind the Mirror” (the film’s title).

It had to do purely with sense impressions that were missing from the Iberian interior with its lack of water and its almost nonexistent cliffs (those that did exist were dull yellow and hardly reflected anything), but not from the sparkling granite areas along the coast, where in the heart of Galicia even seemingly dry brook beds and mere mud puddles that looked like cattle watering places would swell up in the flooding and spread out to the width of the rivers or lakes they really were: not small meadow brooks, not merely damp, naked earth between two fields, but arms of the sea with salt water.

And there was another reason for him to have his film take place in that light, besides the most obvious one. When he, already no longer young, had first found himself in Vigo, Pontevedra, and La Coruña, he had moved through the area from beginning to end with the sensation of cities behind a mirror. He had certainly known their names all his life, but not been able to imagine an existence to go with them. For him Spain ended long before that, with the Sierra Cantabrica or at most with Santiago de Compostela. (Similarly, in his childhood, in his own house, there had been forgotten corners, which, when one entered them unexpectedly, appeared brighter than the rest, with everything highlighted and graphic.)

Something was behind the mirror, it was said, had been there all the time, and very close by, too. And nevertheless one first had to get through to it, who knew how? at the suitable moment, when was that? But then there were revealed, and as a rule precisely in one’s own country, on one’s own continent, as if independent of it and self-sufficient, as if completely on their own and also quite healthy and sturdy, existing settlements, entire cities or city-states, in whose polished mirror surface a new world could be deciphered. At least that was how it had seemed to him that time in La Coruña, and even more in the larger town of Vigo. And all this was perfectly natural.

So for the film it was merely necessary to soften here and there the gleam in the foreground and add a glow in the background. The technical crew, uncertain at first because he, allegedly a painter, did not lay out for them a single camera angle or light setting, soon got used to being, like him, only somewhat prepared instead of completely. It even electrified them when he came up with a surprise at the last minute. And with the passage of time they, too, seemed happy that he was not narrating his story as they were perhaps accustomed to; he allowed the images to follow each other in such a way that it looked more like a frieze than an ordinary film, and background noise, of planes, of trains, was as welcome to him as the sudden shadow of a cloud on the face of the actor who happened to be speaking. Finally a sound engineer took it upon himself, after the end of the workday, to go, in pitch-black night and heavy rain, out to the lighthouse of La Coruña because he was not satisfied with that day’s recording of raindrops falling on an empty soda can out there among the cliffs; he wanted to catch the sound between the drops that fell into the can through the drinking hole.

And the actors, a family of Castilian villagers, to whom the coastal region was also new, recited their story, or watched and listened to it with a complete, almost imploring solemnity, which came perhaps from the fact that the moment of shooting was the first time all of them were speaking their monologues — the script had nothing else — learned in isolation, each of them alone.

Things changed when the film was finished. Even before that there had been hardly anyone who seemed to be really looking forward to the film, and those who said they were curious did so in a tone that made it sound like a threat.

At a first screening for his acquaintances in the interior, they avoided his eyes when it was over, and those who opened their mouths spoke of something else entirely, or praised the shot “where the fish leaps over the coffin.” A few complete strangers had wandered in off the street, one of whom began to clap at the end but stopped at once in the general silence.

Of a second screening, for a couple of potential distributors, at which the painter was not present, he heard only that one of them had had tears in his eyes, and had at the same time given the thumbs-down sign. Then some viewers had their praise conveyed to him, and a short while later expressed to him their disappointment at his failure to respond.

Having believed that his film was for the whole world, my friend felt mute anguish at his lack of success, anguish that stemmed from the thought of having done something that hardly anyone needed to do anymore; the times — or who or what? — needed stories other than those in As I Lay Dying.

His loss of distance had a different origin, however. The origin lay within him. It seemed to him as though with this film, for which he had seen himself as responsible, he had lost his unity with himself, his identity; only when it was no longer present had it been transformed from a word into a thing.

That he had made a fool of himself was something he welcomed; from the beginning that had been characteristic of him, had meanwhile become, to an extent, a sort of duty, which enabled him to carry on. The waste of money was a matter of indifference to him. And if the notion of defeat came to him, he thought, “What defeat?”

Yet no such redeeming contradiction presented itself in response to the thought: “Distance and I are no longer one, I am not a painter anymore.” The question “Who am I?” had ceased to be rhetorical for him. It was he who had driven himself from his special place, to which he had laid claim from very early on and had occupied with an assertiveness unlike that of any of the painters around him. It had been said of his paintings that in them, specifically with the many variations on black, perhaps for the last time in history the coasts of the Mediterranean had been brought to life, from Gibraltar by way of Sicily and the Peloponnesus to Crete and Phoenicia, as only once before, and then by all the peoples together, in classical antiquity.

No longer to know who one was also implied culpability, incurred anew with every step. Since his transgression he was an outlaw, not vis-à-vis the world around him but vis-à-vis himself. To be without identity was not something he experienced as blissful extinction. It was a stigma he could not hide, for it was visible only to himself.

The loss of distance meant at the same time a loss of images, in the sense that without that feeling for distance he could no longer paint — could not send his color off in any direction. Whenever he looked around for his material, as now on the Duero, light did radiate from the spot, to be sure, but it was whirling and frightening as, in his childhood, the snakes on the Medusa’s head in the Roman museum in his native Tarragona had been. Hadn’t the gaze that allegedly turned people to stone looked to him more like one that summoned people to reflect? Thus in his months of confusion he thought one time: “It may be that I have blocked my way back home.” And then another time: “That’s fine. What an adventure. Finally out in the wild world.”

Medusa was a beautiful, solemn young woman whose head was later cut off, and from this sprang, instead of snakes, the horse with wings, Pegasus by name.

That he had formed the habit of stretching out on the ground in the course of the day was not merely the result of his great tiredness. Had that been the case, he would have changed his position and would not have lain facedown the entire time, motionless, his eyes open. He lay this way on purpose, somewhat like one of his forerunners, the American Sam Francis, who, when he was sick once for a long time, was supposed to have looked for several months at nothing but the floor under his bed, through a hole in the mattress — or had he pushed the mattress off the bedspring? Except that at that time Sam Francis had not yet been a painter, and he himself now?

He sprawled there on the river-bend pebbles, these so close to his eyes that when he blinked, his eyelashes grazed them. The flint bulges appeared dark, with a shimmer of light only around the edges. To think that he expected to be strengthened less by looking up into the heavens than by looking down at the ground! And who else would have been able to give himself over to lying down this way? Not Picasso, not Max Ernst, but probably Matisse when very old, Cézanne obviously, Poussin, especially in his in-between period, when he was unhappily painter to the king, and even persnickety Braque.

Except that this grouping no longer had anything to do with him. None of what he had produced out of himself previously in his life could he now claim as his work. What he was trying out at the moment was amateurish drawing after nature, and on every sheet only one thing, a flintstone, a shrub, a pyramid of earth, a wave in the river. With determination he set himself up as a Sunday painter (daily), working with ordinary pencils on writing paper, and their little sound meanwhile meant as much to him as his earlier stroking, rubbing, scratching, scraping.

And thus he wanted to continue wandering and hiking into wintertime, going upriver from one drawing station to the next; he had started out in Portugal, behind Pôrto, where the Río Duero flowed steeply downhill into the Atlantic, had then crossed the border and continued on until he was below Zamora, in front of the ruins of the church on the little island in the river that had almost been washed away, while on the other island, around which the current swirled, a dog that had been abandoned there in the wilderness or had found its way there barked and barked for a week — then nothing more.

The feelings on this trip were new to him. Although they resulted from tiredness and were called sorrow or desolation, he experienced them more deeply and lastingly than those from his glory days. Weakness and defenselessness conferred a strength all their own, or so it seemed to the former prince. He felt compelled to see, precisely because of his repudiation; to take things in; to act. And thus he might shake his fist in space or spaces and say, “A new kind of painting must come! For which the peoples will mobilize. In the face of which they will fall silent and then go away, go and go. A kind of painting as festive as life. No more pictures hidden away in museums. Cliff painting.”

The sketcher on the field of rocky rubble at the foot of the great Duero terrace sees above his sheet of paper a flash of lightning from a cloudless sky. It has already gone out of his mind when a peal of thunder follows. Or does this come from a shot fired by the two hunters, father and son, who for hours have been lying on the other side of the tracks, their sights trained on the badlands with all the rabbit holes?

No, it thundered and lightened, again and again. The hunters disappeared, running. The frogs jumped into the river, the wind died down, and autumn leaves fell, straight down and heavy. The lightning could be seen not in the bright blue sky but rather only in its reflection on the scree; each new bolt seemed to shoot out of the hummocks there.

In the confusion my friend sniffed his pencils — the scent of thyme — and continued sketching his object, a single pebble, shaped like a viper’s head. The drawing done, he set out for his camper, up on the chamomile-covered steppe just beyond the town. But first, after traversing a stretch in a sandstorm, with hares, storks, and rats scurrying back and forth across his path, and a sense of well-being from the grains of sand striking his cheeks like sharp blows, he stopped in at the barrack bar, where all the river fishermen and hunters were crammed in together, and there he stayed until the other express roared by, the last of the day, from La Coruna to Madrid, announced long before between the river terraces with a bull-like bellow.

As he continued on up the mountain, the first drops fell from the still-blue sky, and on the entire stretch such first drops again and again. The old cobblestone pavement on the serpentine road was darkened by them to a fresh black and wafted a fragrance up at him. If he painted again, he thought, it would be in camouflage colors like this.

If anyone was out in the open, it was alone on each of the slopes separated by precipices, searching for mushrooms or simply out there, the old men, “like me,” he thought. But he had not even entered school when they were fighting the civil war, that man there against that other one? And now? Tomorrow on up the river to Tordesillas.

But for today to the clay-yellow church of Toro, where with his eyes he traced the masons’ arrows, keys, and circles etched into the blocks of stone. Then to the Alegría Bar on the Plaza Mayor, where at the moment of his entering the glass of fino was already waiting for him, and on the television, just before the coup de grace, torero and bull began playing with one another, seemingly cheerfully. Then on to the Imperio movie theater, where he was alone with the lighting strips along the aisles, like those on a runway. After the film, which he did not watch to the end, it was already night, with the rushing of the Rio Duero in its deep chasm echoing through the town, and up here almost no other sound than the din from the pool halls, as if people tended to disappear into their houses more in Toro than elsewhere in Spain. Then for the late evening meal alone again in the innermost room of a little inn, with a view of a trompe l’oeil window, including curtains over the opaque glass, lit up from behind. Then, after the proprietor’s hand on his shoulder in farewell, lying, no longer on his stomach, at some distance from town, in his camper on the savanna, and reading Horatius Flaccus by the oil lamp: “What? A criminal gets up at night to strangle someone. And you, to save your skin, remain at home?” While turning down the light, brooding over the masons’ marks, and the thought: “Arrows in those days still had feathers! And ours today still have them?” And in the dark then a woman singing on the radio, “¿Quieres un lugar?”

4 — The Story of My Woman Friend

She had always wanted to return from her solitary journeys with a treasure. Yet every time she came back empty-handed again, and not because her searching had been without success. Each time she stumbled upon amazing things and took them, bargained for them, or, more often, stole them. She was capable of dragging them around with her on hikes that lasted for weeks, and then leaving them behind somewhere, one after the other, at the latest on the final leg of her journey, the last item perhaps just around the corner from her house.

These found objects did not lose any of their specialness in her eyes; they merely revealed themselves toward the end of the journey as something other than the treasure she had had in mind. Over the years they were then brought back to their original place if possible, as now, on her southern Turkish excursion, the old milestone or marker from near Ephesus, which she had laboriously dug out and then rolled for hours with her hands and feet, with a Greek inscription of a fragment from Heraclitus: “The nature of each and every day is one and the same.” Once she had it in a different setting, this object had come to seem like a mere theatrical prop.

Yet as always in the presence of such a presumed treasure, out of enthusiasm or feverish excitement she could not refrain from promptly removing it from the spot, getting her claws into it. “Here it is,” she thought each time, “I’ve found you at last,” and hurled herself upon it as if upon her destiny, finally discovered, which would bring the solution to the riddle of her life that she had long since ceased to expect from any man or system, and why not in the form of this unique wooden cudgel on the alluvial cone at the base of the coastal mountains, let’s say near Bodrum, alias Halicarnassus, although almost only the husk was still wood, while the inside, the core, was packed lengthwise with shells or fish bones? shaped like drinking straws and open at both ends, so that she could imagine looking through the wooden pipe as through a particular prism that broke the light as nothing else would and had been lying in that very spot just for her. “And now tell me, precious thing: Who am I? What should I do? Where is my place? How will I come into possession of my power? What is going to happen to me next? Light my way.”

That piece of wood had long since been rolled back to the rubble cone, just as later the salt-white erotic three-legged stool, break-in booty from a saltworks distillery, was returned the same evening. But this morning, after a night in her sleeping bag up on the boat deck, at the first call of the muezzin (or his voice on tape), still in darkness, beneath the stars, from the distant land, along with the first cock’s crow, which reached her at the end of the bay, over the sea, she again awoke with the sentence on her lips, “This is the day for the treasure; I will have hunted it down before sunset, and the world will share my amazement.”

Who was she? And how did it happen that each time she set out searching anew it was in the Middle East of all places, in Turkey, whose inhabitants still lurked in the minds of her southern Slav contemporaries as arsonists, throat cutters, and stomach slitters, even though their domination of her part of the world had ended long ago?

I read once in an article entitled “Speech and Silence of Women in Medieval Epics” that women at that time avoided any speech that threatened or exerted pressure: orders, directness, and questions that expected an answer. And in an article on “Interrogative Intonation in Various Languages” I once read that German questions were marked by an interrogative intonation, whereas questions in the Eskimo languages managed without; where do you fit in, my dear friend, in this respect?

I do think I know a few things about her. To begin with: of all of us, she is the only one without cares, sometimes to the point of being infuriating. For her, only the present seems to exist, whatever is more or less peaceably there. Anything that is not there, if it does not attract her, she considers a nonthing or nonperson. And even if her conversational partner knew otherwise: from her face he could never imagine her living with a man, let alone having children, being a mother. Even when no longer all that young, she still seemed, to use an image from an earlier century, virginal, at least at first glance, transient, and likewise for the person who saw her again after a long time, always swept away into the prevailing daylight, surrendering to it as the most crucial factor, something also visible in the angle of her head and her posture: for this she could forget even her searching, with the greatest of ease, without transition.

And she knew no fear. Whenever she heard about a fearful person, her eyes would stare in incomprehension like a cow’s, and her face would become beautifully clueless. Equally foreign to her was any compassion, and far from despising a compassionate person, she would be angry at him: if anything could be done to help, she did it at once; if not, she ignored the other’s misfortune.

And she was the one who did not have a name for anyone or anything, or if she did, not the original one. Her using a name was such a rarity that the listener would experience either disenchantment (probably initially hers) or a solemnity unusual for her. But as a rule, for her nothing in the world had a particular or unique name. “Dalmatia,” where she had been living for a long time, was not allowed to be called that, but “the coastland” or the “steep coastline” (even “karst” was too specific for her), and equally impossible were “thistle,” “hemlock,” “Tito,” “Ephesus”; only words such as flower, bush, marshal, city, perhaps “philosophers’ city” could cross her lips. She usually did know the various particular names, but it was as if she were saving these for a special occasion. Or at first she did not even want to know the names, especially place names; her letters carried place names only in their cancellation stamps, and at most she might ask the recipient long afterward what the “village on the lagoon with the miniature turtles” had been called, where she had spent a week in the “half-moon country.”

The most noticeable feature of her speech, however, was that she did use names, but ones she had invented, in the form of circumlocutions or images. Just as her “container,” “river beyond the mountain,” or “conifer that loses its needles in the fall” resembled the clues in a crossword puzzle, I found myself time and again trying to guess what she meant by her “fruit that makes you sleep well afterward,” her “day on which the trees with the white bark stand next to the front door,” her “star with a belt and the male sex organ beneath it.” Maribor, where she had been born, was always referred to by her as “the town with the red tiled roofs” (although that might have long since ceased to be true), and the Drawa, which became wide there, as “the river with the smoking ice floes,” simply because once as a child on a particular winter day she had observed this from the great bridge, when it was so cold that everything seemed rigid but the huge, wild ice floes galloping along with much crashing and banging and smokelike frost clouds that rose from them, from which all the pedestrians on the bridge fled, except her, of course.

Those tiled roofs, stacked in layers all the way to a distant horizon, had been, seen long ago from the window of her room during her childhood and youth, the entire city of Maribor, with the addition of the long mountain ridge in the south, which only in a moment of impassioned homesickness was given its name by her, “Pohorje!” And from tile to tile the red had often changed its shade, so that in her eyes an eternal writing, which did not begin or end anywhere in particular, spread over the roofscape, formed by the darker patches, in curlicues, waves, loops, crosses, indecipherable, which she nonetheless never tired of reading; the longer she let her gaze travel back and forth over it, the purer she felt; and when later, in another Slovenian city, was it Ptuj? with a similar roof map of the world before her eyes, in the midst of it, on the largest of the roofs, was it the cathedral? real writing, monumental, dark on light red, leapt out at her, “IHS,” she saw such obviousness as positively barbarous.

And the ridgepole tiles on those roofs had also been something special, she said, one long hood after the other, and thus in many rows, often a little irregular, as if slightly bent, marching in procession toward the four points of the compass, which for her at that time had all been called “Land of the Rising Sun,” “Orient,” “Levant”—not names but images to evoke. And if names, then only those derived from the sun, or from its reflection, the colors (when a cow was called “Brownie”), or from the forms of the earth (“the High Road,” “the Deep Ditch,” and all the capes of “Finisterre”).

What encouragement it gave her when she learned that somewhere in the world something was publicly and compulsorily known only by its generic name, where, for instance, a forest was known as “the Forest,” a delta “the Delta,” a hilly area as “Collio,” a lake as “Jezero” (that could also be the name of a village on a lake): “I must go there!” Such designations were never deceiving; things with names like that, such as the hillock named “Hillock,” the bay named “Bay,” fulfilled what their names promised, did them proud.

Or didn’t the image of originality and exemplariness that emanated from the brook “Brook,” the place “Kamen” (stone), the desert “Le dé-sert” (even when the place marked thus on the map was only a sandy field in the midst of the bush), come instead from the power inherent in names and markers? How had that ancient debate as to which came first, the things or their names, been resolved? At any rate, as far as she could say herself — and I never heard anything from her mouth but her own thoughts — although the Turkish Mediterranean was not half as wild as other oceans, it, which was called almost exclusively “Deniz,” the Ocean, without all its nicknames, officially as well, billowed up before her every time as only a high sea could, and whenever she reached the top of a range of foothills she took it at first sight for an even higher range of foothills in the distance. Yes, this ocean with the name “Ocean” seemed original to her in the sense that the word is also applied to a human being; he is original — thus an original? — no, the original.

Almost all the given, arbitrary, specialized names sounded to her by contrast like diminutives, unsuitable, almost as idiotic and embarrassing as all dogs that were not simply called “Dog.” If it had been up to her, she would have had her children baptized only with the name “Child,” and she stubbornly referred to them, even in the presence of close friends, in just this way, calling both of them “otrok,” without “my” in front, but also not, as I did with my son, as a way of conjuring them up, but rather as a given: that is what they are called, and that is what they are, and vice versa.

Time and again I heard her reply, when asked her own name, especially by people on the street, where many thought they recognized her, not only in her Yugoslavia, “I have no name!” triumphantly self-assured or furious, and each time believable.

Yet twenty years earlier, just out of school, she had been “Miss Yugoslavia,” and although every year a new one was crowned, for many in her homeland she remained the one and only beauty queen, not forgotten even at the Albanian border, at Lake Ohrid — especially not there. On the magazine covers with naked women that in the meantime have become common, but were not in her day, not a few Balkan adolescents apparently replace the faces with cutout photos of hers, and just recently I heard a boy from the Hungarian minority in Croatia who was going blind say that he had studied every single feature of her face with a magnifying glass, day after day, with the world of light gradually disappearing, so as to have a concept for later of how a woman can look.

On the other hand, it has happened to me not infrequently that in her presence I thought I had never encountered such an unprepossessing, ugly creature. Whereas it was only later that I dismissed various other women, including some described as beautiful, she was “the broad,” “the crone” only at first sight. It was her intention to make such a first impression; she actually enjoyed going unrecognized as much as possible, even now and then by those closest to her, such that they looked away from her as from a man-sized wart. To disfigure herself in this way, all she had to do was change her facial expression a little, not even twist it, and this, practiced before the mirror during her year as beauty queen, she could accomplish at will. And a kerchief over her head, nothing more, provided the appropriate disguise.

Memorable events in her childhood were the Catholic prayer services in the cathedral of Maribor during the month of May, where she floated up to heaven with the hymns and litanies to the Blessed Virgin. An event of another sort was that afternoon under the apple trees in a school that trained nurserymen when two of the young trainees there and she had shown each other their private parts, after which the three of them had tried to kill a stray cat, with almost no fur and looking as if it were about to die, “out of pity,” as the brats said, driving it with stone after stone, stick after stick, to the farthest corner of the orchard, where the animal was still alive and howling, while one of the boys was already in tears and she and the other were becoming more and more silent, “inside as well.”

Then she was the national youth champion in sports, in track, especially hurdles — they had that for women, too, there — in the broad jump, in swimming, in volleyball, and the movements of each continued to vibrate inside her for a long time afterward. It was not only the torn ligaments, the pins in her bones, the stitches that made her give up competitive sports. The only thing she continued to practice was parachute jumping. Yet she did not view that as a sport, and she also kept it as secret as possible; when she described her jumps, she seemed to disbelieve herself, and only when one believed her in spite of that and responded was her enthusiasm kindled.

It was an athlete, after all, who then married her when she was a beauty queen, one of the stars of the Yugoslav national basketball team, a dark, handsome Croatian workingman’s son, who had become rich from sports, always alert even when not on the court, as if ready to go after the ball, and yet, “but not because of his height,” shy and with laconic good manners, always greeting people first or letting them go ahead in hotel hallways and entrances; he and she, the daughter of a shabby inn in Maribor (that was where her room under the eaves was), made a dream couple. She described how people underwent a metamorphosis in every place they entered, even if they did not recognize him and her as so-and-so. In the most dreary people’s meeting hall on a Sunday evening, with the cold December rain and wind outside, with the waiters baring their teeth at the darkness and waitresses showing at most the white heels of their stockings in their clogs, from the moment she appeared she caused great sighs, beaming smiles, straightened backs, welcomes, people taking their seats. Suddenly invisible lights were switched on or lit, also a fireplace fire, and that in Yugoslavia, and then musicians stepped forward, who had been waiting specifically for her in a back room. People clustered around the couple with great emotion, solicitous and childish; at last they could show their best, their true side. Who were “they”?—“The peoples.”

Later the two of them set out together for Arabia, where he worked as an engineer building a pumping station along an oil pipeline and after a few years committed suicide, or, as she said, “went of his own accord.” She told the story that way so that the listener, instead of asking why and how, would merely nod.

She returned to Yugoslavia, to the city of her birth, for a time managed her parents’ inn, engrossed anew in the citywide roof-tile images, and the processions of ridgepole tiles heading toward the Orient. Either she was seen only in the taproom, now in heel-revealing clogs herself, and with grim, dark eyebrows, intentionally penciled in this way, or far away on the wintry back roads, recognizable by her rapid pace, almost like the jerky movement of a speed walker (an athletic discipline), shoulders back and rolling.

Then she became, the first woman in Slovenia to do so, a forester, no, godzar, whom, almost as famous as the former Miss Yugoslavia, no one connected with the latter, superior to the men because of her sharp eyes and ears, especially in the forest dusk and night; then married again, a local “co-worker,” both of them in uniform and studded with decorations from the Communist Party; then she returned alone, “single,” without work, to her room under the eaves, where she made herself, as she said, “beautiful again,” simply by looking and reading, and began to draft maps of imaginary countries, on a very small scale, painstakingly precise, with every watering place, cave, pier, cliff, following the example of the map in her copy of Treasure Island, which had remained more deeply engraved on her memory than the entire story; drafted, measured, outlined, entered; otherwise did nothing besides her work in the taproom except, on her morning walks along the edges of the fields, dig out hren (i.e., “horseradish”) to be used as a seasoning for the “cold-cut platter” in her restaurant, long, always amazingly white-white roots, until one day we met on the bridge over the river and each of us reminded the other of someone else, she me of no one in particular and I she perhaps of everyone but her first husband. With our shared story consigned to the past, my friend married for the third time, after an interval long enough, she wrote me, for her to feel “pure again,” and she moved to join her husband in the “city where the cathedral is an imperial palace” (Split) and gave birth to her children (two).

Not only did she take on nothing from her new status in life and continue her solitary trips as well as her Treasure Island studies; her children even seemed to be born without her, slipping from her body without labor pains into the world, and this, it seemed to me, was how she dealt with them later, more than merely unconcernedly, I thought, roughly, irresponsibly — but who knows?

It was similarly disquieting that in the intervals when she assumed the role of a housewife she became one with a single-mindedness that left no breathing room for anything else. She would be constantly cooking — and overcooking — washing laundry — washing out the color — washing the dishes with such forceful motions that they broke, and she went around, even on the street, along the pier, in felt slippers, every inch the slattern or the caricature of a concierge, with the two ends of her headcloth sticking up like rabbit ears. But might she not be on her way to a parachute jump in this getup? Yes, who was she?

And then again it sounded believable when she said, “The supermarkets and shopping centers are my native turf.” And once she also let fall, as if it were to be taken for granted, that she, who hardly had to worry about money, participated in a housewives’ circle like those in American suburbs, in which the women took turns inviting each other to their homes, and combined a convivial afternoon, with no men around, with the selling to each other of plastic kitchen utensils, like peddlers, except that it was in their own houses, she! and in “our Yugoslavia”!

She had come to Turkey this time in response to a classified advertisement, either delivering or smuggling to someone in Izmir a Ford Mustang, the luxury car with the galloping wild horse as its insignia.

After this she continued to head east, almost exclusively on foot, not only from bay to bay but just as much through the interior of the country, where on a single plain there were often numerous little brooks and rivers — marked by a succession of high natural fences consisting of reeds — often in the middle of nowhere, each like a living thing, flowing side by side toward the sea, slowly, and easy to cross (for her).

To stroll across such deltas, to wade, to swim, to dive, with a new watercourse every couple of stages, without bridges or boardwalks — of all the varieties of being underway she found this the airiest and most lofty, “my golden proportion.” These plains were similar to those of the Isonzo, Tagliamento, and Piave rivers in northern Italy, which streamed toward the Adriatic in parallel, each one as the other’s neighbor, only the plains here were far more remote, and smaller, and the watercourses, often nameless, were closer together and simply more ancient-seeming, and that not only because of the older history of the region.

It could happen that she did not cross such a brook immediately, but continued in it and with it — she was equipped for that, or sometimes not — to where it flowed into the nearby bay, where the ocean was often so still that there was a clear boundary between the two types of waves, those of the brook and those of the sea, their encounter with and merging into each other as gentle as imaginable, or that even the individual waves came from the fresh water streaming out into the salty deep, or at least the individual ones that made themselves heard.

For her it was something special to feel this borderline, slightly rocking, against the backs of her knees, at her hips, or on her thighs, one water in front of her, the other behind. (And although she subsequently referred to herself only in the singular, I think she was not always alone, “not absolutely alone.”)

In such spots she also regularly found, underwater, something resembling a treasure, which, however, soon lost this aspect once outside its particular zone.

She was even more powerfully attracted by such river-mouth areas, the miniature ones, than by the ocean.

In the meantime, along the paths, in the Turkish villages, she transported her few things on a cart she had “borrowed” somewhere, and thus gave herself the appearance of a pilgrim to Jerusalem.

Then, too, sometimes, when it was already spring, not in order to disguise herself but for protection against the sun and the dust on the road, she went along with a jacket over her head, pulled down over her eyes and mouth, looking thin and so black-clothed that she appeared more peasantlike than any native woman. In the light shining through the material, filtered by it, the most harsh and naked landscapes were softened as if by an eclipse of the sun, a different sort from the kind we associate with certain battles during the Crusades: a calming one that sharpens one’s powers of observation, and she wondered why no one wore sunglasses made of this different kind of transparent material instead of glass.

If she attracted attention at all, it was only because of her bare legs, which, from her knee breeches down, were scratched and rough, even revealing the beginnings of varicose veins, “appropriate,” in her words, “for a Slavic woman.”

Then one morning she was jolting along, her heels almost in the dust, on a mule; trotted by toward evening on a horse; was sitting the following day behind the windows of a bus that were shaking like a kaleidoscope, which also made the countryside look kaleidoscope-like; turned up by the sea a few days later in a thickly wooded, seemingly uninhabited bay, high on the hump of a camel, looking from the other end of the bay like the advance guard of the scattered “Orient Circus” that had lost its way, appearing from close up, with her sooty cheeks, like a guerrilla or simply a charcoal burner’s wife — higher up in the forest a charcoal pile really is smoking — who now settles down with all her earthly possessions on a dock in the reeds, by a carefully carved-out channel, little by little joined by similar figures loaded down with bundles, who, like her, seem to emerge from the underbrush, several children in tow, all of them now waiting, in silence, for the weekly motor launch that will carry the group on to Fethiye or Marmaris, where they will change to the bus to Istanbul or to the steamer to Antiochia, Alexandria, Heliopolis, Leptis Magna, while the camel, now riderless, already far away, circles the bay at a leisurely pace, and a child who stayed behind on the shore fills with stones the shell casing found by my woman friend on her way there but then left lying on the beach.

Although she did not keep notes or make sketches or take pictures on her trip, sending her husband and children only picture-postcard greetings and sending me, in loose imitation of Heraclitus, only fragments like “The village of Kokova shouts its poverty out over the sea,” it seemed to her as though all her movements, back and forth across the country, were being recorded.

With her peculiar style of being on the road, always and intensely focused on the subject at hand, prepared to let herself be surprised and to surprise others, she pictured herself making tracks not only through these regions but simultaneously on a particular map of the world. There each of her present steps seemed at the same moment to be placed as a marker, like the markings of an explorer, and ineradicable, which gave her a good conscience in addition to the pleasure she could experience alone with herself this way: as if her crisscrossing were now a form of work, for the common good if any work ever was.

In addition, as she saw it, not a single step in the course of her journey could be such that it contravened that transfer onto the “trail map” as she pictured it. One false step or thoughtless action, and the entire marker script that she had paced out would be eradicated; her work, her oeuvre, would have been in vain.

From such consciousness she then derived something like an ad hoc ethical imperative: “Conduct yourself on your journey in such a way that you see nothing you do as a violation of your leaving traces.”

But then why did she still expect that the next time she came around a bend she would finally have before her eyes that which she found sorely absent from such a way of life, scandalously lacking? Why did she search, and search, and search?

And from time to time she thought that what she would encounter around the bend would be the ax murderer intended just for her, and her presumed leaving of traces was merely a sickness, part and parcel of that irresponsibility that led her to tell herself that what she was doing should not be judged and punished like the actions of others, simply because she was the one doing it?

And with the outer-space-blue Turkish sky above her, she saw herself as far from where duty told her she should be, indeed as torn away from it, never to return. No matter how faithfully she continued to follow her personal rule, which, again paraphrasing the stutterer Heraclitus from Ephesus — a place already irretrievably left behind — went as follows: “Go well!” and which she had mastered and now modeled for the world around her as otherwise only the woman apothecary of Erdberg (from my unwritten novel) could: in such moments she was behaving, in the eyes of the agency responsible for her, like a vagabond, as a disgraceful neglecter of her main concern.

But what was her main concern?

The others, even her children — thus experience had taught her — were better off without her constant presence; her long absences did them good. Her assignment — thus experience had taught her as well — was her way of being on the road in this original fashion. “My way is my assignment, nothing else!”

Yet now that was no longer valid — for hours, even days, at a time. No matter where she struggled along, eyes opened wide to the millennia-old life of the Orient, her graceful movement providing at the same time an example of pure presentness: nothing more of it appeared on that map that required no reprinting, located — plotted — recorded — transmitted. Among thousands of good news items this was the bad news from this journey. She did not feel herself to be either in the Orient known for its patriarchal atmosphere or in the Levant fabled for cinnamon and clashing cymbals. Spaceship Earth did not answer anymore, even to the most imploring SOS scraped by toes and pounded by heels.

Carefreeness: was my friend in the process of losing it?

It could even be that in the course of the summer, in some city on a harbor, in the bars and bazaars, she was listening for sounds of home: except for a bit of Russian, nothing. During this year she seemed to be the only person from her country spending time in this area, or abroad at all, and for the first time this was not a matter of indifference to her. For the first time she felt something like fear, or a prelude to fear.

One day she could be seen among the yachts, where, without needing money, she offered to help the crew with shopping onshore; and the next day she rented for herself, for continuing her trip eastward, a light cayman with crew, she being the only passenger, in which role she then stood erect in the bow, which was decorated with nothing, nothing at all, and sailed into a bay accessible only to ships and already sparkling festively when she arrived and filled with the sweet scent of wood fires, tying up in the last berth there, to the sound of “Death and the Maiden” drifting across the water from the most distant of the boats. And on a third day, still in the depths of night, she created a silhouette, standing before the glow of a village flat-bread oven in the interior. And in the first gray of dawn she was darting along a path through the hills, whose earth was cracked from dryness into an endless hexagonal net; she walked ahead of a herd of goats, the males’ horns clashing against each other. And that same morning, in a town already up in the mountains, she had a tooth extracted, and at noon stood in a house entryway without a door, contemplating a pair of canine lovers, glued together, no longer able to break loose, howling with strain and pain, tumbling around and around each other, until she felt hungry. And that same afternoon she crossed a mountain village, deserted except for an old woman and her hens, and robbed of its access road by an earthquake; she had to practically scramble over the village, like a wall of rubble and boulders, then wished a good evening to a soldier on patrol with a walkie-talkie, on a rise, in the icy wind, the eternal Taurus snow before his eyes, and then ran downhill, ran and ran, until she reached the next harbor, where the cook on her hired boat was already waiting for his queen of Sheba with the evening meal, while the helmsman lay on his back next to the cayman in the extremely salty water and by the light of the full moon read the newspaper spread wide between his arms, or made it look as though he was reading.

This particular day occurs in the August heat, when even the wind is blazing hot and makes breathing difficult, and my friend has had a taxi drop her off before sunrise near the ruins of an ancient temple to Leda, who was ravished by the chief god in the shape of a swan. Actually the temple was dedicated to Zeus’s lawful wife, his first, whose name was similar, Lato, but the traveler had decided to rededicate the temple in honor of the woman who bore Helen, which happened to be my friend’s name as well.

And indeed, in the darkly shimmering light of dawn, more part of the marly furrowed land than of the sky above it, in the midst of a heavy, soundless stillness, the swan in question swooped down among the fragments of columns, in a sudden dive, casting its shadow ahead of it, like a bird of prey about to pounce on its booty, landed amid splintering and cracking in a puddle, flapped its wings furiously in the air, and promptly lifted off again, vanishing immediately behind the dike along the nearby river, and in the temple precinct, as a branch usually bounces after the departure of a winged creature, the water rippled in widening circles, with the disappearing swan’s flight creating a sound like an immense coughing. “On with the day!” (Another of her favorite paraphrases of Heraclitus.)

After hours of heading inland in the heat, quite often running to make the breeze feel cooler, far from any water, once passing fleshy, hip-high stands of wild sage, once passing stinking sheep skeletons, she found herself marching through a broad stretch of hinterland, where, again for hours, all the umbrella pines and scrub chestnut oaks stood charred, which afforded a view of the world very similar to the one she had had with the black jacket over her head. For a long time she encountered not a single living being, just as the soot colors, up hill and down dale, remained at a distance, and, in the absence of wind here, the only sound came from her footsteps. She waded through ash mixed with pitch. The smell of burning brought back to her nostrils the remembrance of the smokehouses of her childhood and thus now and then provided a sort of cooling by way of memory.

Once, when she crouched down to relieve herself, there appeared unexpectedly, from all sides, butterflies — small ones and large, blue, white, multicolored; in no time they had swarmed over the spot of urine and were drinking it. As she held still, all around her in the charred landscape she heard the very delicate chirping of crickets, which, like no other sound, wove together or dissolved proximity and distance, a welcome sound after the cicadas’ racket, which here in the dark light was absent for a change. And close enough to touch, glassy in the dull ash gray, a snake glided by, slithering in a zigzag, its head slightly raised, as if looking for its family after the fire.

On with the day. And toward sundown she came to a strip where finally some growth was beginning again, first in the form of blackberry canes, clambering green up into the dead branches, and their berries, which in such a setting somewhat resembled animals made up of thousands of black-gleaming eyes, for which she stood on tiptoe, jumped, took a flying leap. She followed the green strip as it widened, and descended by the steep path, with now and then a breath of ocean air from below, for a while adhering to the rhythm with which a long-bodied Mediterranean hornet flew time and again at a snail shell on the ground, pushing and rolling it along, until the house was finally lying with its open side up, into which the hornet promptly slipped, and my friend recognized, and heard as well, that inside it was now ripping and stripping the rotten flesh from the walls.

The water of the new bay, which she reached as the last swallows were still swooping across the sky, again at a run, in loping strides, was — without a ship, hardly even a boat — thickly populated by swimmers, probably from the village nearby, all generations together, their heads gazing out over the still, bright surface of the ocean as if everyone were present.

She joined them, swam as she had previously run or strolled, and the sea, which at the same time did not make her feel wet, buoyed her up under her arms, embraced her, mothered her, as if celebrating the return of the Prodigal Daughter, and as if this were all that had been necessary to quench the thirst of her many days’ journey. She dove down, saw on the ocean floor, half buried in sand, the sarcophagi of a sunken ancient cemetery, or petrified boats, their keels pointing up? and afterward she sat down on the shore, her face turned inland, from which now, in the katabatic wind, parachutists, an entire squadron, facing toward the coast and, some of them linked together in figures as during an air show, float down onto the “Bay of the Prodigal Daughter”: from close up, the wings of linden blossoms, with the fruit capsules dangling from them, and swarms of bats zigzagging around them.

And my friend murmurs half out loud, turning to no one in particular, including herself: “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s all over with me. I shall die soon. Today was a happy day. Thank you. When was that? It was a long time ago. I am mourning. Ah, movement! What do you want to search for? Look. One must look. Sweet life. I am afraid. Is anyone there?”

And she listens to her own voice and is amazed at what comes out of her when she simply talks to herself this way.

And she longs to perish, longs for glory?

5 — The Story of the, Architect and Carpenter

When I was in Japan, in every new place, in the cities and even more in the countryside, I imagined undertaking the journey with a farmer from my Central European village, Rinkolach, and a woodsman from the same Jaunfeld area.

I would have been the tour guide, so to speak, but one who kept silent if at all possible, and in the presence of the wooden temples, the fields and trees, would have been merely a witness to the exclamations, the observing, the touching, the describing, the comparing, perhaps even the theorizing of the two others with their expertise.

With their calm, endless capacity for wonder they would have, I thought, kept my own wonder alive; without them it pretty much dissipated after a few days. Instead of taking in the differences, as at the beginning, with refreshed eyes, thoughtfully, I found myself observing almost exclusively the similarities, which manifested themselves more and more concentratedly with every day that passed, and from which, unlike in Europe, there seemed to be no escape into unpopulated areas or into nature (at most in the national parks), such that at times I actually felt like a prisoner on the Japanese islands.

If I set out to get productively lost, I did not once succeed, blocked as I was on all sides by barriers or impenetrable thickets. If, on the other hand, I set out with a destination in mind, also in a hurry and short of time, for instance trying to make a train, I would get so hopelessly lost that in the end I did not know anymore which was right or left, had two left hands or feet for every movement, and collided with all the passersby in Japan, who without exception took the shortest route and also never stepped out of a person’s way.

Without the woman from Catalonia at my side sometimes — this was our honeymoon — I might perhaps have knocked down one of these millions of prison wardens, who acted as though I did not even exist, and embarked on a meaningless flight.

But with my two fellow villagers I would have found constant pleasure in Japan. Every day they would have grasped and explicated in my presence things that could not be found in any guidebook; they would have been the right teachers for me, their unhurried eyeing of an object and then of the relevant subject matter, articulated in astonished conversations with themselves; in no time flat they would have been on intimate terms with the local folk, without imposing themselves on them and without even exchanging a word, with construction workers, cottagers, priests, drinkers, women at the market, gamblers.

Imagining their company did help me now and then, but did not replace their physical presence, the actual expert fingering, sniffing, measuring.

The carpenter and architect did not need such companions. Wherever he was in the inhabited world, when faced with any questionable phenomenon he could summon and deploy from within himself an entire team, as it were, in which one complemented the other, helped him along, took over his role. If he was constantly talking to himself on his trip to Japan, it was a discussion, usually in question-and-answer form, between not merely a builder and a woodworker but also, for instance, a geologist and a well digger, a teacher and a road builder, a photographer and an ironworker, and, last but not least or in between, an actor and a nobody or a ne’er-do-well. As he learned from unfamiliar objects, he learned from himself.

Yet he accomplished hardly anything, and did not even much care. When he built something, it was almost always without a commission, without a client, for himself, or for no particular reason, on the piece of property he owned, a scruffy savanna on the Italian karst, above Trieste, which he had inherited from his parents, or secretly, on no-man’s — land, especially that of cities — to the extent such a thing could even still be found anywhere nowadays.

That these structures stood there unfinished, one and all, was not his intention, at least not his express intention. As he said, he wanted to leave himself as much time as possible for each, and it did him good, he remarked, to start something new in the meantime, and besides, it was a pleasure to do everything himself. And furthermore, he had no money.

So for a house on his land (he acted as though he did not know whether it was intended for himself), he had dug out a small sinkhole to create a cellar, but since then nothing had been added: only the hemispherical form, hollow, its walls like its rounded floor finished with the local white, gray, and bluish limestone, lay there sunk into the steppe under the open sky, and a spiral staircase built from the wood of the narrow, tough karst oaks, without a railing, stuck up out of the hollowed-out cellar, rose above the earth’s surface, and ended at about the height of a diving board, with a final, thicker, threshold-wide step leading out into space — that was where the entrance level of the house was probably supposed to be, with a round floor plan, eventually or never?

To be sure, he had already erected a doorframe made of the same weather-resistant wood as the staircase, broad like a portal, set into a marble base, but it stood, and apparently not only temporarily, somewhere else entirely on the lot, with nothing else around it, and seemed to belong to a second house or a future courtyard wall; and the ramp of tamped red earth, located somewhere else again, gently mounting into nowhere, was perhaps conceived of as the approach to a barn, or at least such a thought was suggested by the ladder wagon left from his parents’ days that stood there, with stone chucks behind the wheels, the shafts stretched forward as if in anticipation of a new draft animal — though he then put the barn somewhere else entirely, at first nothing but four tall poles set in concrete, topped by the ridgepole and the rafters, uncovered to this day, through all of which the air whistled, except in the entryway built down below, its boards tightly joined, with two completed doors and even a glazed and puttied window, an entryway large enough to sit in — but what did that have to do with a barn?

A trench from the First World War ran right through the builder’s work area; his parents had filled it with rock and especially brush when they cleared the land, and he piled more on top of the juniper, grapevine roots, blackberry bushes, interwove the whole thing, stuffed the interstices with the tough savanna grass, the hard, clumpy red earth, smoothed and rounded the top, creating, along the former trench, the longest, most curving, most elastic bench for sitting on that I have ever encountered, although it was not certain that this structure had been planned as such: would he raise the bench later to the height of a wall, perhaps even studding the top with bottle shards?

At first sight someone might perhaps have mistaken all his piecework for a movie set. But for that the individual elements were too solid. A set designer or builder would never have been capable of designing and devising actually usable nooks like the craftsman and master here. And in distinction to a movie set, with these structures the adventure being played out or the relevant story would remain utterly mysterious, or, on the contrary, would not pose the slightest mystery.

His architectural works outside of the inherited parcel, in hidden no-man’s — lands in the four corners of the globe, stood there unnoticed. Aside from his friends, hardly anyone knew that those mounds that could easily be confused with local piles of rubble and soot were, under their camouflage, bake ovens, cisterns, root cellars, and woodsheds.

This notion stemmed from his childhood on the karst, in a borderland, which additionally had the “Communist threat” on the other side of the border, against which a third of the entire Italian army was massed, with weapons and tanks, all camouflaged under fake woodpiles, from which, when he was on his way to school, he would suddenly see a tank’s gun thrusting, under fake igloos of stone, which would unexpectedly flip open, revealing the nose of a rocket, inside a lone tree of the steppe, from which, through a sliding door, a heavily armed guard would emerge: the architect and carpenter’s later structures were the reverse of all this.

The only money he earned, in addition to that from odd jobs, came from a position at the University of Udine, where, for one hour per week, he taught the architecture of Greece and Rome, and his earnings went almost entirely on his building projects, or, as he called them, “void building,” “memory building,” “attention building.” That he could spend this year in Japan was a birthday present from us, all his friends, and to reciprocate he had promised us a sort of photograph album, with the working title “No-Man’s-Land Strips in Japan.”

Yet up to now, the middle of autumn, he had hardly taken a picture, although the painter had given him a camera that could take pictures with the most accurate long-distance focus, and although, contrary to expectation, here and there among the Japanese subdivisions, which were built up almost solidly, something similar to terrain vague had turned up; he had hardly taken a picture either of the theme of his journey or of anything else typically Far Eastern, but instead perhaps a picture of a motorbike wrapped in a silvery tarpaulin in Yokohama, the hands of three children, one on top of the other, on an umbrella handle on the tiny island of Izu, a wooden rack for drying rice straw, similar to the hayracks in Carinthia and Slovenia, at the turnaround in a field in the north — and that could have been anywhere in the world.

The moment was gradually approaching for fulfilling his promise. But, as he just wrote to me, he still feels reluctant to take pictures. And the photograph he did send along, of the Ryoanshi Temple, which he had just visited for the second time, of the “nothingness” or contentlessness of Kyoto, did not show the famous empty pebble garden with mossy boulders (and in addition perhaps the rake belonging to the monk-gardener), but, as a wobbly snapshot, merely the masses of visitors, sitting head by head on the balustrade around the square, their legs dangling down, apparently talking loudly, laughing, squinting as they faced the expanse of nothingness.

The handwriting in the architect’s letter was certainly not that of a person who had been sitting idle. It was that carpenter’s writing that I take as my model now and then. By that I do not mean the thickness of the carpenter’s pencil, intended for marking and numbering pieces of lumber, but rather the heaviness of the hand, perceptible to the reader, from which I sense: the man who wrote that must have been working just beforehand, using his entire body.

Not that the writing is shaky. Rather, it is rounded, the fingers, just washed, rest on the paper, except the index finger and the thumb, blood coursing through them from the manual labor in which he was just engaged, and the joints follow accordingly, and with them the lines, loops, connections, and transitions among the individual letters. The carpenter’s writing has something about it as handy as it is hearty, it is painted and built, and it breathes like the thing written; I decipher it as a document.

Thus I have likewise developed the habit of seeking out some physical work that involves the whole man — not a sport — before I get down to writing. Except that my raking, sawing, chopping, cropping, thinning is different from the carpenter’s painstaking fitting, joining, measuring, nailing, bracing, and more often than not I fail to achieve with my gardening that pulse of variety that would make my hand not only heavy but also flexible.

And as I look again at my distant friend’s letter, I picture him that same morning, on a vacant lot in Kyoto, onto which, overgrown as it is, he fought his way with the help of a bamboo knife, and where he has gathered and piled up stones to make a hidden fireplace, from the outside merely the empty base on which at one time, in the outer courtyard of a now vanished holy place, the demon of deterrence once stood. For secretly the architect has an entirely different project in mind than the aforementioned photo album: to leave behind in a Japanese no-man’s-land another such camouflaged structure.

Back there in the winter snow of Morioka he was already close to accomplishing it. After weeks of searching from south to north, he was standing, not all that far from the center of town, at the first break in the rows of houses that otherwise stretched unbroken across the long island country of Japan.

The sight of the windy strip, with nothing but a clump of bamboo poking tall and narrow out of a puddle frozen solid, down to the gravel at its bottom, without a sign that new building activity was in the offing, for the moment did him nothing but good. A very long time ago something must have been built in this opening, of which now only a certain artificial unevenness, its forms blurred, served as a reminder. The wire fence that separated it from the street had gaps where one could slip through; it had rusted out long ago, and no sign either indicated that the place prohibited entry or announced new construction. From the crown of the bamboo, whose shafts were bluish, came a seething and humming, and the listener wished the sound would resolve itself into an utterance that he could take away with him.

Instead a little plane broke through the clouds above him, and from it boomed that martial loudspeaker voice that had accompanied him, so to speak, all through Japan, in which a nationalist party was demanding the return of the islands lost to Russia during the Second World War. And the following morning, when he came to his project site very early, still in bitter-cold darkness, equipped with a tinsnips and the many pockets of his special jacket stuffed with the necessary tools and materials for erecting the planned enclosure — a space in which the rustling of the bamboo in the midst of the emptiness could resonate — he found it illuminated by spotlights, the bamboo hauled away, the first holes bulldozed, and the area swarming with workers in blue overalls and yellow helmets, like all over the world, and even the Keep Out sign had English subtitles. And so he watched the workmen, dark like Mongolians, until the sun rose (late and very slowly above Morioka, already very far to the north): the first thing they set up was a tall wooden partition, a sort of screen from the street. And although they appeared to overlook him, in time it seemed after all as though they were following, as with a foreman, his eyes’ silent directives, which, because he knew what the next step had to be, were always one step ahead.

The medium-sized high-rise buildings around the center of Morioka looked hardly any different from those in Udine, for example, and the many sparsely wooded hills reminded him of those of Friuli, from between which, just as here, the snowcapped mountains in the north gleamed. What was so different from home in this remoteness, except perhaps that instead of the accustomed clanging of bells a gong sounded? And the carpenter felt compelled to get away from the cities, in the opposite direction from most architects.

At the railroad station in Morioka, while he was waiting for a train to take him farther north, where the couple of falling snowflakes collided in the air, for the first time on his journey one of the natives approached him, a young boy, and requested permission in English to ask him a few questions, but then could not stammer out even the first question.

To get out into the Japanese countryside, into a village, into nature, then became more tedious than tracking down the last hiding place of vagueness in the cities. But since he was fired up with enthusiasm for such a destination, it had to exist, as he told himself. And since he had unusual patience—“refresh your heart, be patient” was his motto — even the routes he took gave him pleasure.

Yet as a rule he had to plot them out himself, especially where the plains thickly dotted with settlements and cultivated fields met the mountains. Here he suddenly encountered virgin forest so dense that he could move forward only with the help of his special folding hatchet. How had the itinerant poets of earlier centuries made their way through here? Or had it been easier to cross the Japanese countryside on foot in those days? But hadn’t almost all of them died young, and in the course of their wandering?

He then recognized that the quintessential rural and village settings were very like the Japanese urban no-man’s-lands: they, too, often existed only for a single moment, though in different form. On yet another morning, now much later in the year, having arrived, as it were, by the back way at a mountain temple, and then been for hours its only visitor, squatting in the dim outhouse there, hidden in a remote spot behind plum and cherry trees, for a moment he had again experienced the sense of security he had had using the privy on his parents’ solitary farm near Aurisina, reachable only through the barn or by way of a long, roofed wooden gallery; whereupon he wrote to me that it was time for my long-promised “Essay on Convenience Stations.”

It was conspicuous that he usually stumbled upon such spots near temples, specifically in their far-branching, always narrow, tapered hinterland, carved out of virgin forests, here a small vegetable garden, there just such a cemetery, connected by an old wagon trail; and the couple of Buddhist monks, always busy, appeared there in the role of farmers.

And again one morning he saw in such an area a cluster of people who did not merely appear to be country folk, men and women, but were the spit and image of those from home, with stooped backs, prolapsed knees, gout-ridden, and this group of village pilgrims broke out in a unanimous cry of astonishment at the sight of the temple bell, at which each one straightened up from his stoop, stretched, stiffened, snapped upright, and one of the farmhand types almost tipped over backward.

That he almost always saw such no-man’s-lands or villages only from the exterior was something he found perfectly all right. Remarkable architect that he was, he almost never felt drawn to interiors. He even avoided these wherever he could.

The many different voices speaking inside him did not interfere with one another. Each one — that of the wood inspector, the wind expert, the acoustical engineer, the vagabond and dowser — could have its say, at length, was distinct from that of its predecessor, which it took account of, continued, supplemented, grounded. That would yield an entire book (and someday he means to write it himself). And in between, and often for a very long time, the voices also kept silent, and he was, again as since childhood, just someone or other, feeling invisible.

In time many of the Japanese appeared to him more like travelers than himself. He was the native. Having set out with a swarm of them before dawn to climb Fujiyama, he went off on his own before they had even reached the tree line and spent the day searching for mushrooms, in the course of which he came upon a deer, small and stocky, almost like a wild horse, like his deer on the karst. And in Yokohama, where he lingered for an entire day on a slope above the harbor in the “European Cemetery,” with the graves of the first traders to come in the nineteenth century, he sat or walked, like the cemetery watchman of many years, behind native visitors, who photographed each other in front of the mostly English inscriptions, and here and there young people, as dusk fell, kissed; and then another time he stood in one of the temples of mountainous Nikko while the priest deep inside called out “Amida!”—that single word that was supposed to secure eternal blessedness — but how he called it out! He stood in the background as the temple servant on duty, one step away from the group who had come by bus from Tokyo and seemed more amused than anything else by the priest’s cry.

Only the Japanese children violated from the beginning his imagined unobtrusiveness. He was the one on whom rested the bright black eyes of the infants (one of whom was always crossing his path, although during the entire time he never once saw a pregnant woman), and in front of the giant Buddha of Kamakura, enthroned out in the open, so large and heavy that he positively radiated peacefulness, he, the observer half in shadow, became a more significant sight for the children filing past all day than the colossal statue. And although he not once caught an adult passerby looking at him, afterward he sometimes carried glances inside him, especially from women, deeper and more durable than anywhere else: and each time he realized how much he had needed to be noticed after all.

Thus from time to time he himself was responsible for his plunging again into the world as it streamed past, not only by making himself noticeable but also by noticing things himself, and not merely various no-man’s-lands or the bare countryside.

On the day of the great Buddha of Kamakura, he stood there until evening on the shore of the Pacific amid a group of girls in dark blue school uniforms who, one after the other, tossed long-stemmed roses like spears out into the ocean, and then danced until the flowers were carried out to sea and night fell. And then again schoolchildren, adolescents, in the railroad station of northerly Sendai, running in swarms alongside the train departing for Tokyo, in which sat their teacher, who had just taken leave of them forever; they were uttering wild cries of dismay, wailing, their tears visibly flying, their half-raised arms like stumps, their weeping spreading through the entire station, while at the same time the teacher, sitting in his compartment, wept silently in unison with them, something my friend had not experienced in any other country on earth, and also not in the land of dreams — only in the portrayals, everywhere in Japan, of the various animals mourning the death of the Buddha.

In early summer, back in the north, to which he felt most powerfully drawn, while crossing on the former ferry, now converted into an excursion steamer the size of an ocean liner, from Aomori to Hokkaido, he caught himself, shortly before docking, under the still-bright midnight sky, in the dense crowd of passengers on deck who were taking flash pictures into the void, running his hand from behind over the hair of a beauty, a tall woman with a very broad Mongolian face, as previously he had now and then run his hand over the head of one of the children. And she, too, let it happen, except that she turned toward him and did not smile. Never had anyone looked at him that way.

The horizon all around displayed long, smooth strands of clouds, almost horizontal, floating, just like the hair of his fellow passenger, though instead of black they were snow-white, and the ship’s arrival signal was still that of the former ferry, the only long-sustained note that had reached his ears up to that point in Japan, where from the traffic lights to the gameboys everything merely peeped and trilled (the temple gongs always died away too soon for him, and the dark drumming of water as it shot out over stones poking up through a cataract, a rarity everywhere in the world, was even more rarely to be heard out in the Japanese countryside, so difficult to get to).

On the island they became lovers, and he spent a few weeks with her, during which hardly a word passed between them, in a fishermen’s village, where they occupied a hut built on stilts among several similar ones, each standing on its own spot and painted in its own color, there along the steep, rocky slope.

During the day, when they went outside, they touched up the paint and improved the dock, which was given a slight curvature, and who has ever seen two people, both in overalls of the same whiteness, working so close to each other and never getting in each other’s way? Only people who had grown old together in house and garden could sometimes achieve that — but these two were still far from old.

The carpenter’s heavy hand became, in loose imitation of Vitruvius, my friend’s Roman ideal, identical with the architect’s elegance. When the two of them, finger to finger, pulled the skin off the fish they had fried together, squatting hip to hip, the bones formed an arrowhead pattern in the pale flesh, and in the dim light of the narrow pebble beach, after midnight a single shell, the size of a fist, shone iridescent in all the colors of the spectrum.

When he set out to leave her, it was understood that they would meet again by the year’s end at the latest, and from then on would do everything side by side. Through her, the rest of the natives had become more accessible to him (sometimes even too much so for a reserved person like him). After that he had only to seek out certain places — not only the farmers’ or fish markets, or the strange village on the northern sea where there was hardly any transition between the boats and the cottages — and the Japanese would reveal themselves in what was to him — this vigilant man from border country — an unfamiliar rootedness, even impudence, and, what is more, out of the public eye, lost the tormenting fear of failure they usually displayed there; when among themselves, they cheerfully made mistakes, merrily did the wrong thing.

What he had initially read in a travel guide now acquired another meaning for him: “You cannot get lost in Japan.”

This morning, already in mid-autumn, in Nara, the original capital of the empire, where he spent the night in the suite made almost entirely of wood that the woman from Catalonia and I had occupied during our honeymoon, the corridor outside as broad as a street, my friend found the courage to take his first picture of a Japanese no-man’s-land, then passed part of the forenoon lying on a temple balustrade facedown, his gaze through the gaps in the floor focused on the reddish, shimmering earth below, just as in childhood he had looked down from the gallery of the house on the karst into the chicken yard below, and in a residential quarter he again witnessed even the natives stumbling over the high threshold of their dwellings, and later he marveled for days over the course he had taken, not merely during this year in Japan but from birth.

He was born at the bottom of a doline, above San Pelagio near Aurisina, on that land he later inherited, a stone’s throw from the barriers on the Yugoslav border, brought into the world by his mother during an air raid while she was working in the fields far below, at a turnaround, and he imagined that his birth and childhood in the great hollow of the sinkhole, with the unique sounds characteristic of the place and the very round horizon above his head, had provided a sort of outline for his future life and his profession, also simply when, in his few earlier attempts at building houses, he had always left the roof uncovered — strange carpenter! — open to the sky, citing the example of the Romans, who did not allow the temples to Jupiter, the sun, and the moon to be roofed over.

And furthermore — while here in the bay, amid the leaves blowing in from somewhere all year long, this autumn’s first are falling, softer than the others, coming down perpendicularly, at the same time more slowly — he thought today in Nara about how the unvarnished fir planks of the ship and the dining table of nutwood back home had smelled after being washed down with hot water: how spicy, how appetizing. And about the pile of firewood out in the courtyard that reached up to the eaves, stacked almost without gaps, and how he had seen the only hole, down near the ground, triangular in shape, not as a hiding place for the cat but as the model for some future human habitation: he would sit in there himself someday and watch from the warmth the earth being swept clean by the north wind, the Bora, whom his parents called “the purest of women.”

And for years he had stared transfixed into the pit right behind his parents’ house where there was a bubbling, hissing, spitting, steaming from the lime being slaked, and for years he had also cracked the whip in the orchard on the steppe, using the juniper handle he had carved himself.

And then that cold morning in July when he no longer sat on the bus to Aurisina and Trieste as one commuting student among others but as a first-day apprentice, apart from the other passengers, in his still new-blue stiff work overalls. And how he then, in the Don Bosco Home, felt such homesickness for precisely the shabby spots at home: the worn linoleum under the table, the hot-water reservoir in the woodstove, encrusted with mineral deposits, the burn marks under the ash box, the pitted enamel of the washbasin, the scraped wooden threshold with the rusty nailheads.

And then the years during which he worked alongside his father as a carpenter, outdoors, feeling uneasy only on the day of the topping-out, not because his father would get drunk again, but because his father would not be as jolly from the drinking as all the others.

And then another such cold morning before he set out for the university, across the border to Vienna, when his parents planned to dress him ceremoniously in the cutaway of the godfather who had died in the war, which they had been keeping in a trunk up on the wooden gallery for just such an occasion, black with fine gray stripes and heavily padded shoulders, and this often tried-on garment, which previously had always been still too big and heavy for him, when it was unfolded this time suddenly hung there in tatters, shredded by moths.

Then came the many years until the moment, when, on the great plain down below by the limestone base of the karst, in Aquileia, which had been so close all the time and had once been very familiar, and not only from school excursions, behind the basilica that stood all by itself back in the grasslands between the mouths of the Isonzo and the Tagliamento, at his feet the former Roman harbor filled with the frogs’ gentle evening croaking, he found himself completely drawn into that antiquity of which he had previously been conscious only in bits and pieces, actually only a single piece, from a homey, swamp-black corduroy road, a section of alder, particularly swamp-resistant (according to Vitruvius) — the one moment when those couple of logs half buried in the path, which every time had announced something to him rather than reminded him of something, now became one with the once-mighty city of Aquileia, the metropolis of the ancient world, which at that moment did not seem at all vanished to him; it was now, it had arrived, it was his world, his future field of work: “Classical antiquity and I are one.”

And then waking up early today in Japan’s oldest city, where not even the temples struck him as ancient, for the wood, even on façades thousands of years old, had, as everywhere in this country, been replaced during this century. And looking down through the knotholes in one of the temple galleries, he saw, lying on the ground, the pine needles mingled with chicken feathers and corn kernels from the courtyard at home in San Pelagio or Sempolaj.

And from one of the pagoda towers, story after story, an unbroken chirping of sparrows, of whom only now and then a little flurry became visible, gray on the likewise gray roof. The doves tripping along in the gravel like first drops of rain. At the sight of the nostrils of a Buddhist holy figure, a desire to see a forest filled with apes the next day, for instance in the mountains around Kyoto.

On the way to the station in Nara, my friend encountered a Japanese woman with freckles, at which he thought, “I have a woman!” A sidewalk sweeper crossed the entire broad street to sweep up a single grain of dust on the other side. Behind a bamboo fence the first Japanese dog growled at him. Many of the passersby were carrying on silent conversations with themselves, which, to judge from their hand gestures, consisted chiefly of mental arithmetic. And, as everywhere, children balancing on the curb. On the evening train to Kyoto, talk going across the compartment, as if from starting blocks.

During his walk on the bridge over the already familiar Kamo River, the night wind billowed the sleeves of the mendicant friar there, his face invisible under the rim of his hat. From the open entryways of the buildings, especially the restaurants, wafted the smell of freshly washed floors. On all the city bridges traffic similar to that in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but under them, among the pebbles on the banks, here and there a frail elderly person, and the thought: “When I am that age, I, too, will go under the bridges.”

The no-man’s-land he had photographed that day had been marked by the concrete foundations of a long since dismantled barracks, emergency shelter after an earthquake, lying there a single stick of wood that was on fire, sending up a tall column of smoke, repeatedly decapitated by the wind. And then, at an afternoon No play, in which the actors kept speeding up their monologues so much that his heart began to race, he had seen another mask that showed him a self-portrait: that of a man caught up, according to legend, “in a one-second dream encompassing his entire life and at the same time aware that, on the contrary, this entire life itself is such a dream”—the expression on the mask one of tremendous astonishment. And outside the city again, on the edge of the wilderness, a Buddha lurking behind the jungle foliage appeared to him as the image of his parents involved in their almost silent work at the bottom of their cultivated doline, where even he, the son, had for decades been surprised and also startled by the faces of the two of them, behind sunflowers, pole beans, cornstalks. And at the end, at the stage of going under the bridge? it seemed to him as though on this day his many voices had come together into one — if only a rather feeble one.

Yes, the time was coming for his building. Except that on the journey he had little by little lost all his tools. And not for the first time in Japan my friend thought, “I’m not even born yet!” It was certainly the first time that he then thought, “I haven’t been anywhere yet!”

6 — The Story of the Priest

On an autumn evening in the current year, he, who otherwise dreamt consistently only on the nights of hoarfrost between Christmas and the festival of the Three Kings, had had a dream that stayed with him, in which he was not a priest but a nobody, a creature, his naked self. He stood there in harsh artificial light before the altar of his parish church, and unexpectedly there came from the sacristy a villager who had recently died, after a miserable death struggle lasting several days. He was larger than life and ordered him to his knees to receive the host. In the dream he had not knelt since his childhood, let alone received the “body of the Lord,” and for those very reasons the moment became special to him. In addition, the voice of the deceased, who, in priestly garments, had become the administrator of the sacrament, was commanding in a way that he had never heard in a terrestrial being. What this voice told him in the dream it immediately confirmed for all time: no way led around this food; to consume it was absolute necessity; without it you are lost! And although upon hearing this voice for the first time in much too long he felt a shudder of awe go through him, it was not just a bad dream; he did not wake up, but slept on, at first trembling and quaking, then peacefully, and finally blissfully.

That night he got up even earlier than usual, also because he had to work on his sermon for Sunday. From his desk he had a view of the back of the rectory and an orchard, which then, as was usual on the Jaunfeld, merged into meadows and fields without more ado. After morning Mass and his morning classes at the school in B., he planned to pick apples that afternoon and take them down to the cellar, without help, all by himself. And what else today? Lunch with the much younger priest of the parish on the other side of the Drau, in an inn halfway between them; another visit to a dying parishioner; an evening Mass for one who had passed away in Rinkolach.

If he looked in another direction, he could see the unmade bed in his bedroom, which would remain thus until late at night. It was cold in the two rooms, the only ones that were still lived in; no housekeeper to light the stove; and he himself did so only when company came, and even then often not.

In his sermon he wanted to challenge the Pope, in all seriousness, and that soon warmed him. For not long ago the man in the Vatican, in connection with a war in which enemy soldiers had raped and impregnated women, had called upon the women in question to love these children and bring them into the world and raise them in this spirit. What upset the priest was less the assumption that the women would carry to term these embryos conceived in violence than the command to love them. Could something like love be imposed from without, and furthermore from on high, publicly? To praise love, as the apostle Paul had done once and for all in his epistle to the Corinthians, was one thing; but to declare it a law and proclaim it as such, wasn’t that entirely different? Certainly he could well imagine that one of these women gradually, or more likely suddenly, might be seized (“surprised”? “afflicted”?) by a sort of love for such a fruit of her womb. But first of all, wasn’t that her own business, yes, her secret, and no one on the outside, not even the deputy of God on earth, could presume to approach a human being with a commandment to love. Or at most in private, as priest and pastor, like him, and then not in the form of a commandment but perhaps as a mere possibility, a little pointer.

He, the priest, was angry at his Pope for speaking of something like love in prescriptive terms, and he wanted to express that openly in his sermon (although precisely thereby his outrage would be perceived as part of a game). Wasn’t the love of a violated woman for this alien seed more the stuff of a story, a novella, than of a sermon from the pulpit? To be told only long, long after the event? Or perhaps not even in eternity? Something to keep unspoken, a matter only for the mother herself? And might not such love, in the cases in question, have long since gone silently and fervently to work, only to be desecrated by the papal edict? But was such a love even capable of being desecrated, by no matter what interference?

The greatest outburst of anger he had witnessed up to now in his life had come from a priest. It had happened during religion class, in the school in his native village, and the perpetrator had been that priest who was the epitome of gentleness, and not only in the eyes of the children. Instead of singing a psalm as usual, to put himself and the class in the right mood for the reading and narrating from the Bible, he posted himself in front of the class, at first without a word, his briefcase closed and his face disconcertingly red, and it became redder and redder as he broke into shouts so loud that they shocked even these farm children, accustomed to quite a bit from home. Every single one of them cringed, and was overcome with fear and horror, which grew from moment to moment, for the entire hour; for that was how long the priest screamed at the assembled children, without pausing for breath. At first they could make out only individual phrases here and there, like “Judgment Day,” “brood of vipers,” “end of the world,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” “spew forth!” and only near the end, when he began to tell a story, though still full of wrath, raging and yelling, did it become clear what this was all about: the previous day, upon entering the deserted church, he had caught one of the village children in front of the altar, thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue at Christ on the Cross. But it was not a simple childish prank; the longer the priest raved, the more the listeners came to see it as the worst offense possible, which could lead only to eternal damnation. Although he indicated that he had recognized the blasphemer, and he was seated there among the others, he did not name him and even avoided looking at anyone in particular. Even though the last word he spoke in this hour was “Vengeance!” repeated several times, he stressed that the avenger would be someone else. And they all felt implicated; each one slunk away, sure that he was guilty of sticking out his tongue at the Lord from the shadows, and maybe even spitting at Him; even he, who later became a priest himself, and in those days was already the “child of Siebenbrunn,” the one with natural piety, had at the very least been an accessory to the crime, and from now on it was all over for him with what had been in his eyes the “greatest fun,” the Mass?

Not only a believer but also a little propagator of the faith, or one who animatedly told anyone who would listen about his faith, that was what he had been as the child of Siebenbrunn.

The church, at some distance from the village, at the foot of a hill from which, as the place’s name indicated, in bygone times seven springs had actually burst forth, next to the farm of his father, who was also the sexton, from the beginning represented for him an extension and special part of the family holdings; very early on he was entrusted with the key to it: over the centuries erosion had piled up earth around the little sanctuary, more and more cutting down the size of the door; the threshold had been raised, and as a result the keyhole was low enough for him to reach. But for a long time he kept his distance from everything inside the church, and touched nothing. It was his father alone who rang the bells, laid out the priest’s robes for Mass, changed the flowers, lit the candles. The boy did not even feel drawn to be an acolyte, and whenever he substituted for someone, finding himself unexpectedly too close to the altar, especially the gilded tabernacle, in whose hollow interior he could actually sense the Holy of Holies, he would feel like an interloper; and he became terribly clumsy, pouring wine on the priest’s fingers, spilling incense on the altar steps, and during the entire Mass was scooping up the pellets there before the eyes of the congregation.

The child of Siebenbrunn felt at home only way in the back of his church, whether during Mass, in the course of which he regularly experienced an altered state, by the “Kyrie eleison!” if not sooner, or when contemplating the old paintings, also the frescoes and wood carvings. Before he even learned to spell, he took the situations they portrayed as fact: that was how it had been, that was the only story worth telling, and even if he later found that it was not documented in the specific wording of the Bible, he continued to read the pictures from his church as piously as the Bible. It was thus a certainty that when Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, an actual dove spread its light-radiating wings in the clouds overhead, that upon Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem a youth waved to him from the top of a tree with a palm frond, that when the Blessed Virgin breathes her last, her soul will escape from the lower part of her body in the form of a tiny child, who will in the same moment have already taken his place on the lap of the Almighty up above in the firmament.

And the child of Siebenbrunn told these stories to others for years and years, including to those who passed through that desolate place by chance. He invited the other person, the adult, into his church, so to speak, positioned him in front of the pictures, and recited and intoned their stories from the background, in a voice that emerged from an uninterrupted conversation with himself, which simply happened to become audible from time to time. He believed without reservation and serenely in these pictures — there could be no greater serenity — and lived in a continual state of joy, perceptible also to outsiders. Nothing could shake the faith of the child of Siebenbrunn; it was innate. With its first mirroring in the pictures of faith, life “was manifested,” as it said at the beginning of the First Epistle of St. John, a saying he later adopted as his motto. With him, at any rate, a loss of images remained impossible.

Or perhaps not? That “life was manifested”: did it not apply to “the Word” rather than to images? Had he, the priest, kept joy alive for himself? “Not really” (he now thought, in the middle of morning Mass, at the admonition “Lift up your hearts!”), “or at least not always.”

Did the child of Siebenbrunn still exist? Where was he? And what had become of him? No, nothing could become of him other than what he already was in the beginning! But then how did it happen that nowadays, if he returned to the area of his childhood at all, he tended to avoid his Siebenbrunn and instead sought out the church in the neighboring village, which was almost devoid of pictures, a church that had Job as its patron saint?

Not once had the child imagined in those early days that the priesthood would be anything for him, although that gentle and hopping-mad local priest had had an eye on him in this respect for a very long time, and then even treated him openly as one of the chosen, for instance because in catechism class he had answered the question as to where the Blessed Virgin had carried her son after the Immaculate Conception, not as the other children did with “in her belly,” but with “under her heart.”

Only a kind of yearning, unspecific, also undimmed by any troublesome hopes, was there. No question but that he would become a farmer right after finishing school, since his parents had both died young and his sister could not run the farm alone. Thus he lived for a decade, and then also fell in love with a girl, in fact from the village of Job, and the two wanted to marry. That he was always slightly absentminded did not trouble the young woman; she liked him that way.

What finally brought him to the priesthood was a lecture by an agrarian engineer for the young men of the area, given at the local community center and sponsored by the Agriculture Bureau. The title: “A Vocation for Farming.” First of all, it dawned on him that he lacked all the characteristics of a future farmer: unlike the others around him, he did not feel at all attracted to the fragrance of livestock; nor did his heart swell at the thought of ripening crops; nor did working outdoors make him happy or even proud; instead, he went about his work as if it were a sideline, like any day laborer, and his thoughts were usually somewhere else entirely.

Once he recognized his lack of vocation, he was seized with a burning restlessness. Instead of to his priest, he turned to the agrarian engineer, whom he looked up in the city of K., to tell him about his fatal lack of interest in farm work. To this day he thought it must have been simply the way he told the story, imploringly, that made the technical expert ask out of the blue whether he had ever considered becoming a priest.

The moment had come. At last he knew what he had to do. Yet he would have kept on farming if it had not also happened that his fiancee understood him instantly—“with glowing eyes!” as he told us — and even encouraged his plan, and that his sister around that same time met a man with whom she would run the farm.

In the beginning he, already an adult, attended a boys’ seminary, where he sat in the back and off to one side at a single desk, avoided by the adolescents and mocked as a “manure farmer” (although as a rule these children’s parents were farmers, too), and then he transferred to a special school for those called late to the priesthood. There he noticed that all the men, from the most varied walks of life, had at least one thing in common: like most ordinary priests, they had experienced while still children something like a summons or a vocation; except that they, unlike the others, had not felt that it applied to them, and had instead followed a course previously laid out for them. And to find their way to the priesthood they had all needed a second impetus, much later, well beyond their childhood. Things became clear to them and the picture came into focus only the second time around. They had had to rely on that second manifestation of life, which thenceforth remained immutable for them in a way that hardly anything did for the other priests — weren’t they, the latecomers, the ones most likely to stay with it for the rest of their lives?

After saying morning Mass, a silent one, in which his lips moved and no word was audible, it seemed to him as though he had taken a breath that would last him all day.

He went, in mufti except for the stiff white clerical collar, which, unlike his fellow priests, he never dispensed with in public, out of the parish church and across the already heavily traveled highway to the Inn on the Bend (on the long since straightened curve) for his café au lait, shoved across the counter to him without his having to order, stood there among the handful of workmen out early, men of few words, clearing his throat like them, and skimmed the already wrinkled newspaper, unmoved by even the most terrible events in the world (just as “his” dying parishioners never haunted him, even in dreams; once out of the sickroom he never returned to them in thought, and also calmly said so to anyone who wanted to know). According to the paper, a recent survey showed that the majority of the population considered priests useful to society, even if they seemed to have disappeared almost entirely from public life; except that, the article went on to say, in the eyes of most people they no longer spread happiness or tidings of great joy.

Then he set out in his forester’s vehicle, whose back seat had been removed to make way for a duffel bag, a pair of rubber boots, the slice of a tree trunk, all lying loose like the few tools and apples, which during the trip overland to the secondary school in B. caused a constant rattling and bumping.

It was a dark day, one on which small things showed up as if lit from within, and the world, with the sun in hiding, lay open for a new beginning; the rattling of the tools behind him provided a musical accompaniment. It made him think of the painting by Brueghel in the Museum of Art in Vienna, his first picture outside of a church (seen on the only field trip taken by the latecomers, otherwise always penned up in rural Horn, in Lower Austria), which had filled him with as much astonishment as the portrayals of the Gospel in Siebenbrunn, perhaps also because of its title, but who had given it that name?: “The Dark Day.”

But that picture in Vienna had been melancholy and almost menacing, especially because almost the only bright thing shining out of the gloom of late autumn was the ax or knife blade, with which, if he remembered correctly, an almost faceless peasant silhouette was pruning a bare tree, while the brightness of the present dark day appeared now in the round shape of an apple, now in the oval of a corncob, now in the rectangle of a many-colored beehive standing alone on the edge of Rinkenberg Forest, now in the triangle of a chapel’s shingled roof.

These objects, registered just this way in passing, brightnesses even for their form alone, appeared regardless of season and had, in their substantiality, in the wood, the fleshiness of the apple, the mealiness of corn, something ethereal as well, which allowed him to feel himself become, for the moment, fruit, silvery shingles, thin air.

Only once, and then for a long stretch, did that brightness disappear, when a series of unharvested fields intervened, filled of all things with sunflowers, probably self-sown, on this farmland that was more and more being abandoned here, each of the many flower heads, which turned or drooped in every direction, darkened, and this black-in-blackish extending all the way to no horizon.

He stopped then, although the children were perhaps already waiting in their classroom, by an abandoned farm along the way, half in ruins, in whose chimney cap on this chiaroscuro day the old live owl was sitting again, even if the only part of it that moved was the amber eyes, following the smallest motion of his finger as he walked back and forth before it, constantly looking up.

Unlike most teachers, the priest did not try to remember the pupils’ names; barely glanced at the individual faces. When I was back home for a visit one time and he took me to class with him, the way he ignored the children annoyed me at first. It reminded me of all the priests I had known since I was very small, in whose eyes I, and likewise those next to me, did not exist and at the same time had a duty to be there.

But then it appeased me that my friend at least did not impart religious instruction to those entrusted to him. Not only did every child from the outset receive the same, the very best grades: he also did almost nothing but have the children take turns reading the Bible stories aloud, during which he gazed not at the reader but out the window. At the beginning, he said, he had been the expert on the text, and still the reader himself, and then he had recognized how hollow it sounded coming from his mouth, compared with such first-time readers. Often the children did not even need to puzzle out the text, but came out with it fluently, as if nothing in it were foreign to them, and in the process they captured the nerve of the whole in sentence after sentence.

After that one hour in school, setting out with him on foot, I noticed on the other hand that he knew almost everyone, or everyone past school age, greeting people from afar, and loudly, calling them by name: many of the local people, however, including beyond the town limits, did not return his greeting, not even when he waved and gestured. “They don’t want to know me!” he said. And those who responded to him did so without a smile, and hardly anyone stopped to talk. He commented that it was their “guilty conscience,” while it seemed to me, on the contrary, that these passersby did not derive any real joy from their priest, and not because he was this particular one. His showing up resembled that of a keeper of public order, whose way of keeping order was not needed, not by the young people, and also no longer by most of the older people.

Always he had been well received only when he did not present himself as who he was. And now and then he even enjoyed being a kibitzer for a while, a participant, or a first-name friend to the people in his congregation, in pubs, outside shops, at soccer games. As long as that was all there was to it, and he, laying aside the priest, contributed nothing but his share to the conviviality, he was well liked; others interacted with him as they had perhaps always wanted to interact with a brother.

But every time the moment came when he viewed their continued familiarity as inappropriate, and tacitly expected them to consult him as their priest. And because that hardly ever happened, except far off in the villages (did such places even exist somewhere?), according to circumstances he would make a point of calling attention to his profession himself, no, his position, and so abruptly that his previous comrades would turn away from him in shock, seeing him suddenly as a man of the cloth.

He insisted on it, however. To present himself as this kind of authority from time to time was his duty. Of course he considered himself one of them, if anyone was. Yet it was not acceptable for them to keep letting themselves go in his presence; they had to give heed to his central concerns, at least now and then. In the long run he preferred to be cursed as a preacher than to be their pal. It filled him with conflict that, except perhaps when he was celebrating Mass or writing his sermons, he appeared outwardly to be anything but a “Reverend.”

How he loved driving, and fast, especially on this broad, rather deserted plain along the border, where during the period when he was engaged to be married he had even participated in an amateur auto race, with the same number painted large on the Volkswagen that he later used for his laundry in the seminary for latecomers.

Yet Carinthia north of the Drau, where he was headed today around noon, remained, as in his youth, a cold, unfriendly region, almost enemy territory, as if — though this was actually not true, if you looked at it the right way — southern Slavic soulfulness and earth-dreaminess came to an end there, and starting with the northern bank of the river, the landscape, including the fields, which were really no different, and the scattered church towers, were pierced by the gaze of the Germanic front soldiers, extinguished by a word-rattling German-speakingness that kept everything else at bay. This image — where did it come from? — he had still been unable to exorcise entirely; not long ago he had looked at the faces of schoolchildren from the capital city bouncing along in the back of army trucks on the tenth of October, the anniversary of the referendum that had joined the southern region to Austria in 1920, and had seen the faces of these children, obviously gleeful at having a day without school and high-spirited because of getting to ride in such a special vehicle, as those of grim volunteers, or at least children who were up to no good.

Such moods, which he called his “daily dose of dementia,” were calmed now by driving, also by the sight of snow high on the Sau Alps, which ran across the entire countryside to the north, and finally dissolved in thin air over on the other side of the rift carved out by the river, at dinner, where he sat with his “brother in office,” simply by virtue of his now having for the first time that day, not shadowy ghosts, but a person with clear outlines sitting across from him, and quite a young one at that, his mouth, cheeks, eyes, forehead nothing but young.

And thus, when his neighbor told him that the sole remaining Slavic grave inscription in the Ruden cemetery had now been removed, or at least hidden, squeezed in between the wall and German-gold stones, it was he who said that did not mean anything; to overlook it would be a form of strength; what mattered was something else entirely!

And he continued talking, about how urgent a German translation of the New Testament was, one neither as colloquial as Luther’s nor like one of the more recent ones, pitched to the understanding of the average newspaper reader, but one that was as literal as possible, from the Greek, which was akin to German, heart and soul, as were no other two languages he could name.

On his way back he thought he heard from a house standing alone at the bottom of the rift a loud sobbing, which turned out to come from the television there.

Out of the river rift, up on the Jaunfeld Plain again, back in his south, open in all directions, he saw from the highway, at the foot of Rinkenberg’s hill, which seemed closer on this dark day, the ancient priest from the village out walking; he had recently gone completely blind, and was being led across the fields by a child, his outstretched hand on the child’s shoulder, a gesture with which the blind man continued to celebrate the Eucharist in his church, proclaiming the texts from the Introibo to the Ite missa est by heart.

My friend turned off to the east, to the village called Dob, or in German Aich, where his parishioner lay dying and at the same time a single figure stood waiting at the edge of town in front of that railroad station he had always associated with Westerns, those films he had watched in his youth, and not merely to kill time; in his thoughts he got out and waited there with Jimmy Stewart.

In the heart of the village — there still was one here — by the outdoor clay bowling alley belonging to the restaurant now no longer in operation, he actually did stop, simply to roll into nowhere the one mud-encrusted, half-rotted wooden ball lying around.

Only after that did he enter the house next door with the dying man, who was fully conscious and at first shrank into his corner at the sight of the man in black, hair and eyes also black. What calmed and strengthened him at once was precisely the odd scorn in the priest’s gaze, which certainly did not pertain to him, the invalid in the last stages. This man facing death asked for the priest’s blessing and did not want to receive it lying down, but instead got out of bed and knelt for it; and thus received Extreme Unction, this sacrament that has almost gone out of use, practiced now simply to ease the conscience of the relatives, to whom the priest in departing indicated outside the door that their father would not die during the night, but tomorrow morning — for a long time now he had had a sense for the moment. And what if he himself died now, this very evening? they asked. He was indignant. “I’m not finished with myself yet.”

Alone, heading back to his car, he found the remote village in midafternoon still permeated with the freshness of morning. In the courtyards turnips were heaped up; a pear, at eye level, felt heavy in his hand; the mountains forming a great circle around the arena of the plain stood there in a color for which the name “Wyoming blue” came to him out of nowhere. How long had it been since he had gotten away from this region, the entire year thus far. He ordered two youths who were sitting on motorbikes and talking at the top of their lungs, while repeatedly revving their engines, to turn them off, went to his car without trying to hear what they were saying about him behind his back, and himself stepped hard on the gas.

The only walk he took this day that deserved the name was on a path through the fields, back to the edge of the Dobrava Forest, his destination the roadside shrine there, from which, on his instructions, a stonemason was removing the stucco and also the postwar frescoes — in the priest’s opinion not only clumsy but also mindless — so that the little place of worship would once more have nothing to show but its medieval stonework, at least for the present.

Now he had his rubber boots on, and also a mason’s jacket and cap, and joined the silent workman in hammering away, one of them outside, the other inside, and the mason was then fired up by his employer’s encouraging shouts, growing louder and louder as the original structure became visible and began to shine through (hadn’t it originally been his, the mason’s idea?).

And later, wearing the same outfit, my friend back home in his orchard picked clean the one apple tree that had not yet been harvested, until the last glimmer of day, when, from the foot of the ladder, a man in a necktie inquired where he might find the priest here, saying the Eternal Light in the church was not working; he was a traveling candle salesman, and also sold electric ones (now preferred by acolytes as better for their lungs). “The priest is on a round-the-world journey,” my friend replied, coughing from the phlegm caused by the candle soot, which would get worse during the winter, and laughed at the salesman’s departing back, neither maliciously nor kindly, just determined to remain uninvolved, decisively unmoved, as the child of Siebenbrunn had been taught by his father the sexton.

Washed and changed and then out again! already in darkness to Rinkolach, the village at the end of beaten paths, the village through which no street leads onward.

The affiliated church there was open, except for the commemoration of its consecration, held on a Sunday in summer, only for the few Masses for the dead. On this particular evening it was for a small farmer or occasional farmhand, without any family, who had died a long time ago, from the windows of whose former cottage turkeys now looked out, being raised by the neighbors who had ordered and paid for the Mass for him. Aside from the almost obligatory stranger who had somehow wandered in and sat off to one side, these were also the only people waiting for the priest in the dim church, praying, in Slovenian, the long All Souls’ Litany, actually more a sort of invocation, close to singing, and finally, very gradually and very delicately modulating into singing. At first, after entering through the open door, he had merely stood in the background, and they did not notice him until he joined in the last apostrophe, addressed not to the saints but to the Holy Trinity, at a terrifying volume, and also in another key.

The church of Rinkolach (Rinkole in Slavic), on its patch of meadow in the middle of the village, looked from the outside to be about the size of a hall; the inside, of the dimensions of a living room, though for a large family, did not provide enough space in the middle for a so-called “people’s altar,” and thus he said Mass at a distance from the people, raised above them on the stepped platform, usually with the nave at his back, from which, to be sure, the dove of the Holy Ghost embroidered on his vestments kept an eye on the congregation.

For each sacramental act, performed alone, without an acolyte, he stretched his arms wide, summoning all his strength, as if he were doing work that required muscular effort. At the same time he moved along briskly, without prolonging any gesture; even the pauses during which he collected himself or simply waited showed him in a sort of activity. Just as he spread his arms like a weight lifter, he also snapped open the book for the reading of the apostle’s epistle, leafed back to the Gospel, jabbed, with his thick finger, at the written text, hammered, gripping the altar slab with both hands, his forehead audibly against it, fell, with a crash, to one knee, pounded himself so hard on the chest that it echoed, unlocked the tabernacle with a powerful twist of the hand, fished out the chalice with his fist, thrust it toward the congregation—“eat!”—and sawed the air as he delivered the benediction.

Once he had even disappeared in the middle, running to that narrow passageway behind the altar where the wooden structure of the altar, without the gilding, rough, in its unexpectedly mysterious form, could just as well be an old, abandoned flour mill, a part of the flour chute; he remained, as during a Mass in Russia, absent from the action out in front, which merely increased the suspense, and returned only after quite some time, again at a run, for the continuation.

Outside the momentary gobbling of a turkey, the drone of a night plane, the seemingly even more distant screeching of truck brakes.

It was perhaps the last mild evening of the year, and therefore he sat for a while afterward with the neighbors of the deceased on their farmyard bench, long enough for an entire tribe to line up on.

With their backs against the wall of the house, half in darkness, half in the glow of the barn light a little farther off, they sat in silence, facing the barely discernible pattern of the ventilation slits in the barn — in the form of solar rays — hearing the rustling and crackling in the invisible famous branching linden tree (and the hundred-year-old cherry tree) in the middle of Rinkolach, and sat and sat, again as in an earlier time, with which, my friend now thought, something could still be undertaken, something could be done; and not at all sure that with artificial lighting of the dead-end street a “long-cherished wish” of the villagers would be fulfilled, as the community newsletter regularly stated.

How he loved the night wind, the black on black. No star was in the sky. No child was crouching under the bench. A riddle from the old days: “What’s lying under the bench, and when you grab it, it squeals?”—“A chain.” All across the plain ladders were standing in orchards. In the last train from K. the heads of the sleeping passengers were leaning against the windows, and the locomotive’s whistle echoed far into Yugoslavia. A palm tree rustled in the sun on the outskirts of Jericho. In a new German translation of the Bible he would put “confidence” in place of “hope.” The woman next to him brushed the dandruff off his coat collar with a hand that was neither cold nor warm, more mineral-like, like flintstone.

And again, without any movement, he felt, in the first hour of night, the approaching morning, this time, however, as something ice-cold that reached into his armpits and then alarmed him mightily. At the same time, he felt “longing” coming back, his favorite word. No, it was a hunger, in the middle of his heart, and it was not coming back, but had been there forever. And then he caught himself also thinking, “No, I did not give up today — not yet!”

What? Did he need a third manifestation?

7 — The Story of My Son

To be asked about my son, by anyone at all, has always put me in a bad mood, out of a clear blue sky; it has immediately destroyed the harmony between me and the other person. It was even worse when I was expected to tell stories about him. “Tell us!”: the very form of this invitation rubbed me the wrong way, and all the more so in conjunction with my own child. At least one way out was to say terrible things about him, to revile him from afar, and in general to invent atrocity stories about him (which also could be counted on to elicit an entirely different kind of sympathy than when I morosely stuck to the truth).

Even very early on, whenever I told a third person something about him in his presence, he himself would break in, as if his father were guilty of betraying him. In his absence I still suffer the effects of this, such that when I am forced to speak of him I vividly picture his disapproval. But the law of silence that pertains to my son’s life, including trivial details (these in particular), originates for the most part with me. Already long ago, even without the child’s punishing stare, I was usually conscious when talking about him that this was actually a form of gossip, and inappropriate.

I also strenuously avoid asking other parents about their offspring, and when I happen to do so after all, out of politeness or heedlessness, or heedless politeness? I feel hostile in advance toward any answer they may give, and then I am sometimes surprised at how enthusiastically they come out with the answer, even in the case of bad news, as if certain fathers and mothers found themselves in their verbal element only when speaking of their children — why else would their conversational tone be transformed into triumphal blasts?

My resistance to telling anyone about my son seems therefore not to follow a universal law. Isn’t it actually crazy that I already resent it when a person asking me about my son presumes to use his first name?: “So, how is Valentin these days?”

It is something else again when it comes to telling about my next of kin or ward when no one is asking me about him. Then I occasionally succeed in being perfectly relaxed about it, speaking in a voice seemingly made up of several voices together, so that my son, I am certain, would not only approve but would also feel validated. This kind of storytelling I have inside me. Only it comes out decidedly too infrequently, because it is either the wrong listener or more likely the wrong moment (is there even such a thing as the “wrong listener”?).

And telling stories in writing is something else again. There, without a specific audience, without my voice’s getting in the way, not forced to wait for the right moment — that is within my control when I write, which unlike any other activity gives me an awareness of having time — my telling stories comes to me in a way that oral storytelling comes only by pure luck, often invalidated the very next day. Only in written form is my storytelling suited to my nature, on the right path, at home, no matter whom it deals with, even my son.

This has meanwhile become a conviction, reinforced by the observation that all my life, whenever I opened my mouth to tell a story, even if I was bursting with it, I hardly ever found a hearing, but instead alienated others and spoiled their fun. Where was the humor I kept trying to slip in edgewise? Only through my writing and being read was a change brought about.

This year, when my son was traveling in Southeastern Europe, almost always alone, I did not worry about him, for the first time. Nothing could happen to him, and for moments at a time this very thought made me uneasy again.

Yet wasn’t it true that in the preceding years, at precisely those times when I knew him to be in danger, my otherwise constant worry about him had ceased, replaced by a pleasurable sense of acceptance? And since the dangers, always major ones, had multiplied of late, hadn’t that very fact rendered me immune to my age-old worry about my closest kin? But: was he really still my closest kin? And: who was I without my age-old worry?

For example, that time when Valentin was trying to hitch a ride on the outskirts of town and his leg was almost torn off by the kick starter of a motorcycle that grazed him as it whizzed by, and he would have bled to death then and there if help had not arrived immediately, as I left the hospital where my son was lying with shattered bones and went home in the middle of the night, I felt receptive as never before to this particular hour of the night, to the region altogether, and grateful; the way things were now was right; I had shed a part of myself, a part that was past its usefulness. Only an adult could be as light of heart and unshakable as I was then — or unmoved? At any rate, that hour, and the others that followed, almost fatal to my son, gave me a standard by which to measure.

It is not entirely accurate to say that Valentin undertook his journey to track down his father’s youth. One stimulus, among several others, was a story I had invented out of the whole cloth, a first-person narrative (a form that always suggests itself when the bulk of the task facing me consists of inventing and playing out the possibilities), the only one of my books he read, actually at the suggestion of, no, under orders from his girlfriend, although otherwise he knows the classics, as well as my contemporaries, from Filip Kobal to Kazuo Ishiguro, also Peter Turrini and Max Goldt, and now at twenty-two, out of fear of soon having nothing more to discover, is a great reader, the only one among thousands, but wasn’t I the same in my day? And besides, time and again he has knowingly deviated from the route of my story and has picked up the story again only at intervals, as a sort of travel guide, more testing it than using it (“many mistakes, but apparently intentional ones”).

And the money for his trip was almost entirely his own, from working as a disc jockey in various young people’s nightclubs and from selling his first pictures; a contribution came from my sister’s estate, which, because it consisted of almost nothing, struck him all the more powerfully as an omen. My son sometimes makes so much of his frugality that I have come to view it as one of his main characteristics, like his punctuality, which does not stem from a sort of obsequiousness but rather manifests itself as that of a tyrant, whose time one wastes at one’s peril; woe unto him who, regardless of the fact that he may be much older and even more powerful, comes even a quarter of an hour late to a meeting with my son, let alone without an excuse.

Having arrived in Ljubljana on a frosty January day by train, by way of Graz and Maribor, Valentin continued on by bus to Nova Gorica. At first Yugoslavia was merely a country he had to pass through on his way to his site for a walking tour, Greece. It meant as little to him beforehand as his ancestors. Although receptive to and gifted at foreign languages, new ones as well as old, he gave everything Slavic a wide berth, except the literature, as if its very sounds were an imposition; the music, whether folk songs or the works of nineteenth-century Russian composers, even repelled him; he felt as if his blood were being sucked out by those “parallel fifths, which are taboo, and not without reason, in melody” (whereas I at his age had shivered through entire nights in my pitch-black student room on the Kahlenberg with Mussorgsky).

Nevertheless he could do nothing now, as at other times, but keep his eyes and ears open. In contrast to his father, who in something new often notices an incidental or grotesque feature, or nothing at all, he immediately notices the salient characteristics, and quite casually. I have often wondered whether he, who has this eye for whatever is essential to a phenomenon, and yet, it seems to me, is never astonished at anything, is really cut out to be the researcher he wants to become someday. In many respects he is superior to me — but what is his passion? his dream?

Thus he had now set out, almost too well prepared, I thought, on this yearlong journey, had anticipated every unusual situation and had taken something along for it. But was that really true? Didn’t his main baggage consist of a present from the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, Valentin’s benefactor from the time he was a child, an ancient Greek biography of Pythagoras, in which the philosopher’s guideline for life had less to do with tools and measuring instruments than with untrammeled observation of phenomena and committing them to memory?: thus Pythagoras had had his disciples get out of bed each morning only after they had repeated to themselves the previous day’s lessons, and then those from the day before; this retrieval of the day before yesterday, without aids, purely from memory, was, according to his biographer Iamblichos, perhaps the essence of the Pythagorean doctrine.

And thus my son, on closer inspection, had his few tools — his army knife, drawing pencils, a geologist’s hammer — more as a sort of ballast, to keep “both feet on the ground.” Committing the phenomena to memory was not something he set out purposefully to do; rather he brushed by them, his thoughts elsewhere: “If you expect an object to leave a lasting impression,” he told me once, “you mustn’t under any circumstance stare at it; you should look through it, though attentively, and only then will the impression be reliable and lasting, and its gestalt will give rise to discoveries more readily from an afterglow than from the thing itself!” (His other approach was to turn away intermittently from his object, intentionally immerse himself in something else, so that, when he turned back toward it, he could “catch it as it was!”)

Valentin produced that day-before-yesterday experience often on the same day by falling asleep right after an event, for moments that took the place of an entire night, and, after the first waking up and recalling, falling asleep a second time: now, after the passage of barely an hour, he saw the object in the light and form of the day before yesterday. Wasn’t that sufficient as a dream?

A trip by bus on a winter’s day, through an unfamiliar country, was particularly suited for this kind of brief, two-time slumber. And thus the “day-before-yesterday effect” assured that even before he reached Postojna, the prehistoric dugout from the moor of Ljubljana that he had just seen in the museum there had engraved itself upon his memory for the rest of his life, its length, weight, peat-blackness, fissured surfaces.

On the bus he had breathed a peephole in the ice flowers on the window, through which he looked out in his own fashion, barely moving his head. They entered an area almost without human traces, deserted and more than deserted, leading into an expanse with invisible boundaries, in spite of the cold already green as in spring, as if made for fruit growing, except that no roads led there, and even the few cart tracks immediately came to an end: this had to be one of those areas that at unpredictable intervals, hardly related to precipitation, was flooded, the result of subterranean water pressure, which made it shoot up like jets from holes in the ground, forming large lakes from one day to the next, which could then be crossed only by boat.

Yet my son took in not the image of the strange landscape but a subject for scientific research: nature as “landscape” did not count for him. He was not interested in looking at things, or at any rate he hardly lingered over that. He immediately, as a matter of course, shifted his focus to the particulars, allowed these to impress themselves on him, distinguished them from one another, and looked for what they had in common.

The first thing he had always looked for, beyond the phenomenon, was its underlying principle. And having detected this, as a rule instinctively, in the twinkling of an eye, he was able, as he then once wrote me from his travels, to achieve “an entirely different view.” Except that he did this in passing, kept it to himself, explained nothing (at most uttered, more to himself, his one-syllable “Look!”), and only when he was asked came out with his conclusions, inferences, his always convincing theories, which, translated literally, were of course “observations.” Thus in his account of that bus trip he merely mentioned in passing, along with Traveling Band on the radio and the way his nostrils froze during the short rest stop in Vrhnika, the gray that altered from one type of tree to the next — thousands of shades of gray, passing, blinking, flashing by his peephole, and only later, in the spring, during a longer stay on Lake Ohrid, did he set about writing down his “Observations on the Variations in Winter Gray.”

Then the so-called Threshold of Postojna, a threshold also in a historical sense for all the migrations of peoples through the ages, from east to west, actually more flight than migrations, and more a narrow pass or battlefield than a threshold.

For Valentin, however, this was a mere threshold in the rock, a geological formation. For him there was no such thing as history, and in politics he was a self-proclaimed idiot. He did not even know that the Yugoslavia he was using as his corridor had earlier been Communist, had even earlier been overrun by the Germans, had even earlier been a kingdom, and even earlier … If chastised, he would at most have responded that such “earliers” were everywhere, extending back into prehistoric times, and that would be all well and good if everyone did not arbitrarily derive from his particular “earlier” all of — what was it called? — history, and then, from that, exclusive rights to the present. “I learned in school that two thousand years ago this was the Roman province of Illyria, and today in Ljubljana I saw in a window the book title Are We in Reality Not Slavs but Illyrians? To me what is real should be first and foremost what exists now.”

Now, after the Threshold of Postojna, it began to snow, which it had been too cold to do before. At an unmarked stop by a road through the woods, a schoolchild, his cheeks rosy, stepped in the swirling white out of the underbrush, and did not even need to warm up particularly on the bus; while waiting he had crouched in a natural basket formed of branches, without freezing.

And after the next threshold, the one leading into the lowlands along the Adriatic coast, it was raining, and in Nova Gorica, where darkness had long since fallen, a warm wind was blowing, in tune with the palm trees there, which rustled. From the bus station, a glass shed in a wooded park, walking paths radiated in a star pattern, and Valentin joined the largest group. On this evening he walked along among the unknown silhouettes as if he were a local person going home, and not only because he had the address of the place where I had stayed there.

The offspring of a villager, he had none of the traits of one. Where I had stubby fingers, his had turned out long, narrow, and almost oddly flexible; I could not imagine they would ever display hundreds of little scars like his father’s. Likewise my neck, which was squat, or perhaps hunched between my shoulders out of old boarding-school habit, had in him grown freely into the air, also strong and straight, and when he was tired his head never drooped to the side like mine, or to the back, like his grandfather’s on the farmyard bench of an evening. At the same time, Valentin had larger feet than I, and his soles had more standing surface than those of almost all the cottagers and their offspring in the region we came from, where people stand better on one leg than on two (one immediately notices, whether inside churches or outside at gatherings, that the men as well as the women, the entire population, are constantly shifting from one foot to the other, just like that, standing next to each other and talking, often shifting at the same time, as if in a preestablished rhythm, giving the impression of a regional dance that consists of constant rocking back and forth, swaying, wobbling).

My son likewise shows no tendency, as we do, when meeting even a familiar person, to become skittish (observation in the Jaunfeld villages: that in everyday conversation, even between neighbors who have known each other all their lives, each looks somewhere else — as if they felt brush by them and flash through them that old uneasiness on soil where they were once only tenants).

And it means little to him that he is an Austrian, or a German, and not merely because he has a Catalan mother. He is neither ashamed of it nor is he proud of anything in that connection; he is indifferent toward it, in a way that seems entirely new to me, as far as one’s own country is concerned. As a young person I suffered from Austria — I use this expression advisedly — and thought I was the only one, discovering only later: many suffered. Yes, we suffered from Austria, and differently from the way I imagine a German suffering from his Germany. That a person then became head of state who represented to a T the outlines of our perhaps half-forgotten youthful suffering brought all this back and at the same time made it obvious that this was a suffering without hope, for life.

Valentin, on the other hand, who had been living in Austria for years now, had a few places, or rather spots, there, where he liked to go, and that was enough of a country for him, if he even used such a word. And when I visited, if he happened to take me to them, I allowed myself to catch his enthusiasm, for I noticed how important it was to him that I at least approve of what he liked. Although he had spent most of his time in suburbs, dragged out there by his father, and then eventually reconciled to it, all that now seemed as if it had never taken place, and in Vienna he never looked for a possible equivalent to the suburbs of Paris, unlike me (every time on the very morning of my arrival, as if salvation depended on it). He strikes me as the kind of person — and his entire generation with him? — who is less intent on finding a permanent home than on having hideouts here and there, located neither in the center nor on the outskirts, but usually, almost as a rule, somewhere in between.

Also my habit of walking everywhere means little to him. But when he walks, from one hideout to the next, he moves so quickly, without ever breaking into a run, throwing his whole body into it, that I can barely keep up with him.

He traveled south, crisscrossing Slovenia, from the coastal area back into continental Europe, from early spring into winter and vice versa. For a long time he saw the sea, the Adriatic, only for seconds, from afar, from the limestone ridges. Sometimes, after covering a stretch in the dark, when he had not been able to see anything, the next morning, in daylight, he would take the bus back the way he had come, approximately to the place where night had fallen.

It was already February when he found a place to sit by the harbor of Piran, otherwise hardly a day’s journey from Nova Gorica, on the breakwater there, my stones of ignorance, in the face of which, when I was his age, thirty-five years ago or the day before yesterday, everything I had learned and all my origins had fallen away from me, and for an afternoon and an evening I had felt nothing but that I was cocooned in the world, a feeling that never came back so completely, if at all, after Piran and that first day by the sea.

From this vicarious refresher course, Valentin sent me a drawing of the stone blocks, nothing but these; the bay and the wooded shore opposite he had erased. Seen thus, with nothing around them, filling the paper and furthermore executed with excessive precision, the blocks looked unrecognizable, might just as well be animal heads, cracks in a wall, bundles of laundry, and were, or created, when I held them up close to my eyes, just as long ago, for seconds at a time, the image of nothing at all. Yes, I had seen these objects back then, and myself with them, as just this pre-creational, unformed. But how could one escape knowledge in the long run? No matter: my stones were still there.

Hardly imaginable that in the calm bay of Piran such a breakwater was necessary, and yet farther out by the punta with the lighthouse Valentin encountered wall-high masses of pebbles, thrown by the most recent Adriatic floodwaters from the ocean bottom high over the seawall onto the promenade, up to the foundations of the houses on the spit of land, much as a previous storm had buried those saltworks in the neighboring bay of Strunjan, where the youthful first-person narrator of my much later “Stones of Ignorance” story, aroused by the salt-white emptiness, hounded by lust for an unspecified woman, who, however, never appears, then decides it is now or never: he must sit down and write a book.

This sea, calm as a pond today, tomorrow a raging monster, began to preoccupy my white-skinned son, previously a rather reluctant guest on the Atlantic and the Pacific. Yet he saw “my” saltworks only on exhibit in the Piran salt museum, in photos, with the last remaining objects, the corncob as the smallest sluiceway possible, the bread stamps the various saltworks families had had for the bread that was baked for them in the communal ovens, the hats with extra-wide brims that also protected their eyes and noses from the blazing sun there.

He also studied in Piran that particular gray of the palm trunks, and in the mild evening on the docks for the first time enjoyed a folk dance, even the costumes; or he caught a sense of how the dancers enjoyed finally having such a different performance space for their dance and their music, otherwise always performed only far off in their narrow Alpine valleys; here their accordions, clarinets, costumes, and limbs were animated by the wind on the harbor square, serving as a great dance floor, and open besides at the rear to the salt tide.

During the first month of his trip he had not always been so much in the thick of things. From time to time he had even been seized with desolation.

Again unlike me and many of my generation, being isolated, alienated, or dislocated did not give him a heightened sense of reality. (At least when I was his age, it was often the odd twist, the element of strangeness that made me feel at home, synchronized.) Only on his first day did all the unfamiliar silhouettes provide an escort for Valentin; then they took on hostile or at any rate unfriendly features; shifting his focus to music or nature no longer created a protective sphere around him.

For the first time in his life he found himself in a truly foreign land, and this seemed particularly meaningless to him, for he had gone there after all without any necessity. This was not his world, not Europe; these Balkans, of which he had had no image ahead of time, did not allow him to form one even now. And if the streets in the couple of larger cities with their hordes of pedestrians had been great centers for stimulation and relaxation well into the century, including for my generation, they were nothing of the sort for my son now: reality for him was assured only by his few regular hideouts at home in the in-between districts, along with the jam-packed crowds of his contemporaries who frequented them — not even friends.

But turning back was not possible. He had told his people at home about the trip, and until it was completed he could not show his face among them. And yet at the beginning, every time he made one of his morning excursions back in the direction he had come, retracing the previous night’s stretch, he was strongly tempted to stay on the bus as it traveled north, and flee back to his own world.

During just such a spell of back-and-forth, at the station in Koper, Istria, which on the previous evening, through the steamed-up windshield of the bus, had been nothing but a rain puddle in the drizzling darkness, the turning point came.

Various factors were at work: the transportation center in the freshness of morning, long and low, with lots of glass, in which the sky was mirrored and through which the sea shone, far outside town, the depot for buses, for a couple of boats, and likewise for trains, whose tracks ended at a belt of reeds, showing a new shade of winter gray, among them scattered vegetable gardens and orchards won from the sea, each populated by one sheep; a saying of Pythagoras, encountered as he read on in the biography: “Every place demands justice”; simply counting silently, and perhaps even the local brandy, helpful this time, drunk outside standing up, with other drinkers, older and younger, at the tent-like snack bar between the end of the tracks and the bus platform.

After that he was healed of his foreignness. He had reached the point of no return, and there my son, who otherwise always had a strange look whenever I asked him whether he was happy, could say he was, yes! No more thinking that he was missing something in his Viennese cellars; and before his eyes a wonderfully long trip. Nothing, nothing, would make him turn back now.

First, however, he went to get some sleep, under a cypress in the local cemetery, on the slope just beyond the tracks, boat channels, and streets, and waking up as if it were the next day, although he had drawn only a few deep breaths, seeing a blond young woman in dark clothing watering the plants on a freshly dug grave, he took the local bus to that very Piran where “the day before yesterday” he had slunk around like a total stranger.

From then on, although he continued to dawdle and also returned to his practice of repeating night trips the following day, his journey took on a sort of elan.

Still on the Istrian coast, in Porec, he copied off the oldest building there a Latin tribute to a famous man; he, until then completely without ambition, was gradually catching fire for some undertaking or other—“I shall do something”—and wanted a similar memorial to himself one day: “In his honor this hall has been doubled in size,” and then forgot such dreams again, for instance spending an entire Sunday in Pazin, back in the interior of the country, knowingly missing one train after the other, while he listened to the doves calling through the city and out into the whole expanse of countryside.

He, ever meticulous, positively finicky about his clothes, discovered shabbiness, or the particular form of it characteristic of Yugoslavia, felt accepted by the deliberately unpleasing, pocket-sized, shacklike lodgings as by a reality more compact by comparison with that of the Europe he knew, stood, soon no longer distinguishable from those next to him, at bars often set up for only a day out in the open, squatted, leaned, and lay down among the scraps of newspaper, indecipherable to him, in the dust and weeds outside bus shelters, forgot departure times, slept his daily brief day-before-yesterday sleep on the floor of public toilets, curved in a U-shape around the bowl, by train embankments, also in the middle of a railroad yard.

Letting himself go was not merely a game for my son now. He even considered it something worth striving for; only in this way could he fulfill his potential; only by letting himself go would he also belong to the others, be less conspicuous and alone.

As for his face, it took only a little, a reddening of the cheeks, a swollen lip, for him to seem on the skids (at least to me). And on the other hand it took even less, almost nothing, or just that momentary dozing off, for the apparent bum to change back, into a young man? No, rather into an ageless scientist, someone untouchable, the very opposite of the genuinely down and out, for whom, according to Pythagoras, no doctrine was even conceivable, because not even a dream could cleanse their souls anymore.

Roaming over the Croatian island of Krk, in the company of similarly scraggly figures, when talk arose of cutting off the braid of one of them, it was he who in the general hesitation flipped open his jackknife and hacked away until the victim burst into tears. In Zadar, after an ashtray was hurled at a mirror, he was beaten up and thrown out of the bar, and then stumbled along for days, now one among many in that country going around in bandages and dressings, his on his chin, another’s above his eye, that of the woman way up front on the bus on her knee. Then on the trip to Split it was not the driver but Valentin who picked the music, well received by all the other passengers; he stood with his cassettes up front by the windshield, as if at his post, calm, in his mind planning the right transition from the present tape to the next, unapproachable, untouchable. And at the bus rest stop in Dubrovnik, on the Dalmatian coast, he amazed those present by doing one-second sketches of their faces, so good that one of those whose portrait he had done went parading through the bar, sticking his picture under everyone’s nose with a triumphant and also menacing “That’s me, see!” And in Ohrid, outdoors, with a view of the sea and the almost bald mountains of Albania, he wrote, from memory, his piece on the different grays of the wintry trees (which in the meantime has won a prize).

Now it stayed light in the evening so long that he did not need to retrace his steps the following morning. But near the Greek border, in Bitola, Macedonia, after the middle of April, shortly before Easter, snow caught up with him, actually only the flash of a few flakes at night by the bonfires in front of the former mosque where chess players were sitting, whom Valentin then beat one after the other. On an unlit side street a mule meanwhile stood motionless by a cart, its head lowered, in expectation of heavier snow.

Although it was just as cold the next day, on the other side of the border, in Florina, Greece, he felt welcome there in a different way from in his father’s Yugoslavia. That country, he wrote me, was really not for him, or not right now, though it would be later, and that indubitably. The appearance of standoffishness in the people, even toward each other, was too predominant; their friendliness remained to be discovered, behind the stolidness and the embarrassed scruffiness and coarseness. But whoever would be the discoverer?

In Greece he found himself back in the here and now, after the gloom of the previous months, due not only to the winter. What a gleam in Florina from the watches on the arms of passersby. And whereas in Yugoslavia there seemed to be only one direction and its opposite, here he was caught up in a cosmic confusion, a welter of possibilities.

On the day before Easter his travels took him on toward Thessaloniki, for the first time in a long while again on the trail of me, or of the hero of my story “Stones of Ignorance.” And again a long bus trip, over mountain thresholds, and again snow, which in the coastal area became nocturnal rain.

The following morning in the city there was so much traffic that getting from the seaside to the church on the slope where I had found the picture of the Resurrection was an uphill struggle. On the Egnatia, the east-west highway as wide as a river, cars flowed in such an unbroken stream, amid the constant din of police whistles, that the other shore with its façades remained not only inaccessible for a long time but also completely out of sight. And having finally reached the steep, winding north-south artery, without sidewalks, one not only had to hug the old brick retaining walls to get anywhere but from time to time also had to make oneself as skinny as possible, one shoulder leading, one’s hands in the fissures in the wall like a mountain climber’s, to reach the next switchback without being crushed by the trucks.

Valentin visited the fresco in the church of Nikolaos Orfanos described in my story only after all the other Byzantine sanctuaries, no bigger than chapels and squeezed in among ordinary houses, always very hard to find, and this, too, he at first contemplated only with his researcher’s eye: What were the paints made of? Where was the variation in the figures and groupings, seemingly the same from church to church?

And in between, in the open air, he had cast an eye over the equally numerous, but dilapidated, overgrown Turkish-Islamic monuments, especially the moss-green domes of the baths, as if to refresh his retina after all the Christian pictorial sequences, or for relaxation he had gone in any direction where there was nothing to be seen, or down the slope, way down to the smoke-shrouded Aegean sea.

That fresco, too, was in the church, or stone hut, one among too many.

It did not show the usual resurrection of the Son of God, but one of the moments afterward. It is a scene such as I, although pictorially familiar from an early age with every Station of the Cross, have never seen anywhere else. It does not show the Son of God risen from the dead, floating up out of the open grave; nor does he encounter, as in the usual sequence, the women with the anointing oil running away. The painter shows an episode between those two. The Savior, obviously just risen, is by himself, and is walking along in his billowing white shroud through an unpopulated landscape, in the background dark mounds of earth with scattered trees, and above a deep dark-blue sky, in my recollection as black as outer space. Aside from his finger raised in benediction as he walks, no action is portrayed except this billowing and these vigorous steps in an early morning otherwise devoid of human forms, yet the eyes as well as the shoulders of this figure returned from the dead are receptive and permeable to all the light and morning air of the world. Who has experienced such a resurrection? And my first-person narrator thinks at the sight, “This is the image with which the world will begin anew.”

My son, on the other hand, immune to being distracted by the imagination, which he holds in reserve for his dreams, set the record clear: “black as outer space” was an exaggeration, and besides, as far as he was concerned, nothing needed to begin anew; things were new as it was. And then, in full view of that Easter scene in the Nikolaos Orfanos chapel in Thessaloniki, he suddenly fell asleep, there on the bare floor, and woke up even more quickly than usual, and contrary to his custom not in a reliable day-before-yesterday, but in the middle of nowhere. What resulted from this sleep and the shift into a Pythagorean day-before-yesterday was bad, as bad as could be: he was nowhere, had no father and no mother, had never had them; that business about friendship, which, according to that charlatan philosopher what’s-his-name, kept everything together, was a swindle, there was no one backing him up, no one he could call upon, the world, everybody, was fundamentally hostile and evil, he had merely managed to stay out of their clutches up to now, had been sleepwalking, and now that was over.

And that was the whole story, the only story. He was lost, had always been, and now he realized that. And half a continent away, in my study here, at my desk, I heard, through the bawling of a small child in the yard next door, the wails of my far-off adult son, and thought: Well, well, and then: That’s the way it is. And then I realized that of all my kin the one about whom I knew the least was my son; I knew nothing at all about him.

The following day Valentin traveled from Thessaloniki southwest over the Epirus mountains in the direction of Dodona, where in ancient times the great oracle had spoken, from amid the groaning of the oak trees.