My Year in No Man's Bay

1 — The Decade

For a long time now I have been familiar with the southwestern suburbs of Paris. But there is one forest bay I overlooked for an entire decade. Even on maps of the area, which more and more constitute my morning reading, in place of the paper, I failed to notice that the area was settled. As I took my walks deep into the forests of the Seine hills, nothing but silence emanated from there; sounds came almost exclusively from the highway up on the plateau of Velizy, or the military and state-visit airport of Villacoublay on the other side; only much later, as a permanent resident, did I develop an ear, also at some distance, for the commuter railway, a sort of acoustic ligament running right through the bay, and often pricked up my ears at its high-pitched hum.

Or when I was out walking along the roads, I must have bypassed that bay every time, not particularly meaning to, perhaps imagining that there, on that last small spit of houses, there was nothing more to see, except perhaps a couple of cottages and sheds, very like the ones here along my path, only even smaller and more pitiful. But it seems to me I did not even have any such thought, simply turned off before I got there, because the road also turned off, giving a wide berth to this area, whose only remarkable feature was a tiny Russian church — the diminutive does not make it small enough — there as if by a birch grove.

It was late afternoon on a clear winter day when I wandered into this hinterland, and, following a railroad cut, which gradually rose to become an embankment, went under an overpass, and reached a square that in any suburb would have been large enough to make one rub one’s eyes, and was also quite remarkable.

On one side it was bordered by the railroad station, on an embankment several stories high, on all the other sides by buildings huddled together, also distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that every single one was a shop. Nothing characteristic of a suburb could be detected around that extended rectangle, emerging from its surroundings brightly lit by the streetlamps, the shopwindows, the neon signs, the waiting room, animated by the trains streaming into and out of the lower level of the station (on the upper level apartments with laundry hanging out to dry), while the sparrows, looking for a sleeping place, were as audible from the plane trees to the newly arrived observer as the cars, the train whistles, and the one-armed bandits in the three or four cafés.

Not only because of its three bakers, three butchers, three flower shops, Vietnamese delicatessen, North African restaurant, its newsstand that carried international papers: this was a real town. I had an experience similar to that of my friend the painter with Vigo, the place he had entered through a mirror, as terra nova, which had been there for ages, a planet unto itself, pulsing and vibrating just as now when he discovered it; or similar to that of Filip Kobal with his karst, where he, who for a good part of his life had been on intimate terms with every pile of stones, had one summer evening taken a step off the beaten path in this little highland, usually visible at a glance, and found himself on a “second karst,” right next to or behind the familiar one, with similar desert villages, whose lights, reflected at night here and there in the clouds, had always been present, but for him constituted a fresh, a young light.

Thus I, too, upon arriving in this unexpected place, was excited and at the same time sure of myself. There was something here for me to do. Yet it did not occur to me that I could ever reside or live in this neighborhood. I wanted only to work here. The square, with the railroad platforms up on the embankment, would be my field of activity.

And my activity was to consist chiefly of what suited me best, as I had recognized in the meantime: observing. Hadn’t I always been a good observer? One whose manner of empathizing had often not merely influenced events but actually created them? Whenever I had taken the stage as a hero or man of action or intervenor, I had made a fool of myself, if not in front of others, then in my own eyes. But as soon as I became an observer, I felt that I was coming into my own, and that my way of observing was almost the only action possible for me. And I remain convinced that actors become gloomy without an audience and go back to war. Yes, all those gloomy competent ones: I would rather be a bright spectator, as when I started out.

Yet my observing had never become anything steady, seldom extended beyond an hour, and besides was more a question of luck than discipline (in the sense of an athletic discipline). But now, immediately upon my arrival, I had the idea of steadying it, by making it my work, “for an entire year.”

Daily, from morning to evening, I would do nothing but record what took place before my eyes on this suburban square and in its environs. I would spend the nights elsewhere, back in Paris, or even farther out, in Versailles.

And as my place for writing I had in mind a room on the second floor of the Hôtel des Voyageurs, where, as I immediately found out, one could rent a room for several months at a time. I would sit there close to a view out the window through the plane trees, with nothing but paper and pencil, would also need no table; as a writing surface I would wish for a windowsill as wide as the one back home in Rinkolach, where doing homework would pass imperceptibly into looking out, far and farther, and vice versa.

At the window of the Hôtel des Voyageurs my observing, my empathizing, and my writing would be one. My hand would be guided by nothing but the happenings outside, and if an image, a thought, or a daydream interposed itself, it would be welcome material for my notes, provided it materialized or hove into sight only as a result of my attention to the external world and immediately made way again for this and its yearlong annals.

I pictured my project as child’s play, as effortless and free of strain and constraint as I had always wished the work of writing might be. Working while at rest, as part of resting, out of restfulness; working as the great form of resting.

And what did I promise myself from this kind of year of simply recording? Something to read; a book, airy, penetrating, full of discovery, oblique as none had ever been; the kind I myself needed to read. And why should it be set here, of all places, in such a place? And furthermore without a plot? Because it was a place in which I trusted myself to spend an entire year as nothing but a hardworking observer, and because I wanted to read a book whose locale would not grow a second head from previous knowledge, not a Paris book, not an America book, not an Arctic book, and also not a book that would dissolve into mere atmosphere for made-up stories.

In this respect I can say that I believed in the place at first sight, and consequently also saw something to do there. In its presence I felt more unrestrained and at the same time more blessed with space than by the Dead Sea or in the Gobi Desert. And I was certain that here I would succeed, if anywhere, in remaining an observer.

The fact that I would be merely a guest, and only during the day, assured that I would not be co-opted by the square in any way; I would not be in danger, as I might as a resident, of finding myself called upon to participate and abandoning my observation post. And aside from that, the place itself seemed ideal for the policy I had developed over the decades: “Participate by observing!” In this place I was exactly where I belonged with my project, and yet it would never become my home. Any such prospect would have been a threat to me. What I saw before me, however, I experienced as a promise, a moderate and nicely modest one.

An additional factor was that while I was circling the square, slowly and unceasingly as evening fell — a brightly lit stadium surrounded by near-darkness, a rump metropolis, New York’s Bronx surrounded by chestnut forests — my ancestors, the dead ones, from far away in the village of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld, also those interred in the Russian taiga, could be felt walking by my side. What a rare occurrence. Otherwise they turned up almost only in conjunction with those images I had of the future in which I was a resistance fighter in a world war, and they gave me their approval there, and almost only there. But this place and my plan for it meant even more to them. This was the place and the approach that would make them most consistently present to me. Here and thus, with my observing and recording, they could be counted on to be constantly and reliably butting in. And those interred in the taiga would also light my way in the form of a bud on one of the wintry linden trees up on the railroad platform. That was how it was.

And I was also certain that I had something even better ahead of me than the resistance struggle I had so often daydreamed into existence. The locale, my future realm of action and inaction, seemed, as the workday drew to a close, as indestructible as it was inexhaustible. Here there would not be the same danger as with systematically recording one’s dreams, which as a result of the process became more and more fuzzy and finally ceased altogether, or were no longer worth mentioning. Here, as I envisioned it, recording things would, on the contrary, cause the events to blossom, day after day. All the objects, obscure corners, and likewise people’s gestures, as well as their postures, would present themselves to me for the long haul as unspent, imperishable, always good for a new surprise, in bright contrast to not only Austria and Germany. Here I would not have to begin by summoning up and ordering the physicality of the world by means of scientific, religious, philosophical inquiry, would not have to rely on the miracles of the moment. For me something would be happening, taking place, and revealing itself constantly, and that would be true not only for this one hour but for at least an entire year. There, for me and my way of thinking, was where it was. It was there.

And how did it happen, then, that your plan of merely recording turned into a story, and also hardly about the railroad station, whose double name was at first supposed to provide the book’s title? And why are you not sitting at a window in the Hotel des Voyageurs, but in a house a few streets away, and as a resident, a day- and nighttimer, and as a property owner? And why, during your writing year in the bay, have you not remained that pure, strong observer, but have instead participated more than ever? Where are your eyewitness notes, your annals?

I did not take my project to the hotel, first of all simply because, as it turned out, the plane trees blocked the view from every window (at least during their more than half-year foliage time), if not of the railroad yard, the wooded hills, and the sky, then certainly of the square below, of the happenings down there that I was particularly keen for, of the ground altogether, in the form of earth, grass, pavement, obvious proximity. And furthermore, I did not want to attract attention, and as a hotel guest, as was already clear to me after several test visits, my person would not have gone as unnoticed as in Paris or Versailles, and that would have jeopardized the restfulness of my observing, even if I sat there out of sight. And finally, none of the windows had the table-wide sill for taking notes or even just supporting my arm that meanwhile had become an idée fixe with me. And as a result of my becoming a resident in the place, my field of vision has expanded, from the square in front of the station and the streets leading into it to the entire forest bay, to just the degree necessary for developing and enriching my proposed undertaking.

And the fact that my planned recording, reporting, chronicling, remaining on the outside has become twisted into a story, and a first-person one, stemmed from the recognition, at the very beginning of the year, that I, the writer, would fail with this book if I did not in turn work myself into it, to give the project the necessary vulnerability, like an animal, which during a fight leaves its throat exposed at certain junctures (and it always made me, the reader, feel good when in a book this kind of first-person narrator spoke up and validated the project, and also intervened in it).

And the thing responsible for the fact that my planned sketchy recording turned into old-fashioned sequential narration was another “once more,” a dream. Tonelessly and imperiously, it outlined a narrative as the only form I could even consider, gave me an order, which at the same time made such good sense to me that I then obeyed.

Yet I ask myself whether the dream hasn’t betrayed me.

Is it possible that even the kind of dream that happens deep in one’s heart, and pierces one as no daytime image or event ever would, can be false?

Sometimes it seems to me that storytelling has been used up, or that there is something rotten about it, and not only my own. Something like the texture has become threadbare over the course of the millennia and no longer holds together, at least not for a larger context, unless it be a question of war, an odyssey, downfall. (And it is not even serviceable for that anymore?)

But on the other hand, the contention that storytelling, the book-long variety, cannot do without catastrophes is something I have never understood. I challenge this alleged principle. It should not be considered valid anymore. I want things to be different.

And that became the source of conflict in my activity. Many features of the area here have lost their original magic over the years, and in the process, the bay, at least in its totality, has come to seem no longer worth telling about, certainly not because I have become accustomed to it or because I am getting older — that with age pleasure wanes should also not be considered valid — but, perhaps, because I, now a resident, have succeeded too little at preserving my distance.

And thus even in this place, ideal for my project, I drifted more and more into the kind of judging that makes me disgusted with myself, and furthermore is destructive to the imagination, the best part of me. How determinedly ignorant I was in the beginning, as far as people were concerned, how wonderfully opinionless. And now? How I left the local passersby alone in my thoughts. And now? Torn between my exuberance here, my distaste there (at the thought of another Sunday with the various generations in warm-up suits on the railroad station/market square, of the thousandth mountain-bike rider zooming through the quiet underbrush, no doubt a great thrill to him), I then see only one possible way: to go back to my initial idea of being purely an eyewitness: look, register, record; the storytelling part as a sideline, and also never premeditated, rather, just as it comes, as a by-product of reporting, which would remain the underlying tone.

With my eyes and ears I practice this daily, and succeed time and again in making a snap judgment transform itself into the lasting pleasure of perception, of having-one’s-five-senses-together with the aid of the chronicler’s role.

Yet when it comes to writing things down, that has not worked out. Whenever I tried to achieve this kind of objective recording and witnessing, in the middle of the first sentence things would twist and turn on me into a kind of premature storytelling, even prattling. Was it conceivable that nowadays there was nothing left in the world to tell, merely the compulsion to tell stories?

On the other hand — my conflict — I encountered here, and again daily, so many phenomena for which inventorying, reporting, notifying, in short, any kind of naming, was just wrong or simply impossible. The only thing to do was to let them be — by telling about them, or circling around them, or touching on them, or letting them resonate, or letting their vibrations die away. And together with the area itself, these phenomena included, for some extraordinary moments, inhabitants of the place. (To be sure, I have almost nothing of the sort to tell about the usual adults, only about certain children, many old folks, and from one to three joggers or indefinable types.)

Even when telling about these phenomena does not promise any coherent narrative, I still find its preliminary form — observing — fascinating as nothing else can be. This is my form of participation, and participation is music enough for me, and storytelling is the music of participation.

The chronicle does not correspond to what I continue to intuit, beyond the profound dream: the chronicle does not correspond to humanity. Only when the facts, the blind facts, thousands of them, can shed their scales, get clarified, and acquire language-eyes, one here, one there, am I, leaving the chronicler behind, on the right path, the epic path, and life, once so deprived, is enriched.

And thus I muddle along, having faith in spite of everything, following that dream, and continue to circle the epic it called for. If nothing comes of it: that’s good, too. I have long since stopped being wild about doing it right. Wrong directions, wrong moves: all the better.

In truth, the situation is more dramatic than that: my panic long ago at what I could only much later call the “metamorphosis” arose, after all, when I, about to write a story, in a flash lost all certainty that deep within me a new story could always be discovered and brought to light every time I sat down to write something, a story that in the course of the sentences and paragraphs would unfold on its own, without my plucking and plotting. And I could not get on with myself, with the book, with the world until I found the other certainty that within me was, if not story after story, then something even more disarming, something that did not merely postpone the end like the stories of the thousand and one nights: storytelling, inventive in itself, independent of particular inventions.

But what if such storytelling, too, stayed away, forever, and that were the signal for the next metamorphosis, again like a fight to the death? Metamorphosis? And what came afterward? If even storytelling lost its universal significance, did anything at all come afterward?

Since the beginning of this year I have been swept back and forth. At one point I see myself traveling along, in conjunction with my undertaking, in some airborne vehicle, brand-new, spanking modern, which for short stretches dives into dark, narrow passageways filled with screeching skeletons, and then again the whole thing appears to me on the contrary as an interminable trip through a tunnel of horrors, with the wide-open, naturally colored outside spaces barely glimpsed as they flash by for an instant before the trip continues for days through nothing but black backdrops with swinging scythes and bared teeth.

I had been living in the area for a long time before it first revealed itself to me as a bay. Previously it had appeared to me this way only in a figurative sense, for instance late at night in the most remote bar, with a couple of silent men standing at the counter and others asleep at the tables, along with damp-shaggy stinking dogs, when I envisaged a sort of flotsam that had slipped past all the other massive and more densely entangled debris and had finally been driven and washed in here, one piece at a time, to this last station or remote “bay.”

That my domicile in fact has the form of a bay was something I finally saw one day from the ridge that traces a wide curve around it, and in addition I had to be standing way up on the catwalk at the top of the transmitter; from its base, even from the middle levels, the settlement below remains, if not hidden, at least unclear in outline, as a result of the wooded slopes that run down toward it all around; it looks as though the large, pale deciduous forest continued through the hollow, rising on the other side in the west to the next, unchanging, but already far-off glimmering hill country.

The transmitter, set in the middle of a convergence of roads and wood roads, is usually accessible only to authorized personnel, but I got in through the good offices of my petty prophet of Porchefontaine, who, in between two restaurants while one of them was in bankruptcy, was managing a canteen there in his inimitable fashion.

To have the settlement’s houses, seen from up there almost all equally squat, almost all with light red tiled roofs, at my feet as a bay, thrust deep into the wooded heights, which were otherwise of an almost unbroken green, mimicking crown by crown the mounting rows of an amphitheater, arching toward the horizon: that meant something. I stood before this form of settlement as before a discovery. This bay was at once so small and so large. And in retrospect it now seems to me as if a column of smoke were rising from every single chimney, straight, narrow, almost transparent, and one close by the other. A former refugee or work camp, erected for perhaps a month on an extended clearing in the midst of the wilderness, had become a permanent settlement, and merely as such had opened itself up to the ordinary suburban world outside, if only along a narrow corridor, as an access channel; the streets still recalled, and not merely when seen from above, the grid of the camp, just as the houses, no matter how solid they seemed, appeared in this bird’s-eye-view borough to have been pushed around like temporary huts or tents and to be standing every which way.

From the top parapet, dizzyingly high above the treetops, of the transmitter skyscraper (which strangers often take for a second Eiffel Tower, transplanted to the Seine hills), I heard, with all of Paris visible over my shoulder — white on white except for the golden dome of Les Invalides and the iron black of the original Eiffel Tower — far below in the backwoods bay, scattered guard dogs from the camp barking, and also a rooster crowing in response, while the sound of the frequent commuter trains was swallowed up in the whooshing of air currents around the platform; the only other sound that made its way up here was the whistle of the long-distance trains speeding back and forth between Paris and Brittany, on the second rail line, which I now recognized as the bay’s tangent, as the divider between it and the open sea of houses to the west, in the direction of Versailles.

The silence there in the depths of the bay seemed at the same time powerfully alive; it was an active silence, on land and likewise on water, on the two fishponds, both taking up approximately the same area as the two other largish gaps in the delicately laid-out thousand-dice game of the houses: the playing fields of the towns that share the bay area. One of the one-engine planes just flying over would lower its landing gear any minute now and touch down on the main pond as in the Alaskan interior, while from the woods along the banks a long column of camels would appear, riderless and unescorted, and by the edge of the other pond, in mammoth oaks, the temple monkeys would be chattering, and from the bus station on the most distant rim of the bay the bus line with light blue horizontal stripes would take you to Providence.

Any longing I might have for far-off places was assuaged by the sight of the bay. And my homesickness was long gone, and now, toward the end of the century, hadn’t every kind of homesickness vanished from the world, like a disease that has been conquered? And in that place I would no longer need any distraction or concentration in my life, no movies, no games in a stadium, no strolling down a boulevard, no sitting in an outdoor café, perhaps not even any reading. Compared to perceiving, inventorying, and reporting the things that appeared there, I thought, all the rest was a waste of time.

And finally during that hour, from my lookout on the transmitter, I picked out my own house down in the bay, or just a section of its roof between the chestnut tree in the garden and the pair of cedars just beyond. In the midst of the patchwork of red, green, and gray all around, it was further marked by the dark line of the narrow lane, which, overarched by shrubbery, led toward it like a tunnel. I was already living alone on the property at that time, without my son and without the woman from Catalonia. Did I also have no need of friends anymore in my bay? Didn’t I need anyone anymore?

For years I could not imagine that there might be any palms in the surrounding area besides that one in the otherwise treeless courtyard of a cabinetmaker’s shop. It looked as if it were set in concrete, and had apparently been there much longer than the workshop, and not until I had passed the second palm, which I had overlooked day after day, did my search for palm trees begin, with the certainty that there would be no end to finding them, and by now I have reached seven.

It was similar when one day in the local deciduous forest I unexpectedly found myself standing in front of a larch, looking, with its shaving-brush bunches of needles, as though it had blown in from an area of high mountains; in the meantime I have discovered all around the bay entire groves of larch, seemingly hidden yet out in broad daylight; and similar, too, when one summer evening, by the road, which, if any, is the main road, in the place where it grazes the forest and has a bank, the most splendid edible bolete mushrooms lay, with lemon-yellow flesh, probably scattered by children playing, the special kind called cèpes de Bordeaux in France, since which time, in my mind, the bank has always been called the Bordeaux bank: over the years I later discovered that the forest around the bay was a paradise of these mushrooms; in the current year alone I have brought home several hundred of them, and what nicer and better weight in the hand?

And much that I could not have imagined here beforehand has revealed itself to me and put me on the alert or made my eyes open wide, and that will continue, not only as long as there are children, who hardly miss anything when they are playing; as if the same thing were true of the bay as of the largest borough of New York, about which someone once said, “Only the dead know Brooklyn.”

But even though at that time I stumbled upon my house in just that way — so to speak in the footsteps of the children out playing — in a spit of the bay that had previously eluded me, to this day I have not been able to track down another structure related to it. And yet I am certain that somewhere there must be another house of this sort, designed by the same architect almost a century ago.

Be that as it may: on that long-ago spring night, after I had turned off for the first time to look at the house I had always overlooked, which I knew instantly would be mine, I forgot for the time being my plan of writing down day by day my year in the area. I stood in the half-darkness up on the railroad embankment, the only person waiting for the last train to Paris, and imagined that after moving in I would do nothing but live there for an indefinite period, and I saw that as an activity that would occupy me completely. Furthermore, no one, not even my friends, was to know where I was. No one in the world would visit me here, and this image, empty and at the same time spacious, branching out, gave me the sensation of being showered under my arms, and I felt wondrously refreshed.

From the beginning I thought of myself as alone with the house, also without the family that we had become once again at that time. Just me and these night-black rain puddles, as at a railroad station on the border, and all my kith and kin over the hills and far away. To inhabit the house and the place in this exclusive way, to do nothing else, also to make no new acquaintances — how robust that seemed to me, how I could picture myself caught up in such a project.

The following months we spent waiting for the house to become avail-Table; we were living in one of the painter’s Paris apartments, with a tree-rustling inner courtyard, in the midst of the city, the broad Seine right around the corner, crossed by the Pont Neuf, the bridge on which the woman from Catalonia and I had once agreed we could spend our lives, going from one bank to the other.

But I was already feverishly looking forward again to my move into the suburb beyond the ridge of hills, and every day spent the entire morning hiking out to my property; when I skipped that, I saw the day as lost.

I made a point of approaching the house from all possible directions, and then walked past it without stopping. A glance out of the corner of my eye at the place, barely visible from any vantage point, and the day had taken on color.

And each time I set out alone. No one was to accompany me, not even Ana, who had said that the house in its wide, hummocky hollow of a yard looked like something out of a fairy tale, by which she meant she felt closed off from the world there.

From the list of previous owners the lawyer had given me, I knew that the house had been occupied almost exclusively by retired folk — a general, a plumber, a professor of ancient Greek, a gravestone maker. My immediate predecessor certainly appeared to have been constantly busy in every room, with shelves of binders, computers, specialized maps of the most distant parts of the earth. But I later learned that he had been unemployed for years. Along with the house I bought the garden tools from him, not only rakes, shovels, and hoses but also the power equipment — lawn mower, chain saw, hedge clipper, even something like an edger — only Flaubert knew the proper name for it — the smallest of the power tools, which at the same time made the most noise, and that was how it was meant to be, as I was told later by a neighbor who worked in a factory that manufactured such tools.

I did this with the firm intention of taking care of things as much as possible exactly like those before me and those around me. Yet to this day I have not even started up most of these instruments, and various neighbors, seeing me hacking away again with my bare hands, have offered their help with the words “I have power tools!”

Am I entitled to call that first evening in the house “ours”?

On the one hand I saw myself as having arrived as never before — the opposite of what the woman from Catalonia had hinted about the building and its location — in the external world. On the other hand I felt hostility toward the presence of my son and my wife. I wanted to be alone with the house, bare yet livable, the doors and windows wide open to the warm July night, its darkness so uncitylike. Or at least no one, not even one of my near and dear, was to obstruct with face and voice the admission of the outside world into the house, the lights from the transmitter flashing in from the eastern hill, the rustling of leaves in the garden and of the trees in the forest wafting toward the house, late trains chiming in, the coolness from the pond waters drifting by.

I turned off all the lights in the house. Valentin went up to his room. I sat at some distance from Ana, on the floor by a window. I had forgotten those entrusted to me. They did not exist.

From the darkness outside the silence spoke to me, on and on, and breathed in, from room to room. That was how it should go on speaking forever. And my house should continue to be as empty as this. And on this night I would not touch that beautiful strange woman somewhere over there.

It did not work out this way, however, and even before winter the house had lost its initial emptiness. If during those first weeks my only connection with the everyday world had come from listening to that transistor radio no bigger than my hand, and then almost exclusively Arab music from Radio Beur, from the metropolitan nowhereland beyond the hills, from time to time we came together of an evening in front of a television set; the turning of the pages of a newspaper, even if it was my own doing, sounded to me like the crack of a whip; books piled up wall-high, when I had wanted to have an armful of them at most in the house, and those as much out of sight as possible, in the closet under the stairs or in one of the many wall niches, of which I still cannot keep track; my wife’s things spread from one bare spot to the next; on the table the tiny little garden flowers and wildflowers were elbowed out by florists’ bouquets, which, furthermore, against my intentions, were purchased not here in the suburb but in the metropolis; and the lamps, hardly larger than clothespins, and also like them clipped on here and there — a temporary arrangement that I as usual had thought of as permanent — were replaced by lanterns, “remember the ones on the bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez?” and a chandelier from a plantation house in the American South.

A friend (the carpenter, the painter, the reader?) on his second visit praised the improvement in livability; one could feel a woman’s hand at work. Yes, I had not kept to my resolution not to let anyone in here, or into my new region at all.

And it was not only my friends who came, who were shown around the house by me, who slept in a guest bed (which, now that I am living alone, is mine, because right next to my study), who gave advice, who also blocked out the emptiness round about in bars and on wood roads, but also people with whom I had nothing to do except to let them interrogate me, persuaded to do so by the woman from Catalonia, who decreed that my concerns were public, and it was my duty to behave accordingly.

What about that metamorphosis? Was it even still in effect? (Luckily most of those who made their way here had eyes neither for the house nor for the surrounding area — which on the other hand annoyed me: I wanted even them, the strangers, now that they were here, to be pulled up short at least now and then, to look and listen and then perhaps to let me tell them something about the place.)

No, after the first quiet summer nothing about my life in the remote bay remained the way I had sketched it out for myself. A new publisher stopped by, coming from the funeral of one of his authors, the twelfth in the current year, and on his way to the University of Montana in Missoula, where he was to receive an honorary degree, and sat facing me with barely contained disapproval, directed if not at me then at the too small chair, which squeaked and creaked under his weight. All my Catalan in-laws gave the property the once-over, and Ana’s mother was convinced the balcony was about to collapse, while her father would not want even to be buried in such a poorly lit suburb, indistinguishable at night from a Transylvanian forest, and with the strangest bunch of hut dwellers swept together from all over the world, and sang the praises of his Gerona and the Catalan nation.

I just barely managed to avoid being talked into a wine cellar, and remained true to my idea that the birds flying past should suffice as pets (though the house was invaded by the barking of a wolfhound right next door, which my new publisher said he would buy himself, too, if he lived in such an area).

Whereas one favorite saying of the woman from Catalonia was “No, no, no!” I myself could hardly ever get out a single no. I never really resisted that, and in the first couple of years in the bay, with the monthly and then also weekly interruptions by visitors, often from far away, of the invisibility I had promised myself, I took satisfaction in this peculiarity for a time. There were moments when I harbored the thought of creating a center in this area, without a groundbreaking or public announcement, simply by regularly inviting one person or another, whose work or style of idleness appealed to me, to come here over the hills and be put up in my house or one of the hard-to-find inns in the bay, preferably in whichever one was being operated just then by the prophet and bankrupt restaurateur, at that time still a station away from Porchefontaine, who could be counted on to contradict my guests, with me as a mere listener. Even if they happened to be very famous, my visitors would have no need to worry that they might attract attention in this area, and that alone had to yield something positive. No face from film or television would be recognized here. At the very most one of the local residents would be taken aback for a moment, but would promptly calm down, thinking it impossible that the person over there could be Michelangelo Antonioni, or, let us say, Eric Cantona, P. Zaroh, Pedro Delgado, Pane Secundo, or Ama Nemus — for never would such celebrities come to our remote corner of the world, even to drop in. I conceived of this center as neither an academy nor a school, though perhaps Pythagoras’ rule about mulling over with others the day before yesterday influenced me, to the extent that I imagined that by retracing our steps this way in our minds, instead of changing fundamentally, which was probably what the philosopher had had in mind, we would see what we were made of. Thanks to my argumentative prophet and even more thanks to his cuisine, this project actually got off the ground, but it soon fell apart, for one thing because by myself I was not enough of an audience for those celebrities, for another because it turned out that strangely enough those who were invited felt a need to be recognized out here after all, and by more than just a few. When they went unrecognized, almost all these famous folk remained silent, actually seeming offended. Or at any rate they were not generous with themselves. Or did none of these people, so dear to me from afar, ever want to let down their guard? That, to be sure, was what I would have wished for, among other things.

Thus during my entire decade here, to the present day, I have never been able to give a party either in my house or in the region for a single visitor — and in the meantime almost none come anymore. That, too, I have not stopped wishing for, if only for just one time.

Never would I have believed that it could be a source of pleasure to live in a house and have the title, the legal title, of owner. Yet that was what it turned out to be in those days, even beyond that first period with the almost empty rooms, and more than that — a joy.

I felt impelled to live in accordance with it, this joy, and that meant more attentively. I resolved to treat my house, just as it was, more carefully than anything previously. I decided not just to treat it gently, but also to give it the benefit of constant observation, including the inconsistent shapes and ill-chosen colors left by the succession of previous owners, along with the harmless peeling and weathering. I then felt annoyed with myself for so much as letting a door slam or pressing a latch without thinking.

My property made me pull myself together in my dealings with it. At the same time, I wanted to use it and make it fruitful (and not only the kitchen and the orchard section of the grounds), and that without adding anything; everything had to remain the same, except perhaps for a fresh coat of paint and a new shrub here and there.

Using it in this sense could mean that I simply went from one to the other of the many nooks and crannies in the house as well as on the grounds and did nothing but let the effect of this spot in the beech thicket, or the shoe closet at the bottom of the cellar stairs, or the room with the stalactite-like plaster, sink in for as long as possible. And time and again it was as though in the process that particular dream of mine was fulfilled in which an undiscovered floor turned up in a long-inhabited house, with rooms like the chambers in a castle, all of them with quiet festive lighting, all of them having stood empty for a long time until I entered them, at the same time filled with an expectancy that now merely strengthened with my presence.

As an owner I also rid myself of certain opinions about right and wrong, beautiful and ugly objects.

Thus among other trees in the yard there was a pine that I would otherwise have judged did not belong there; its place was in a forest. Yet now I thought nothing of the sort, but instead rubbed the smell of the fresh shoots under my nose in springtime or from time to time soaked up the special pine wind rustling through it, no different from the sound I had heard long ago on the edge of the forest in Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain.

That the weeping willow next to it, a sight that would earlier have made me gloomy, now appears differently to me, I owe to what I heard a workman in the bay say one Sunday evening about such a tree as he stood in front of it with his family: “They’re lovely, these weeping willows” (although his voice sounded subdued).

I wanted my fellow residents in the bay to see the owner in me, yes, in their eyes I should be nothing but the owner of this house here, of these grounds, of this narrow, gorgelike lane, in the same sense as on quite a few tombstones in my place of origin, instead of the person’s profession, beneath the name was inscribed “house and property owner” —except that in my case they would not even know the name. The most they would glimpse of me was a silhouette at the window, by the garden gate, in the lane, and they would say nothing but “Ah, there he is, the owner, the same as yesterday, the same as always!” with an undertone of relief, as if my being there like this contributed to their daily sense of security.

It may be that all this led me to feel, if not like the owner of the entire area beyond my own property, then at least responsible for it, especially since hardly anyone else seemed to care about the place, to see himself as one who also had something to say and some say, if only “Out of the way!” “Don’t build here!” “Don’t you dare cut down this apple!” or even just “Quiet!” Although not borne out by the facts, it seems to me as though my chief occupation during that first period in the bay consisted of such using and cherishing, guarding and defending.

When did the woman from Catalonia disappear for the second time? One can almost describe it as “an entire lifetime” that we have been playing the game of losing each other. Perhaps we are both convinced that nothing can happen to us, we will never be finished with each other, and thus push the game to the limit, keep putting off the serious part, or what is real in us, longer and longer, until suddenly there will be no going back, and one of us will be irrevocably lost to the other. It is a dangerous game, a sinful one (it was not my friend the priest who said so, but I myself); for we see that we should stay together, even without the formal sacrament, in glory, and that it would be a dreadful shame to spoil it. “Fragmentary experience — complete dreams”: in this belief, too, one of my favorite mottoes for many years, Ana resembles me.

So it was always for only moments at a time that we were serious with each other. And but a moment after such a repeat honeymoon we might run into one another, coming from different directions, and cringe; so thoroughly had we forgotten the other person’s physical reality in no time at all.

Very often the intimacy we had just experienced would be transformed abruptly into mutual rage. Who was this man? Who was this woman? The house in the bay, not so much roomy as full of odd corners, favored such estrangements, and as far as I am concerned, so did the fact that I was infatuated with my property, or, to use an old expression, I “had a fancy for it.” Such a fancy tended to have a paradoxical effect. And once more Ana and I used the game of loss to put off thinking about our true relationship with each other, put it off until the relationship was over. With each new day of grim dissension she and I both thought to ourselves that there was still time to find our way to the relationship we had had before, and one day: too late. It was the end not only of the game but of the two of us. And now, in retrospect, too late, I think: we were not really those two who once walked toward each other on the bridge to find harmony, nor those two who wanted to destroy each other with their bare hands, but beings of a third sort who had not yet been discovered for one another.

2 — The Year

I almost missed the right moment for telling the story of or reporting on this particular year in this region.

For one thing, it seemed to me that simply by living, walking about, taking things in, I had already written the book, that each day in itself was at the same time the day’s work, and explicit word-making was more like a superfluous addition, a retracing, that would result in gratuitous ornamentation; for another thing, now that I had already spent several years in the bay, it was too late for such a one-year report, because, always thinking “too soon, too soon,” I was waiting for the aforementioned right moment, instead of simply beginning at some point.

This is what I finally did, actually with little faith, half convinced that the execution of my plan was a mere re-presenting, and was also taking place at the wrong moment, too late, or perhaps too soon after all. But I did it, and with the very first sentence all these hesitations were gone. (They were replaced and intersected by others.) I, the writer, was now the one who decided; and if I was ever anything, it was the writer. I experienced that once again simply by sitting down, as after every longer intermission, and writing — from the activity itself.

First of all I decided what would not be included in my notes on one year in the bay. And what would be included would not be decided in advance; to paraphrase Wittgenstein, or simply to play with language, it would dis-cover itself, and in my writing down of things I would follow it.

What would not play a role but at most be mentioned: anything I had not experienced myself as an eyewitness, or verified, at least after the fact. Thus in the course of this year the statue of the Blessed Virgin was stolen from the pilgrimage oak at the edge of the forest. And upon hearing the news I went there and first observed the empty spot up in the fork between the branches, then, a week later, the plaster replacement figure, obviously mass-produced, and finally the original, which had turned up again. And I found out only from the bay’s weekly newspaper about the old lady who left her house one morning and with her diamond ring scratched the paint on all the cars parked on the main street, and yet I felt as though I had been there.

What they call world history was also to be kept out as much as possible, less because of my dislike or distrust than in recognition of my weakness where not only that but also all major events are concerned: I do take an interest — and television does not prevent my feelings from being profound — yet I could hardly say anything about these events, let alone write anything. Not that the world’s seemingly endless obstacle race leaves me speechless. It is only that in this connection images very seldom occur to me, images which, I sense, I would need in order to say anything, and when they have occurred to me, they have not once provided me with the necessary opening bars.

My weakness, with regard to both the horrors of history as well as the things that occasionally move me profoundly, is that I cannot transform them into images and cannot fall into a rhythm, as for instance William Shakespeare could, and who else? History becomes an image for me at most later on in my dreams, often even a compelling image, but then without a context, and if there is a beat to it, it breaks off every time in the middle, and furthermore the period in which the action occurred has never been my current one, generally agreed to be certainly epoch-making, but each time a past period, already almost legendary, once with Goebbels as the protagonist, transformed into a saint, during his last days in Berlin, another time with Nicolas Poussin as the main character, during his unhappy year as court painter in his native France; or the dream took place at the end of time and of history, on the day before Judgment Day.

But I persist in my weakness. And who knows whether things may not be different someday? Whether world history will not eventually give me a coherent dream? And who says I have to wait until night for that? I’m thinking incidentally of my brother, probably the only master our village of Rinkolach has ever had, master in a trade, and his lifelong struggles with his country, his religion, his contemporaries, himself, his desire for victory, his desire for self-destruction, his ghosts — indeed his “preparations for immortality.”

A long time before I set out to record this year of 1999 in the bay, visits to me had already become fewer, and in the last months, the months of preparation, they ceased altogether. As a result of my son’s moving out, then my wife’s, the house gleamed freshly in the emptiness, a little also the shabbiness, of this new beginning, and I asked myself whether it wasn’t being completely alone there that I valued above all else and for which I had been fiendishly scheming all the time, not unlike a long-premeditated crime. (“You can’t share your rustling of the trees and your trembling of the grasses — except in the book”: Ana.)

And after the initial befuddlement, then desolation, then longing for death — no, it was thoughts of doing away with myself — I was in good spirits, nothing else. I undertook no more journeys, not even short ones within the country. Instead I set out on foot every morning, even often in the winter rain, beyond the area, in all directions — except toward Paris — farther than ever before, and undertook actual marches through mud and night away from the bay, also as though I had something to be afraid of there.

I read hardly any newspapers anymore and no books, except the pamphlet in which the stonemason from the transitional period between the Romanesque and the Gothic told in fragments the story of his Middle French forays: “The New Cathedrals, Building the New Tower of Babel.”

Likewise I stopped making notes, put the pile of filled notebooks away in the most inaccessible cupboard, took down the maps of the Seine hills and the aerial photographs (smuggled by someone out of the air base up there for my purposes), wrote no more letters, removed from my desk the stones, wild apples, falcon feathers, and other fetishes, leaving only a row of pencils almost the width of the surface, most of them old and used up, and the ball of clay, scooped up from a sunken road here and long since become hard as rock (even paper — this above all — I banished from my sight), and then in the week before beginning I avoided any kind of preparation, forbade myself even to break into a run, drank before going to bed more wine than usual, expressly to distort and muddy my dreams, usually so clear and incisive, especially in the dark season, turned away when I felt drawn to look at something, and finally was waiting only for the first snow.

The last thing I did was sweep and scrub the house, even into the out-of-the-way corners — the housekeeper had given notice after my family moved out, explaining that there was nothing further for her to do with me there alone — and pruned the trees in the yard, more than necessary, so as to have additional spaces and openings to look through from my window; even opened with my clippers a small, round breach in the hedge, which, from my ground-floor study, was to serve as a peephole through the garden next door to the road I had declared the main one.

The bills were now paid in advance, as much as possible; the heating-oil tank was filled, the lane freshly strewn with crushed rock. And the first snow fell, if initially only, as I heard one morning on the radio, in the highlands of the eastern Pyrenees: I saw it from afar on the crops of the short-legged dark horses in the meadows by the Río Segre in the enclave of Llivia. And that was enough for me. I would begin the next day with my year in the no-man’s-bay.

On the evening before the beginning, the blade of a jackknife with which I wanted to tighten a screw snapped back and cut me in the index or writing finger, so deeply that for a moment, before the flesh closed up again, still without a drop of blood, I saw the white of the bone flash. In the hospital, outside the bay, where the wound was sewn up, the doctor said the finger should be kept still for weeks, and “What is your profession?”

That was all right with me. All the better: I would make do with my other fingers, thus avoiding the familiar pitfall of false dexterity. No more postponement.

In the hour before I went downstairs to my study, I started a fire upstairs in the fireplace, of beech wood, as my grandfather always did before the Feast of the Three Kings, except that he used the glowing embers, and like him I then held my hat over it, and pulled it, still smoky-warm, over my head, for that kept headaches away for the rest of the year.

After that I went out to the yard, got up on the tallest ladder, and sawed a funnel-shaped opening in the top of the spruce, imagining that the mythical beast hiding in the woods, of whose existence I am convinced, would, if it were winged, build itself a nest there in the course of the year, to serve as its outpost in the bay, and I could have it and perhaps its brood in sight from time to time during my writing.

Then I went to the Bar des Voyageurs at the station, read a letter from my carpenter friend from Morioka in northern Japan and my favorite paper, The Hauts-de-Seine News, suburb by suburb, on the way home took a roundabout route, so as to pass the dog next door, locked in the garage during the day, and let the massive animal, which repeatedly jumped at the steel door, bark at me and bark himself out, and finally squatted in the yard by the open door to my study until, in the sparse grass at my feet, a path through the fields appeared.

The first sentence after that, not thought out in advance, promptly led me deep into the forest bay, and only now can I return there.

A stranger crossing the bay on the rather leisurely local train, trav-A eling for example from the center of Paris (which is almost everywhere, after all) out to Versailles, will, at the sight of the expanses of hanging vegetable and fruit plantations to either side of the tracks, interrupted at first by no houses, only toolsheds, at most be surprised at suddenly being out in the countryside, the more so since during a 3,200-meter stretch in the dark just now he may have thought he was in the subway (the supposed subway is in actuality the tunnel through the barrier formed by the Seine hills). The stranger will hardly be likely to get off at the station with the plane tree, unless he has time and no particular destination, and unless the surprisingly rural quality or rather the sudden indefinability of the landscape reminds him of something and holds out the promise of some curious excursions.

When I hear other languages in the bay, it is almost always from residents, especially the Portuguese — no, they actually tend to conceal their native idiom, speaking in public more the language of the country — the North Africans, the Asians, most of all the Armenians and the Russians. Pretty much the only foreigners who are here intentionally, also of their own accord, come from nearby Paris, and can be recognized as outsiders precisely by their not presenting themselves as such, but instead as people from the capital in one way or another, including having the accent to match; and then they are not in the area for its own sake, but are using it only as the starting point or end point of a hike.

Otherwise I have encountered in these ten years almost exclusively foreigners who found their way to the bay either by chance or even involuntarily. One evening a couple from a provincial city came into one of the few restaurants, sought out, if at all, only by residents of the bay; they had wandered in from one of the industrial exhibitions on the periphery of Paris. The couple immediately drew attention to themselves there, in and of themselves and then also because of their completely different, louder, gesticulating, space-grabbing self-assurance, and finally they expressed in such clear signals and utterances their superiority to the region, also their disdain, in the presence of the scattering of brooding, seemingly hunched-over local folk that I, if they had not wolfed down their food and disappeared quickly, would have got up from my seat and, as a representative of the place, barked at them to behave themselves in a manner appropriate to strangers and guests here among us.

It was far more often than once that I heard people who had strayed into the region asking from their cars, “Can you please tell me where I am?” and when a car with a strange license plate pulls over to the side of the road, I am almost sure in advance that someone inside, looking quite lost, will be unfolding a map. And one time, when I was heading home long after midnight, several people came running toward me over the dark square in front of the railroad station, waving their arms and uttering cries of dismay (I immediately picked out my son in the group): as it turned out, a group of Chinese, who had mistakenly not got off the train until after the tunnel, and had now spent hours, meanwhile seized by panic, running back and forth like headless chickens, trapped in this indecipherable, night-cold no-man’s-land cage, without taxis and without any passersby at all, without an open bar or police station.

But hadn’t things been this way since long ago, not only in this current year of 1999? This year only one foreigner has stuck in my mind thus far: that almost-friend, a journalist, who changed his specialty from sports to war. When I, meanwhile more receptive to visits, perhaps precisely as a result of my months of activity here, showed him around the region, he considered it very special because he saw in a store window “souvenir” plaques of marble — in reality grave plaques in the stonecutter’s display. He has remained in my memory because he, still a very young man, was dead soon after that, killed in the German civil war.

It is not just since the beginning of this year that I have spent early evenings now and then standing in that bar, also a tobacco shop, that for me marks the last spit, the finis terrae of the bay. But only this year has it become an observation or looking post.

It happens that two major roads from Paris to Versailles meet there, one of them formerly the route that kings took over the chain of hills, both ascents very steep, with an actual top of the pass up there; the other, Route Nationale 10, leading from the great bend in the Seine down by Sevres through a gently climbing, meandering, gradually broadening valley, in my eyes at the place in question already an upland valley. The acute-angled junction of the two roads is officially called a pointe, a tongue, or, as I call it, a spit. Certain buses of line 171 have POINTE posted as their destination or last stop, whereas the majority continue on to the palace of Versailles, and likewise almost all the nearby facilities are called after it: Ambulance de la Pointe, Garage …, Pharmacie …, Video …, Tailleur de la Pointe (specializing in alterations).

In the Bar de la Pointe I avoid standing directly by the door, located I right in the spandrel of the junction, and instead seek out the back of the bar and gaze through the gaps between the others at the counter. And time and again at nightfall I had the image of a particular darkness, in which cars on the former royal road that cuts across the bay were all in a hurry to get onto the decidedly brighter and also wider highway, the Nationale, and as they accelerated it sounded like the squeaking of rabbits in flight, while the vehicles approaching in the opposite direction seemed to hesitate before the already palpable wooded darkness of the bay.

Yet not only in my imagination is this Pointe something like a place of transition, or actually more a line of demarcation. On old postcards it is also represented as such. On one photograph of the two-road spit of land, taken facing toward the east and the metropolis, what is today the Route Nationale still has trolley tracks and plane trees along the sidewalks, then as now the width of a boulevard, seeming even wider than in Paris, because so much less crowded. Only an old man is walking along, on crutches. The road from the pass, on the other hand, already part of the bay, initially more a path through the hollow, has trees only in the background on that turn-of-the-century postcard, the hillside forests, which at that time extended farther down, and for pedestrians on both sides, then as now, there are only slats, boards set on edge, balance beams. In those days the present junction or fork or bifurcation café, was, in accordance with the significance of the spot, an auberge, and why shouldn’t the innkeeper of Porchefontaine, as his last undertaking, someday open a very special place with a view, here on the spit of land?

I act as if the bay had fixed boundaries. In truth these seem to me to have become fluid during the current year, also because I have undertaken a kind of survey. One day a spot that I previously included as a matter of course falls out of the picture, on another it is reincorporated, and another that had previously gone unexamined reveals its bay character. There is a constant shrinking and stretching going on, and on some days outside the bay I have even circled around little enclaves, and likewise here in the bay, on the contrary, enclaves of other realms.

A factor contributing to such changeability is probably also the way in which I approach my writing terrain. Sometimes, in order to get closer to the original image, I have moved away from it and then approached again in a wide arc. But precisely in this process, as a result of the different directions from which I returned to the bay, its boundaries became most fluid. And my inner image of the entire region also changed and jumped about, depending on the path I took to get home; and thus I came upon it every time as a new arrival who knew nothing about it, which was fine with me for this year, without a trace of memories from my decade-long life here.

A newcomer of this sort turned off the Route Nationale one rainy evening and promptly found himself in an abandoned coal-mining area in the Ardennes. In the former miners’ settlement, a village along a street that stretched farther than the eye could see, the doors of the few still-occupied houses were slightly ajar, and the road surface, rumbling from the heavy traffic, had blackish streaks and potholes, from whose huge splashes one escaped only into the half-open entryways of the houses.

This bleak, unchanging highway finally dipped under a railroad overpass, on one side of it a bunkerlike concrete protuberance, the Rive Gauche (Left Bank) station, on the other side a building whose ridgepole hardly came up to the height of the railroad embankment, the hotel (with bar) of the same name. A woman, shadowy, ran inside, and in passing he heard her asking for a glass of water. And after her, out of the darkness under the bridge, came a pack of derelicts and inquired, one more addled than the next, after the Route Nationale or the Rive Droite station.

The underpass, then, barely lit, nothing but pale, crumbling concrete, some of it already fallen, had a ceiling from which thousands of whitish nails were sticking, at second glance stalactites, deposits from the concrete, of which drops landed on the asphalt sidewalk, falling onto the corresponding stalagmites or ground dripstones, tiny mounds, glassy cones, which could now be felt under one’s soles. The rattling of trains overhead interjected itself into the sound of trucks crashing along, and a squad of soldiers came by at a run, loaded with heavy sacks, almost knocking over the stranger to these parts.

On that evening this was the main access to the no-man’s-bay, in the form of the gate to a dripstone grotto, with the rounded mounds below as its threshold; since then, whether returning home or setting out, I have always made a point of rocking and swaying on them for a moment on the balls of my feet.

After that a leap to another image: in front of a dense, lumpy-wet stretch of woodland along the road, a longish, dim rectangle of light, the across-the-way bar, with the name Little Robinson, a sort of log cabin, surrounded by junk and even more by tree trunks, more higgledy-piggledy than stacked, but protected by tarpaulins as if for several rough winters; the silhouettes inside less those of patrons — the proprietor seemed to be alone there with a shaggy dog — than again those of branches lined up and halves of tree trunks. And smoke puffed from this shack. And then in the woods something rare after all, bunches of rowan-berries, in a resolute red.

And again the image changes. The entry had not yet been negotiated. I had not yet turned into the bay, as I usually did at that spot. The previous highway, after an unexpected curve, cut across a hollow and became a nocturnal landing strip in a penal colony, far from the rest of civilization. Although the inmates could move about relatively freely, they slunk past the wire fences and piles of muck with heads either bowed or turned away from each other, and though the paths were wider here, each walked at a distance from the next person, including the couples, and not only the old ones, to whom it was probably not a new experience, for either the man or the woman, to be a few steps ahead of the other.

There were hardly stores in this sector; the one supermarket, like those otherwise found on military bases, was without displays, without price lists, with sight screens, and if a product was visible, then only its back, and the cashier’s head itself seemed to be that of a prisoner, just as the children sat there trapped in the bare neon-glare-lit room, in a deeper cut in the hollow, in a camp school, born already unfree, the offspring of the banished.

In addition, out of the hill-darkness all around, the watchtower loomed, many-storied, huge, each story shining down fixedly on the isolated stragglers and slinkers along the track, and only from the top of the tower a restless flashing and smoldering.

On that evening I did not feel I had arrived in my bay until I reached the square in front of the local railroad station, full of motion from the shadows of the plane trees, whereas usually the bay began way back at the Route Nationale and sometimes even before that, for instance at the Armenian church, or at the shop of the alterations tailor beyond the junction, the Pointe.

On another such day during this year I returned after tracing a similar arc through the woods, from which far more wood roads and hiking paths led to the settlement than streets from anywhere else. And just as I daily had the experience of noticing something I had previously overlooked, it was the same now: by a clearing deep in the forest, among the oaks and edible chestnuts, a palm tree; and one of its fronds, on an almost windless day, was rustling and rattling like a sail on the high sea. An owl hooted, and yet it was the middle of the day, with the bells of the Catholic church chiming noon, and the almost simultaneous siren from the roof of the only official building in the bay — a mere annex to the main building somewhere else — an indication that it was the first Wednesday of the month.

In the distant outlet of the forest, directly facing it, stood a house, framed and overarched by the last trees; the path led directly to the door and the few steps up to it. It was a sight so different from that at the other end of the forest, up on the plateau with the office complexes, which as a rule displayed only their often windowless side elevations to the roads there, and then only parts of these, the edge of a wall, a ventilation pipe, a propane gas tank, their colors also clashing with any of those in the forest. Perhaps, I thought, this impression of the office buildings’ defiantly confronting the trees stemmed not only from the fact that the buildings towered above the latter, but also that one had to go uphill to reach them in the end, whereas the wood roads more or less gently descended toward the houses in the bay and merged with the side streets or even pointed toward a particular door, as though that were its destination.

Yes, the houses down below, the great majority of them, were proportioned to the forests around them, and not only when glimpsed momentarily through the trees. I have never seen woodlands and human dwellings achieve such a vital and beautiful communion anywhere else. That comes, I saw, specifically from the bay character of the settlement, extending deep and with every glance deeper into the otherwise intact primeval forest — an illusion renewed almost daily and perfectly fine with me — and even more from the wildness, no, the aboriginal quality of almost every individual shape amid the hodgepodge of houses, comparable to the trees in the forest primarily by virtue of a similarity in the spaces between them. And to me, the new arrival, even when I had long since passed the outer edge, and instead of on the wood road was walking down the side streets here, which I hoped would go on forever, the robustness and simultaneous delicacy of the arboreal structures and the residential structures seemed similar.

On that day the boundaries of the bay thus extended to include the last houses up on the opposite slope, and the intrusive sounds, almost the only ones in this great expanse, were the shouts of children playing, dogs barking, hammering, while behind me, from the woods, the owl could still be heard.

And on yet another day, as I was walking home toward midnight, by full moon, on the wood road, no owl was hooting anymore. Instead a fox was standing in front of the house at the forest outlet, and stood there, and stood there, a fox profile as never before. And when it ran then, showing up in a flash several gardens away, it appeared to me as a ghostly flitting through all the fences and walls and house foundations, whereupon it just stood still again, its entire silhouette horizontal, from the bushy tail to the perfectly pointed nose, its head over its shoulder for a long, long stare at me, at no one but me, and from there it dashed on again, fleeing or directly toward me? A shudder ran through me. Where was that? Was that even here in the bay at all? And in the current year?

As for this, the first thing I recall is the bats, again in a clearing in the forest, at dusk up in the hills of the Seine, and that was in January, right at the beginning of my sitting down, during a hike over the hills to Meudon, and a warm wind was wafting. The bats did not show their faces again until late summer, and then only for one evening, flying by rapidly in a zigzag through my yard, above which a few swallows were still swooping.

It was likewise still January that time I stepped barefoot into the grass outside my garden-level study to sharpen my pencils and then spent a good hour walking back and forth between the pear tree and the cherry tree, the ground was so warm under my soles. But it was probably only my imagination that at the same time crickets were chirping from the forest preserve, the result of the great winter silence there sometimes. (More later about the sounds of the crickets here and their connection with the silence.)

No hallucination — although I took it for one at first — was seeing a little snake creeping along the sidewalk at the foot of the Bordeaux bank on the bay’s main street, on a winter night that was damp and cold after all, no, not an earthworm or a novelty store item, and it really moved, though in very slow serpentines, and when I crouched down beside it, it raised its head weakly in the lamplight, flicking its tongue with its last strength, or not at all. The lone late passerby to whom I pointed out the snake was not surprised for a moment to see the animal at this time of year, and altogether the people of the area seemed to find hardly anything astonishing. And as several boys approached from the floodlit athletic field, I pushed the dying snake over the bank into the thick-layered fallen leaves of the forest.

And it was also in the depths of winter that I became a witness to the removal of a ninety-year-old woman, who, alone in her house up on the plateau (part of the bay on that particular day), had caught on fire from her gas stove and had burned up in her living room: when I passed again later that afternoon, pelt-black smoke was still puffing from a smashed windowpane, being photographed by the chronicler of The Hauts-de-Seine News, too late on the scene as usual, and a village expression acquired new meaning for me: “Your place is as cold as a burned-out house!”

And even before the onset of spring something unprecedented happened in the bay and the surrounding area, an earthquake, still inexplicable even to the geologists, also, these say, because so little research has been done on the area: only a small one, to be sure — the rattling of glasses was mistaken by most people for the doing of one of the bombers from the air base again — and yet, in the gypsum-rich part of the circle of hills, the underground tunnel of a former quarry is said to have collapsed, putting an end to mushroom-raising there.

If the earthquake hardly jostled my handwriting in my study, something else did so all the more. I, so dependent on consistency and daily routine, was threatened with being brought to a standstill and almost compelled to give up my undertaking, as yet so up in the air, also because I was still only at the beginning. (And where am I now?)

The woman from Catalonia, my wife, who had vanished long since, suddenly reappeared, but not to live with me again, for a third time, but to forestall my, our, book. At least that appeared to me to be her intention during those winter weeks when time and again but never regularly, and also at no particular hour, she would block my path in unexpected places.

It did not solve anything that I fled in between to Salamanca in the Spanish highlands and continued my work there, the Plaza Mayor, seen below in bird’s-eye view from my attic room in a pension, merely pretending to be the view from my study (those weeks seem so distant that I am not clear as to whether the dying snake here wasn’t actually dragging itself through the wet leaves down there on the bank of the Tormes River, and altogether whether the person squatting by the animal isn’t actually my friend the painter): I had to go home to the bay; without my presence there throughout the year the book would lose its locale and its basis.

And on my very first morning back, as I continued my work, “that woman” descended on me again. Actually I merely saw her running away down a side street when I went to my mailbox, located at the end of the lane, as if for a farm, fastened to the lamppost there, and then found, my only mail, a picture postcard of the medieval bridge over the Tormes in Salamanca, the back side left blank.

Ana had keys to the house, and some days I heard her banging around above me. Later she also came downstairs to the study and sat in a corner. I avoided speaking to her, recalling the phrase an almost-friend had used: Let the will-o’-the-wisp have its way; otherwise all that will be left to it will be its substratum, melancholy. (Earlier, when I had repeated that to her, the woman from Catalonia had replied, “But beneath my melancholy my joy may be waiting!”) And she spoke no more than I did, merely watched me in silence, hour after hour, and hadn’t there once been a time when I had wished that of her for my work? Then, as if she sensed that the day’s quota would soon be polished off, she would get up and leave. But on occasion she would come storming in, especially when, increasingly exhausted by the situation, I would be trying to sleep in the next room; she would shake me, still without saying a word, and then be gone again.

And on a spring day she appeared in the backyard and pounded with her fists on the study door. I went out to her. She had the ability to acquire tremendously broad shoulders all of a sudden, and with these she rammed me to the ground. I stood up, and she rammed me again, except that this time I was ready and stayed on my feet. I would have defended myself, but then I would have lost the sentence in the middle of which she had interrupted me, and with it my ability to continue the book. And so, with the woman from Catalonia one fingertip away from me, eye to eye with my enemy, I silently spelled out the next sentence, and likewise the one after that, and at the same time was close to seizing this giant dwarf and spiking her on the fence pickets, longing at the same time to unite instantly with this female body and give Ana a child, wanting at the same time nothing but to put my arms around my wife, and fearing at the same time that one of the neighbors might see us like this.

And what finally did happen: as old as I was, I began to cry, and in the process became as old as I was. And it seemed to me that her hatred was now being transformed into scorn. Yet as I then looked at her, she had disappeared again. And I squatted down on the spot where we had just almost killed each other, became lost in contemplation of the overlapping traces of wallowing and stomping, along with the uprooted grass and clumps of earth, thought that no human race was foreign to me except sometimes my own white one, and even more that of women; thought, “One day we will kill each other”; thought, “I shall find us once more,” and then continued on with this year of mine in the no-man’s — bay.

Since that day my wife has not appeared again. Instead, when summer came there were other threats and hindrances. But don’t you need those, too, for your writing, as the outward calls to order, without which you would inwardly let yourself go?

From time to time, yes, from time to time.

It is the moment for focusing on the houses in the bay, which in the beginning looked so odd to me, and meanwhile stand there so naturally.

Only in this process of writing things down, which sharpened my senses, did I become more attentive to the buildings here. That happened in an almost time-tested way: since I am incapable of forcing myself to perceive something, I would first note down at home at my desk what, without specific observation, had caught my attention about one house or another as I passed it. This allowed me to get away from my little memory trail; I became concrete, described as completely as possible, made up details at random, drifted into make-believe.

With such descriptions of a house and its surroundings in black and white in my mind, actually more like guesses, I would set out a second time in that direction. And only in this fashion did I become capable of seeing how it really was. And far more powerfully than what I had got right my mistakes impressed upon me the real character of the place. Except that in order to achieve that I had to have interjected something in writing between the object in question and my senses, if not something wrong, then something half cloudy, and in any case something in writing. Then all I had to do was go home again and correct this where necessary.

And sometimes I allowed the mistakes to stand; who could say that the telephone booth I had hallucinated onto a certain street corner would not in fact be installed there the next day?

Nowhere else have I seen such houses as those in the bay? Yes, and I have never yet seen houses like those here.

And again it was only during my writing year that I began to distinguish: it is not merely because of the particular building style. It also has to do with their location in this remote spit of a settlement, cutting deep and narrow into the forest. (The solitude or remoteness helped create this world — and what besides?) Not a house there which, observed from a distance — and the majority reveal themselves thus — does not have as a background, high above the roofline, a wooded ridge, which then extends over the roofs of the other houses as well.

The chain of hills round about not only provides the frame for the houses of the bay, but even more forms part of their image. Without it, marking the curved horizon floating gently above them, the houses would stand as if alone, each an incomplete phenomenon, so to speak. Without this omnipresent background of wooded hills the settlement would lack something that constitutes the unique solidarity, if not of the inhabitants, then of the dwellings there.

It has sometimes happened that I have looked out my window and pictured the wooded heights as gone from behind the near and more distant gables in the neighborhood, the eastern chain of hills with the transmitter, the southern slope, called Eternal Slope, of Velizy and the Poussin Meadow in between, the western heights, now at the beginning of November already shrouded in snow clouds; and each time a sense of uneasiness, almost of horror, has seized me at such hilllessness round about, with all the buildings in the fore- and middle ground continuing on into unbounded, drizzly, identical plains.

No. Even by themselves the houses of this region, without the green and gray arc of hill forests above their roofs, are a force, at least many of them. Even on the plains they would assert themselves, and would form lovely and spirit-lifting horizons, one in conjunction with the other, as well as with the front and back yards, around corner after corner, off into mirror-polished depths.

And again, only as a result of this year have I recognized that the city of my childhood longings was not exotic but one exactly like the settlement here in the bay; that those white cities I later chased after through the decades were not the right thing. Or: the White City is nothing for me.

The bay also has white houses, but they are rare, and in contrast to the White City, which begins to glow only from afar, here the last white disappears at a distance, or one has to search for it. A century ago there was only one such building, which was also called La Maison Blanche. The façades display concealing colors, so to speak. Although yellow and red, even purple paint also occurs, nowhere does it make an impression of brilliance, or even of colorfulness. Yet the houses do not seem camouflaged in any way, but rather embody, in their distinctness and clarity, the fact we know as a house, and these house-facts stand, according to Karl Valentin, out in the open.

But isn’t it also thus in other suburbs? Perhaps. Except that the houses here appear more forcefully, precisely in that they are almost without exception smaller: if just as broad as elsewhere, they are lower; if as high, decidedly narrower. And since, on the other hand, the yards are often larger than elsewhere, the space between houses is entirely different from there. So much more air is visible, no matter how narrow the gaps, between and above the houses’ smallness.

It was this play of staggered in-between spaces that first brought back to me childhood images of a place of the future and rendered them concrete. And the play developed even more drawing power from other unique characteristics of the bay’s buildings. Almost every one of the thousand little houses, strangely angular or strangely spreading, had a form different from the one next door, and when two similar ones did occur, it was as rare as twins, and they always turned up far apart. Besides, they did not stand in a row anywhere, but rather each at an angle to the next, the barracks-flat one close to the street, the next one, towerlike, in back at the end of a bowling-alley-length vegetable garden, and then vice versa, and so on. And at every step you found the façades pointing in different directions, not only around the one pond or the one round, always unpeopled plaza called Place de la Concorde.

The yellow-and-gray sandstone, that common suburban building material, did not occur in the bay all along a street as elsewhere, but in isolation, likewise buildings of red brick and pale limestone, and the few stuccoed houses displayed from house to house not only different shades but also different pebbliness in their textures. Thus far I have encountered one or two whose walls reveal a pattern like the first application of mortar with the trowel, and just as many, each time again at locations far apart, where the stones, cut into hexagons, were accordingly laid in nature’s basic pattern, most noticeable otherwise in the cracks the earth develops during a drought.

Otherwise the houses tended to have no decoration, except for the chimney pots, often a veritable collection on a roof, one like a pretend factory smokestack with an upside-down flowerpot on top, the one next to it a many-winged miniature pagoda: hamlets in their own right. And on two southern façades thus far, separated by several streets, sundials revealed themselves to me, so unusually tiny — like insurance company decals — that they were a discovery if for no other reason. And on a garden wall, that row of concrete blocks, set on edge, in the form of dice whose black dots had meanwhile been whitewashed, and on a house wall a relief representing billiard balls and a queue.

All the houses in the bay huddled together in the broad hollow surrounded by wooded hills; none stuck up from a rise. None had a tower, an oriel, or turrets, or imitated a palace like quite a few in the neighboring suburbs, and none could be called a “villa,” except by a real estate agent. The one house that was somewhat more imposing resembled a forester’s lodge; the one, the only one, with an arched portal had probably once been a rectory. And in distinction to the other bays in the Seine hills, where one can repeatedly see, when out walking in the cookie-cutter side streets, a rounded Romanesque form here, a Gothic pointed cap there, in none of the established buildings here could I discover a single imitation of another building style, and probably nothing resembling a style at all.

For the architectural style of the Paris suburbs, the expression pavillon has been introduced. But for most of the local lodgings here that is not applicable. They look too unplanned, too little thought out. They are simply residences, or buildings of convenience; yet there is nothing provisional or hasty about them either. They have been standing and existing there in the forest bay since long ago, and are meant to last. I keep seeing them anew, singly and all together, as classic, less in the sense that they are timeless than that they are original, and then, too, in that they gave me a concept of everywhere, not just any old one, but rather a central one, particularly rooted in that place, indeed animated by it.

And I would never have assigned the population there to any particular people or any specific social class. A short while ago I read the remark of a famous architect from the metropolis beyond the hills, who, on the subject of the pavilions in the suburbs, whether ironically or seriously, praised the good taste of the petty bourgeois revealed in them. I do not know. At any rate I have never had any such thought in connection with the inhabitants of those classic residences in the bay here, to my delight.

As a result of the reserve the longtime inhabitants of the settlement brought to each of our encounters, I experienced all of them the same way I did their houses: as modest and untroubled — which is different from humble, or obsequious, and carefree. Each time I want to greet them, even though I do not know them, when they show themselves at their windows or garden doors, which occurs infrequently, and at times I have actually succeeded. And what a glow, a quiet, laconic, also playful glow, I received in return. I can say: In the old people in their cottages in the bay, and most of them are old, I have faith (I cannot say that of the other generations, certainly not of my own). If a single term for them ever came to mind, it was certainly not “petty bourgeois” but “cottager,” as they would say in the area I come from. And in their discretion, I thought, they combined the characteristics of saviors and the saved. Most self-deceptions are more farfetched.

Whether I am walking down the main street or down the hundreds of side streets: these residences appear to me every morning as houses in the purest sense, and still with the freshness of morning in the afternoon. And they form such varied in-between spaces with each other that the things within these spaces — the bushes, clotheslines, benches, and, way in back, the woods — or simply the empty space itself, can walk, drive, ride, or move along with me as I pass. The cheerfully rhythmic glimpses or onward-onward gestures form courtyards between the houses, if only with the breadth of a crack, and, when there is a little more room before the next house, they actually are that as a rule, rather than gardens, grassless, paved with crushed rock, occupied by rabbit hutches and chicken ladders (and soon I will also discover the first beehive there).

With the help of such interstices, the image becomes sharper from one step to the next, like the opening of a curtain, then another and another, back into the deepest background, accompanied by a constant shining forth of individual parts of all the other houses, worked in relief, of a window over there, a gable one yard over, a porch there around the corner, a steep exterior staircase up to an attic room — every separate part recognizably an element of a human habitation, and the entire thing housing in the most fundamental sense, and not a schematic drawing but in the proportion of one to one, also not dreamed up, but entirely real.

An unusual feature for a town was also that the vegetable gardens and fruit trees were located more in front of than in back of the individual houses, whereas from the backyards only a basic element or nothing but pure green could be glimpsed between foundations and edges, with the feeling of a secret meadow spreading out there. I merely intuited this. Merely? Intuition comes to life: hardly anything has a farther reach.

Untroubled, yet with constant modesty and care, would also describe the style in which these original settlers added on to their houses in the course of time. Often close to blocking off the in-between spaces, but never entirely doing so. Without fail there always remained a slit, dark, to be sure, but letting one sense all the more powerfully the greening behind at its outlet. And untroubled, too, the way in which some of the additions jut out onto the already hardly present sidewalks, and one balustrade, hardly wide enough for a cat, and one door high in a wall without stairs up to it. And each addition, even a crooked or a sprawling one, merely reinforced the original harmony.

So, is there nothing at all about the buildings in the bay that disturbs you? — Well, perhaps I notice the absence of something: for instance, larger roof overhangs, to allow sitting outside when it is raining, which instead of soaking a person would only spray him now and then.

And probably for longer than just my decade here, but obvious to me only since I began my writing year, something has been happening in the bay that upsets me more than an interruption: the closing of the little vistas. At least once a week I stand in front of another such in-between space, which last time I looked was still part of the spirit-lifting back-and-forth game running deep through the settlement, and it has been walled up, specifically by one of us, those who just moved in, the buyers-up of property.

This year’s wars in the world were civil wars. Yet as a rule the contending parties hardly knew what they were fighting for. It was not that part of the population of the country at war did not live in freedom, or that its language was being suppressed, and also the inequality of opportunity was no longer so egregious as at one time, or was it? At any rate, such things were not cited anywhere as causes. No one cared a fig for causes, or if so, then only for show.

At last there was war in the world again; that was its natural state, that was how it had to be, for otherwise where did those dreams come from, even in lifelong peace, in which it was a reality that my sister put out my eyes, my brother kicked me out of the house we shared, my father ripped my flesh from my bones with his teeth, gazing at me with the eyes of a murderer, and when I came home, my mother, in the form of a giant avenging witch, jumped me. This contradicts those psychologists who declared that within the human race any material for making war had been used up for all time. (I had believed them, and in a way I continue to believe them.)

As wild and cutthroat as these wars were — as they say only civil wars can be — those who waged them had none of the characteristics of close relatives. Instead these were wars among distant cousins, and it seemed as though even in the long peacetime actual brothers had become as alien to each other as though they were separated by ten degrees, and then enemies. Even where no war was taking place: how often in the last decades I have heard someone speak of his brother in a tone that suggested that as far as he was concerned the brother could not only drop dead but also go unburied — and if he were to be buried, then in a grave with another name. After the outbreak of war they went at each other accordingly: bloodthirstily, and at the same time with an “I’m not touching you!” Slaughtering, shooting down, blowing sky-high, yes, but all that only with the fingertips. Devastate and destroy, yes, but at the same time with an expression as if it were all for show.

At least that is how it was with the German civil war, not even the East against the West, but almost each person against every other, and finally more and more often massively against oneself, a threat to the economy and combated by the professional army. This war, which suddenly broke out, in all the countries, early in the spring of 1999, has meanwhile long since ended, and it is as if Germany were finding itself at something like a beginning for the first time, without ghosts, healed, if shaky on its legs and bemused, “I hope for more than just the moment” (the reader); as if now its entirely different history were going into effect. And the other peoples of the earth seem gradually to be following this into a peace that is not even phony, in the sense that for them, Germany, to paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges, is the world consciousness. In contrast to that period before the first millennium after Jesus Christ, now, before the second, ominous signs as well as promising ones are on the increase (except that for many countries a time-reckoning different from the Christian one is in use).

In that spring my almost-friend had dropped in on me in the bay, only yesterday the author of sports reportages as light-footed as they were stirring, and in the meantime, still as young as ever, only pale, with a stubble of beard and a black shirt, a war correspondent in Germany, exclusively for a paper specializing in war in its everyday variations, a paper engaged in passing on news, as even the sentence structure revealed, less for the purpose of informing and explaining than as a power game and profit-oriented business, without a hint of an eye or compassion: my young acquaintance’s very first article was veiled by those employed there and turned into a sort of mask, and he did not get to write any others.

On his brief detour from the fronts to the isolated bay, he was, to use the expression that instantly came to me upon catching sight of him, “full of war.” So instead of letting him come into the house, I promptly walked with him from the doorstep out into the landscape. We then sat down on the far side of the body of water with the name Etang des Ecrevisses, Crayfish Pond, at a picnic table by the edge of the forest. This morning, over half a year after his shot in the head, I sat down alone in the cold and emptiness of that spot to recollect better the hour we spent there.

He was constantly snapping pictures, though not of the region but exclusively of himself, and they were also the only ones he included in his war article. The old fishermen, the former Crayfish Pub, the palm tree back in the in-between space of a freshly turned-over root-vegetable garden, the constant trembling or bubbling of the water, like that of the palm fronds, the taiga birches at our back, already with a hint of green, the trumpet blasts, monotonous, curt, muffled, from the track workers on the horizon — to me the music of the bay — the great sky, the broad earth, this quietly vibrating peace certainly did not go unnoticed by him, but he despised them. Somewhere else was war, which counted, and through which he, as young as he was, had finally established a connection with the world. Just as certain characters in animated cartoons had the sign for money (dollars) in their eyes, so he had in his eyes, as if black-ringed in mourning, the sign for war. Relaxation and pleasure now meant to him, and he was not the first: lying on his belly on the ground between two battle lines, barely protected from the hail of ordnance, and feeling his own heartbeat. It was almost as though these very eyes pushed my hand away, when I casually, more for myself, tried to point out something in our surroundings or offered him a few hazelnuts from my garden.

But what came to my mind this morning by that pond, at the sight of the blackish, pre-winter-bare table with carvings left there by lovers and single individuals? I should have waved him into my house, or given him a kick in the pants. How his face came to life for a moment when over there, on the pond road, a parachute-green military vehicle rolled by, with a machine-gun muzzle sticking out through a gap in the canvas.

Later that spring Mont St.-Valérien above Suresnes, the only elevation in the hills of the Seine known as a “mountain” because it stood apart, was transformed overnight into a volcano, again to the amazement of the geologists, who would never have guessed that the magma, thought of in the region as more harmless than almost anywhere else, under all the soft, quiet layers of sand, sandstone, limestone, and gypsum, would ever find its way through them up to the surface.

The eruption was not exactly powerful, no mountaintop was blown off, no rock thrown up, the liquid earth just bubbled up as if from an underground oil tank, though one that was boiling hot. After the one hour of volcanic activity a crater hardly formed, or if it did, it was half filled up again by the rock rubble rolling back down, which also stopped up the magma shaft for the time being.

The flow of lava down the mountain in the direction of the Seine was, however, no trickle but a small stream; the contents of the burst tank were plentiful. The only thing destroyed by it was part of the fort on the peak, used during the war by the Gestapo as an execution place, now a memorial, in whose inner courtyard the new volcano had opened up, and the edge of the famous vineyard of Suresnes, whose delicate yet robust wine bears the designation “Vin du pays des Hauts-de-Seine”: there the magma came to a halt; today, long since cooled, having fused with the sand and gravel it swallowed up on its way down Mont St.-Valérien, it forms what looks from a certain vantage point like a glassy flank — the ground in which a handful of vintners there will cultivate a special basalt wine in the next few years, a red, as a varietal of the wines of the Seine hills.

That vantage point is located here in the bay, at the highest point on the wood road that I call the Absence Road, a point that lies several stories above the extinguished volcano of Suresnes, which in that spring could be recognized through the sprouting leaves by its white smoke, and now, through the bare trees far and wide, by the gleaming tongue below the pale fort, with the platforms of the towers of La Defense in the most distant background. Simultaneously with the brief volcanic activity, the entire hilly area, in its great arc around the Seine, is supposed to have risen by several millimeters, and it actually seems to me as though I no longer, as in previous winters, have to stand on the very tips of my toes to catch sight, from my highest elevation in the countryside, through the myriad of treetops, of the glassy stump of a mountainous cone there on the distant bend of the arc.

Usually it rained so hard for a while in springtime that some of the former brooks, without which the fairly impenetrable network of valleys, often actually ravines and gorges in the suburb’s landscape, would never have formed, overflowed the sewers of which they had long since become a part, and on the surface, if only fleetingly and quite harmlessly, traced out their old meanders: for instance the almost forgotten waters of the Marivel on the boundary between the bay and the upper valley, a name now attached only to an apartment complex, a résidence. Some writers of letters to the editor of The Hauts-de-Seine News offered the opinion that this was a bad omen, while others took it for a good one.

Likewise leaves wafted and whirled, without a real storm, from the woods, long before summer, for days, flying high through the bay, as if to blot out the sun, not withered leaves from the year before, but the pale green leafage of the current year, barely sprouted from the oaks as well as the edible chestnuts, birches, beeches, and again that was interpreted one way or another (for those who had seen it as the handwriting on the wall, the summer foliage that followed, more luxuriant than it had ever been, was a miraculous sign).

As for me, the summer was remarkable particularly for those legendary lizards, the central figures in the coat of arms of the bay town, to which, by the way, a coat of arms was as little suited as a castle or any kind of overlord.

When I came upon them, on the gray-sanded sunny bank deep in the forest, I at first mistook the two animals for pieces of bark, and then for dead, because they were lying on their sides, close together, their whitish bellies almost skyward, and, unheard of for lizards, did not dart away the moment they were prodded but remained motionless, completely lifeless to the touch. And only after that was there a pulsing in their necks, increasingly powerful, and finally I noticed the foot of one of them on the other’s body, tiny and yet pawlike. I sat down on a tree trunk on the other side of the path, which since that time I have called Lizard Way, and watched the couple, as I have subsequently done every time there is still, sunny weather, play dead while copulating — apparently? didn’t lizards conceive virginally? — while above the treetops, through the great blueness, the transmitter sent out flashes from its upper deck, like a lighthouse operating by day.

With the passing weeks and months, the two animals moved, each on its own, into holes in the bank, side by side, in which they lodged like giant cave dragons of old, only gradually discovered by me amid the camouflaging shimmer of the clay, with their rigid, scaly triangular heads, from which only rarely their tongues darted out.

For this attempt at a chronicling of one year in the no-man’s-bay I have not yet looked even once at my notebooks (although they fill the two upper drawers in one of the few pieces of furniture in the house, the dresser, to the point that they stick). In my storytelling I am following only my memory, and would like to keep it that way.

And with the help of — or according to the measure of — my memory, it is again animals, when I recall how the spring continued, as Pythagoras’ pupils recalled their day before yesterday, that determine my image of the bay at that time.

First, even before the lizards, on the days that did not get a little warmer until around noon, on another path by a bank in the forest, I came upon a colony of wild bees. These had their holes, numerous, honeycomb-close, like an earth city, in a zone of the gray-blue sand that is called here Sable de Fontainebleau, although the Seine hills are far from the town of Fontainebleau. The sand dug out by each of the bees, forming bulging ramparts around their holes, seemed to come from a considerable depth; it looked so unweathered, unwintry fresh, and pale as wood shavings, providing, along with the barely noticeable yellow of the pussy willows, the first spring color in the great expanse of tree gray.

Those hundreds of circles of sand on the mossy bank first drew my attention to the craters in the middle, which, when examined from a squatting position, turned out not to be empty at all. Hairy black heads with antennae filled the openings, at first only here and there, and then, after a warm hour of sun, in almost every earth comb. Fine sand blew and slithered in all directions, along the entire bank, and finally here and there a couple of bees flew out of their grottoes and took off, some black-armored, others red-pelted, toward which pollen? while the majority who remained behind, merely crawling around their holes, were now pounced on by slim, all-black flies, at second look also bees, only of a different gender? which circled and rolled about with the bigger, more colorful ones as if in foreplay.

That was repeated several days in a row on the Wild Bee Path, except that more and more of the plump chief bees were left lying as cadavers next to their holes. (I explained this to myself as the result of the persistent nighttime frosts; they had frozen to death.) And in spite of the stronger sun, the thousand-grotto city seemed to be dying out more and more; a rarity now when a hairy black head slowly struggled up to the light or landed with yellow-dusted legs; and the dive-bombing small bees had completely disappeared. And only later, when I turned over one of the curled-up putative frost-corpses did I see an empty thorax, as if sucked out, and it was exactly the same with all the others: only the back held together for appearances’ sake; underneath nothing was left.

The legs of the dead, gilded with pussy-willow pollen, thus became for me the next color of spring. And even later, when I pushed the dead leaves aside one at a time at the base of the bank, I discovered under them the main deposit of mining-bee corpses, heaps of them, all topsy-turvy, on top of and underneath one another, swept together after the slaughter as if in mass graves, and all the cadavers were completely without flesh between the head and the abdomen.

Since then, for the rest of the year, I have not seen any mining bees, either murderers or victims, either at the long since flooded settlement in the grotto bank or anywhere else. In the summer I was stung a few times in my yard by bees, true enough, but those were the usual kind (which, however, likewise in summer, for an incredible, sun-darkening moment, whooshed through that same yard, no, roared, a swarm-cloud, in flight).

Only once, also in summer, did I have an experience with perhaps similar wild bees, but I hardly got to see them. And my experience was then entirely different.

That was the day when, in one of the bay’s forests, on the edge of a ravine, I finally found my way to the cliffs I had been missing in the area as a sort of nourishment for the senses. I had been following the upper edge of a brook bed, during a hot noon hour completely free of wind — and there: the cliffs, in which I had almost ceased to believe anymore, after all the terrain symbols for roches, which then turned out to have been blasted or built over, now only names on maps.

I stopped in my tracks, on a path overgrown with beech seedlings, at the foot of the row of massive rocks, emerging so unexpectedly out of the forest, with the sun shining on them and the trees at some distance. These were cliffs as cliffs should be, for climbing, for hurling oneself to one’s death, for taking shelter under in a storm.

And then I again heard a roar, but different from that of the honeybee swarm and that of the warplanes that were still tracing their practice loops more often than usual from Villacoublay to the Ile-de-France: it was very close, and also, unlike the bombers, had something profoundly even about it, and came from the cliff in front of me.

For the moment there was no other sound. The entire stone face, as high as a building, and smooth as a pebble, was thrumming, and not until I was within a hand’s breadth of it did I notice the crack from which that mighty sound surged — I almost had to put my ear right against it to be certain. Surged? It surged through me, swept me away, and I allowed it to surge through me. And at the same time I was almost gripped by fear, and not only because of the occasional bee that came shooting out with its lone buzzing, which once out in the open promptly dissipated or sounded like nothing worth mentioning.

That there was such a roar inside the cliff had to do not only with the population of wild bees in there but also with the way the fissure probably widened out inside into a cave: the bees returning home sounded as shrill as wasps in the moment of squeezing into their refuge, and a moment later their sound was swallowed up in an entirely different sonority, the roar from deep within the cliff. As close and threatening as the sound was, I had, on the other hand, never heard anything come from a greater distance. If this was a trance, there was nothing more real than a trance. Only this made presence of mind possible. If ever there was a music of the spheres, it was resounding from the earth here.

In that hour with the cliff bees, the noon stillness did not last very long in the surrounding area. On that very day in Paris another peace conference was taking place, in connection with one of the civil wars, and the airspace above the seven-airport region was soon filled with the rattling and rumbling of helicopters ferrying representatives of the warring parties back and forth between Villacoublay, Buc, Toussus-le-Noble, Guyancourt, St.-Cyr-l’Ecole, and the Elysée Palace. But even while the squadrons were flying uninterruptedly over the treetops, I was listening only to the roar of the wild-bee colony in the cliff — like the humming of my childhood in the telegraph poles, except that it was a live sound if anything ever was, a sound before every other sound — and I tapped my foot to it and wished we might all have such a ringing in our ears, in our skulls, in our hearts, for me and you in the hour of our death.

It was not yet summer when I then went to the woods to write. On the one hand I had long had in mind to sit out under the open sky with my stuff, as I had during my time in Ulan Bator. On the other hand I left my study not of my own accord but as a fugitive.

To be sure, there had always been noise around the house now and then, but in the meantime it had become so bad that even in unsettled weather I ran away from it. By noise I do not mean children crying and sounds of work. Although high-pitched whines, drilling, hammering, and squeaking could get on my nerves, I knew I had to put up with it, and battling my way through even seemed good for the text: as if it were to be tested for accuracy that way. There was a crash with whose help I found my way back to a train of thought I had lost during a period of too much stillness; wasn’t there a danger of letting language run away with me in the stillness? This other noise, however, was dangerous in a different way. It seemed malevolent to me. It was not even that the noisemakers were taking aim at someone else — someone else, anyone else, did not exist for them.

In the last few years I had acquired some new neighbors. With the many trees and dense hedges, I hardly saw them, and merely heard, all the more clearly because I could not see it, that things were being torn down, built, rebuilt. Some evenings it was actually a relief when, in place of the earlier pitch-blackness and desolateness, from the area around the yard here and there another illuminated window shone. To be surrounded at a distance by the silhouettes of small houses, their roofs hardly visible through the treetops, was nice. It was as if a village had sprung up around my property, or a circle of wagons.

The nights in the bay still kept their spacious elastic fragrant peace. The problem was that I had to wait for daytime for my undertaking, or my observing. And now there was hardly a day without this noise, which left room for nothing else, and all the more noticeably in that it disrupted the very special silence of the region, and always without reason.

There were days when I was surrounded by it so completely and complicatedly that the only thing I could do was laugh and quietly keep plugging on. While one of the faceless neighbors was assaulting his environment through wide-open windows and doors with every madness aria ever composed — any music, no matter how lovely, blared this way now — the one next to him was blasting away — with an air gun? but then where did the smell of burning come from, penetrating into my study? — tirelessly at the swarms of pigeons in what was not even his grass, and the invisible third neighbor around the corner was trying out one of his ever-increasing number of fiendish machines, using the acquisition of the week to go at the not terribly old apple tree in his pocket-handkerchief yard — which he wanted to turn into a raised barbecue terrace? — instead of digging up the tree, grinding it to bits, on the spot, stump, root, and branch.

To this day I know hardly anything else about these people except that they have some of the attributes of campers (but aren’t there quiet campers, and nice stories about them, and don’t campgrounds have their rules?), and at any rate none of the attributes of residents, either of their houses or of the bay. Never have I encountered them except on their properties, or by their cars, which are always ready to start up, whose engines are also often running when the owners are somewhere else, and whose alarms go off at intervals, now here, now there. And never was even one of these neighbors to be found at Mass, or at the local bars, on the soccer field, on the boules court, in the handball hall. When the outdoor market opens on Sunday morning on the square in front of the railroad station, they may just possibly pass through the crowd, recognizable by their weekend-only garb, glaringly bright warm-up suits and jogging shoes.

They seem to be of no particular age, neither poor nor rich, and it is uncertain, too, whether they come from the country or the city. If of any origin, then from an alien, extremely alien planet. The only thing that is clear is that they have never had a neighborhood and will never understand what a neighbor is; that in their work other human beings never occur, or if they do, then only as raw material; and that for them Sundays and holidays exist only so that they can broadcast into their surroundings from inside their hedges, as though they were sitting there in its midst, their ever so inventive racket, which always erupts suddenly and at double decibels.

And none of these neighbors feels disturbed by the fellow next door. Each is so engrossed in his own din that he does not even register the other one’s. When one of them, again on a Sunday afternoon, out of nowhere, broke the last existing sound barrier, and I, convinced that something terrible had happened to him, wanted to alert his immediate neighbor from my ladder, propped against his fence, there at my feet a shadowy figure, surrounded by a cloud of dust, continued with utmost equanimity to operate a sandblaster, with which he apparently wanted to render his façade as marble-smooth as the palace of Versailles, while to my left a sprinkler was hissing for the benefit of a lone patch of grass with the approximate dimensions of a doghouse, and what to my right was incessantly whinnying behind the shrubbery was anything but a herd of horses, and diagonally at my rear cries of passion continued to blare from a rented video, accompanied next door by the hundredth repetition of the waltz of the fleas or Bolero. One of these neighbors remarked once that he did not even hear the noise anymore. So what did he hear? And there had been a time when I thought: If salvation, then through hearing. But what was there to hear now?

An additional factor was that almost every single one of the hitherto remaining interstices, even the most inconspicuous slots, were walled up in no time flat by the new arrivals, used for garages, recreational spaces and various storage spaces, or for enclosures for newly added spiral staircases, so that in the fairly tight ring of buildings around me, instead of the breeze from the woods, a massive echo was created, which made impossible a pinpointing or locating of individual noises, which would at least have provided a kind of reassurance.

And more and more the loudness of these neighbors also came to lack that regularity with whose help one might perhaps have got used to it. The longer they stayed in the bay, the more erratic their world of noise became. I could no longer rely on the initial din. This would break off suddenly, and after a brief, squishy soundlessness, like the sudden cessation of a mosquito’s whine in the night, an entirely different one would break out. Something even worse than a roar filled the air: a whanging.

And when all the other inhabitants of the bay had set out somewhere for the day, even if only to the nearby forests: my racket experts stayed behind, at least on Sundays and holidays, glued to the spot, and if they did not create pandemonium outside, they rumbled around inside, armed with machines, between cellar and attic, as invisible as they were audible far and wide. It could happen that in between, exhausted by their frantic activities, they slumped down and stretched out all four paws. But there was always one who kept going in place of all the rest, alone, indefatigable, and it was because of him that I went to the woods to work, even in thunder and lightning.

His new house, with a run behind it for the German shepherd, was the structure closest to the study that had been meant to be my place for the year in the bay. And although there could hardly be anything left to do on his almost immediately clear-cut property, I heard, especially with the onset of spring, my unknown neighbor constantly busy there: if on the other side of the hedge, a few steps from my desk, peace reigned for a change, it meant he was away, the dog shut up in the garage, where it made all the more noise.

The man had a special piece of equipment for each of his gardening activities. There was nothing he did by hand. And each of his equipment sessions took at least as long as the equivalent manual operation. He went about them with grim thoroughness, yet afterward the soil or plantings, viewed through my hole in the hedge, looked exactly the same as before: barer, more monochromatic, more even, more smooth it could not possibly become. Along with the lawn tractor, which almost filled the speck of lawn, including the flagstone terrace, he also operated a sort of shredder, like an antitank mine, for any clumps of grass around the periphery that might have escaped; a sort of motorized water jet for annihilating any traces of weeds in the chinks between the pavers; a sort of trimmer that worked like a laser beam, only much louder, with which he pulverized the couple of blades of grass that might stick up above the rest (never did I discover through my peephole even a single blade poking up); a lawn dryer after too much rain; and all that at the same high volume, though at different pitches, from dentistlike whirring to rattling, shrieking, and thrumming, which made an ordinary banging and grating seem positively comforting.

In addition, from time to time he fired, even under a clear blue sky, a sort of weather cannon, and called in yet more machines to spear intruder leaves that blew in from neighboring yards, for burning out a mole tunnel, for smoking out an ant heap, for neutralizing the squawking of sparrows, for diverting the stronger gusts of wind.

Whenever I, sitting in my study, halfway quiet for a change, heard just beyond my yard the unmistakable squeal of the parking brake and then the crash of the garage door closing, I knew that any moment now one of these machines would start up, which one first? And while trying to take a deep breath outside the door to the study, I saw through the bushes the silhouette of my neighbor pacing off his angular course with one of his power tools, looking self-absorbed and quietly collected, while his dog, driven mad by his pitch-black garage exile, sensing my presence, let out behind the shrubbery sounds entirely different from the earthworm sucker-upper or the depth charge used for detecting a stinging-nettle root invading from next door.

Such tumult (a word which, in the decrees against disturbance of the peace, was always linked with the word “scandal” in the days when the bay was still a royal domain) I could tolerate, at least for a time, at least during the day, and much more easily during work than during mere sitting and watching. The noise receded into the work, was sonorized, so to speak, by my absorption, took on a different sound quality, a darker one. But no sooner would the beginnings of tiredness or distraction brush me than the noise would pound all the more stridently at my study door and against my skull. Then it became dangerous. My material was not yet impervious, and even now, toward the end of the year, is still not impervious. If one sentence or paragraph went, the entire thing was at risk. What was threatened was less my head, my ability to think, than the absolute necessity for me, unlike for a scientist or a chronicler, to become as one with a feeling, a heartbeat, or the rhythmic image.

And with the passage of time I then noticed that in my writing-down, as an effect of the noise, hardly any heart was involved. Without that, however, my thoughts appeared to me as mere singsong. I no longer knew what I was doing. With every attempted image immediately rubbed raw by new whanging, I ended up blindly lining up words next to each other, without any sense for transitions.

How should I call it to my neighbors’ attention that I was still there — not as a writer, simply as a neighbor? In the tiny interval between the time my omni-tool neighbor got home and set the parking brake, and the moment he revved up, I would step outside the study door, for example, and try to make myself audible by blowing the shavings out of the sharpener as loudly as possible as I sharpened my pencils. No other noise occurred to me.

Should I shout my sentences into the neighborhood before I wrote them down, like Flaubert? Instead I once tossed a burning log over the hedge at man and dog, whereupon the master, invisible, retorted in a chalky-smooth Sunday voice that I was the one disturbing the peace, after which he promptly cranked up his latest acquisition, a device with which he was either drilling for oil under his seared grass or plowing it up in search of a field-mouse nest.

Thus, with the passage of time, I would jump at even the sound of birds or of water boiling in my own house, as if at the howling of a motor or raucous voices from a party on a nearby terrace.

For my first day of work out in the forest, I sat down by Lizard Way, among the trees a few steps away from it.

It was a warm, sunny May morning, and I leaned against a chestnut tree whose foliage was just beginning to bud, with mossy earth in the root hollow under me. The gentle breeze and the stillness, of which the Niagara Falls-like roar from the distant highway up on the plateau was a part, filled or inspired me with peace.

All day long people passed right by me up there on the bright path. Although I was so close to them, no one noticed me, not even their escort dogs. Around midday most of those passing were joggers from the office buildings in the corporate center of Velizy, with the variation in this year of 1999 that almost all of them were out there without jogging suits, dressed rather in suits and overcoats, with their briefcases and even heavier ballast.

That was in between. Beforehand and afterward, however, sometimes passed by mountain bikers, figures moved across my field of vision such as I had never before seen in the woods, not even in those of the bay, which from the outset had been full of surprises. (And my head was as clear as my chest was marvelously painfully expanded; I was not having hallucinations.)

While here in the shadows of the leaves my pencils darted along evenly, over there in the sun a priest passed by, in an ankle-length soutane, accompanied by a wedding party, the bride and groom and the witnesses; then came, at a distance, relaxed yet alert, the new cast of The Magnificent Seven, all abreast — that was how broad the path was there; then came, after a time, hand in hand, already half lost, gazing heavenward, Hansel and Gretel; then came, hours later, an elegant couple, he in a camel-hair coat, she in high heels and an evening gown — I later recognized the man, tanned, with a blackened mustache, his arm wound around the woman, heading uphill with elastic tread along the edge of the path, through the wild broom, as Don Juan, and the lady as Marina Tsvetayeva (they spoke Russian with each other); then a horse went by, riderless, workhorselike, and with steps as slow as those of his predecessors; and common to all of them was also that they appeared to me less as human beings or as animals than as living beings.

And toward evening the stonemason turned up again, not a wanderer along the path but a person extricating himself from the thick underbrush of the forest reserve over there. He did it matter-of-factly, as if this were simply his way of crossing the countryside, and promptly sank down on the oak stump, so broad that it could have provided a resting place for a dozen hikers. He hung his doublet behind him in the bushes and sat quietly erect, without stirring. A jogger who politely circled around him called out, “Isn’t it great here!” to which the stonemason did not even nod. He ate a piece of bread and an apple, which he peeled in one piece, and now gazed across from his seat, which had so often been mine, into the forest toward me.

I had long since suspended my writing. If he saw me, he did not show it; at any rate, his barely perceptible raising of one finger did not have to mean anything. And yet it seemed to me as if I was supposed to address him from among the trees. I did not do so, and he went to work on his sitting trunk with a conspicuously short-handled hammer and a chisel that I at first took for a crowbar, and finally he disappeared back into the area that had been reforested a few years earlier, where the young trees already grew so dense, with hardly a patch of sunlight on the dark ground, that only a fox could get through. He entered there into a space of his own, like a bullfighter, and in response to the pivoting of his shoulders and hips, so rapid as to be almost impossible to follow, and thus seeming all the more purposeful, the straight saplings swayed no more and no differently than in the wind.

Hadn’t I imagined time and again that like a mythical beast there must also be a hermit in the bay’s forests, and that the old residents knew all about him, as they knew about the beast, but they would not betray him to anyone who had moved there from somewhere else?

I finished my project for the day and then sat down outside the forest by the sandy path, already after sundown, now on the great oak stump myself. The annual rings could not be counted, since the stump was burned coal black, even down into the roots, splayed like fingers and at the same time deeply anchored, and furthermore split by fire. The dense pattern of notches around the base: did this represent the stonemason’s marks, or perhaps rather the footprints of birds, the front toes as clearly delineated V’s, the one back toe a mere brushmark, marks such as were already there at my feet along the path, now toward evening frequented only by birds, for dustbathing and tripping back and forth?

Across from me, right behind the bank with the lizards, which had already slipped away, and the first trees, was the empty and, to outward appearances, rather gloomy spot where I had been crouching or squatting only a little while ago, and before that the entire day. And at the thought of all the happenings during the course of a day along this woodland path, barely a few hours on foot from the Eiffel Tower, I was filled with an astonishment as powerful as that I had experienced much earlier for at most a moment when half asleep; and the question that Gregor Keuschnig had asked himself a quarter of a century earlier took on new validity: “Who can say, after all, that the world has already been discovered?”

To write I went out into nature, into the fresh air, into the day, into the wind, into the forest, and then if possible every morning, right through the summer and far into the fall. (As recently as yesterday I remained stretched out there until I could hardly make out my own handwriting, and that was also because of the evening dew, for the pencils did not mark properly on the damp paper.)

A couple of times, when the rain became too heavy, penetrating the leaf canopy and not letting up, I continued with my writing in one of the few public buildings in the bay, but hardly ever back at my house; I have been spending more time in my study only since the somewhat quieter days of early winter.

In bad weather I most often sought refuge in the bay’s little post office, the “auxiliary post office”—in general the local agencies have modifiers like “branch,” “annex,” or “provisoire.” There was a counter there intended specifically for filling out forms, even a windowsill, a spacious, broad one for propping one’s arms on and looking out, just as I had wished for from the beginning for my writing year.

Outside the window nothing was to be seen but an area marked off by a brick-red wall at the rear, resembling a grove with its few widely spaced spruces and birches, on the ground the short, thick, yet never mowed grass and the several-year layers of spruce needles and cones, among which then in the course of the summer new white-and-red mushroom caps kept erupting, harvested by me with the consent of the postmistress. This woman was alone most of the time and knitted behind the counter or talked on the telephone, as loudly as — fortunately for my concentration — incomprehensibly; she was almost deaf. The fact that I came in out of the storm, sat there, and went away again without ever leaving a letter with her did not disturb her.

When she did have customers, as a rule they were older people, with postal savings accounts. Once there was a telegram to be sent, in Spanish, and it took her an hour to transmit the few words by telephone because of having to spell out everything several times, especially the address. The little place had no telex, for there was no demand, and when a person from elsewhere blew in one day wanting to send a “chronopost” overseas, she explained to him that this was the first time she had ever been asked to do this kind of mailing, whereupon the stranger drove off with his express package, to a post office outside the bay.

Otherwise a great stillness prevailed in the auxiliary post office, without the thumping of rubber stamps or radio music; at most the postmistress’s little dog sometimes shifted in his basket. Nothing but the slapping of the rain against the windowpanes; a pattern of shadow from that on the windowsill, or a flash of lightning.

The disadvantage was only that this branch closed early, and thus I sometimes finished my day of recording in the next bay over, in the back room of the restaurant run by the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, whose raging misanthropy I had almost been driven to share by my neighbors’ racket; from time to time it did me good.

In his rooms, too, there by the railroad embankment, in a former station restaurant, there were windowsills, wide ones, extending out to my ribs, and even the benches that went with them, as in the ancestral house in the Jaunfeld village of Rinkolach, and all of this shaken again and again by the wonderful rumbling of the trains directly above me.

In this year the weather changed constantly, and always from one hour to the next. But whenever possible I sat outdoors with my project, out in the woods. And what then became my main sitting place was the spot that had attracted me most powerfully earlier on when I was out walking and doing nothing.

Writing beside a body of water was even more promising than writing beside a path. At first I tried it with the three ponds in the bay, one after the other. For a few days I worked halfway up the hill by a sunken road behind the Etang des Ursines, in the largest and also the oldest part of the settlement, where the prehistoric flintstone and stone ax had been found; after that at the weathered picnic table behind the pond with the crayfish, with the mental image of the war correspondent, now dead, of his shock of hair standing up, his stubble-beardedness, his paleness, his total incomprehension of a person like me; then by the one surrounded entirely by woods, without houses in view, called Hole-in-Glove Pond, under the birches there; everywhere I made good progress, except that I did not like to be seen with paper and pencil — some people did pass by, who, however, mistook what I was doing for drawing; none of them came up close — and except that some fishermen had transistor radios with them.

Nonetheless I finally set out for that body of water which, although it always struck me as the only really old one and also the most extensive one in all the forests of the Seine hills, is not marked on any map of the area, even the most detailed, nor does it have a name, even in the folklore of the bay (but who knows?), and which I privately call, after neither “bayou” (Mississippi) nor “Everglades” (Florida) stuck, the Nameless Pond.

Yet the word “pond” does not fit this puddle either, at the sight of which at least the first passersby call back their children or their dogs with exclamations of disgust and horror. In fact its surface, and not only during a longer drought, looks bubbly sometimes or glistens with an oily film, and I have hardly ever been able to see all the way to the bottom. Trees, long since dead, barkless all the way up, naked, only the whitish-gray trunks remaining, with a few broken-off forks of branches, stand there in the water, among those that have tumbled in from the banks and are still green, and aquatic vegetation with dark-haired root tangles below (masses of them in the light of low water).

A puddle, and yet extending far out? Yes, and this on the one hand by virtue of its complicated shape, going around one corner and then another, entirely different from a man-made pond, and especially by virtue of that unique shimmer of distance or enigma in its most remote spits, with a view through the vegetation and dead tree trunks, over hundreds of sawed-off trunks barely rising above the water, a glow of distance reliable in a way I have never encountered in a puddle, but also not in a full-grown lake, either in that of Gennesaret or that of Michigan or that of Neusiedl. Every time, from sitting there awhile, from the farthest tongues of the puddle, along with the water’s edge, air, and shore, even when nothing was moving, a pull emanated.

And in such an environment I settled down one lovely spring day to continue my work, and that became my established place, except during torrential rains, until the first frosts.

It was in the thicket on the other side of the Nameless Pond, but I had a view of the water, through a long cut, all the way to the bays in the more accessible bank; but anyone standing over there would have had to look hard to catch sight of me, until the time of leaf drop.

At my back, after a gap to slip through, the underbrush led right up to a forest in the background, not at all dark or crowded, extending up the hill, to the south, so that the sun, filtered through the foliage, shone on my paper as it crossed the sky.

In that same place, on my very first day, I came upon what was left from the sawing up of a mammoth oak, once a cylinder, which had been burned out from the core and had fallen apart, leaving two hollowed-out half cylinders. I rolled the sounder half, with some difficulty — it was so massive — over and over along the mossy ground to a place where it bumped down a steep bank by itself to my watery corner. And there, on the soft, peat-black but not yet swampy ground, I set this shape upright, sat down on the ground, within a foot of my pond bank, leaned back into the half circle of wood, and had a wing chair, without legs, just right for my purposes.

It surrounded me literally and really like a set of wings, and moved with me on the peat soil, yielded, pushed me forward again, but would remain steadfast in the face of my most violent shoves; that was how heavy it was, also from the fire; and besides I felt protected in its curve during my work, shielded from the eyes of the joggers, one or another of whom, especially during mushroom season, would suddenly make the branches crack up there behind me.

There I sat, leaning back (and would like to continue to sit and lean back), and promptly began, with my pencils lined up, the eraser next to them, to write, as if it were child’s play, without the usual fear of beginning. I imagined the sentences following the movements of the water at the tips of my shoes, the air streaming all around the trees, the open sky, not exactly right above my head, but plentifully at brow level and as a reflection from the pond, while the sun, whether on the horizons or at its zenith, followed the outline of the semicircle of my backrest.

Unlike earlier I no longer ground to a halt when I realized that something I was just writing down had already been said long ago, by me or by someone else. If I repeated myself or another person now and then, that was fine with me, and of course I did come to a halt each time, except that now I approached the repetition with additional elan, positively elated at the prospect of it.

Certain other concerns also dissolved into thin air: that in the history of the bay and of my distant friends so little was happening; that the plot was not moving; that the sentences were too long for a book nowadays. I let them get as long as the image that was inside me and motivating me required; all that mattered was having such an image inside me. And if it was long-windedness, I felt it to be in harmony with the back-and-forth ripples of the wind on the water, around all seven corners of the pond, and with all that nothing-at-all in between, a little tremble far off, the drilling motion of the red-throated downy woodpecker in the dead wood, who, when I next look up, is giving its stomach a one-second bath, swooping down, with an incomparably delicate splash. It seemed to me as though such simultaneity acted on my storytelling like a verification; as if the water above all, there in its uniqueness, was what confirmed my work — work? here more a mere synchronized breathing.

Besides, I had an infinitely easier time of it, there by that nameless pond, with my project, always in danger of becoming so tied up in knots that no air was left in it, of making paragraphs, or, instead of being forced to conjure up an appropriate transition and a compelling sequence, keeping going imperturbably. Making paragraphs in this context meant only pausing in the middle for a catching of breath, impossible for me as a rule during indoor writing, for a walking away from the page so that it, too, could have a moment’s peace.

Thus I remained calm when rainfall heavy enough to force its way through the leaves interrupted me. I tucked my portfolio between my jacket and my shirt, put on my hat, actually brought along for mushrooms, and waited.

The wilder the conditions around the water, the more serene and also patient I became. Stormy winds mingled with pounding rain, sand hit me on the fingers, terminal darkness broke in, thick branches came crashing to the ground, another tree tipped headfirst from the bank into the pond, the many birds of the area, large and small, fluttered back and forth, cawing and squawking, barely missing me, and I sat there, leaning back, with my manuscript, and watched, without batting an eyelash, warm around my heart, this panic-stricken world having emerged clear and whole behind the customary, fragmentary, chimerical one, and in the panic-stricken world that mixed-up creation — not chaos — in which I had always felt at home. “Now it’s right.”

When I was busy there by the water, the surroundings looked entirely different from the way they would have looked if I had merely been sitting there idle. Without my specifically taking them in, they became part of me, in passing.

And again in my memory the animals appear first. (Yet I am not thinking here of the mosquitoes that fell upon me in droves, though not until dusk, when I was usually already finished.)

That all began with the migration of the hitherto completely invisible tribes of toads downhill through the woods to their spawning grounds. The Nameless Pond, by which I was sitting, was their chief destination, even for those toads coming from the most distant of the hills of the Seine, although all the other bodies of water offered more room.

But either they were polluted, like the most appealing of them, that pond called Hole-in-Glove, by the oily effluent from the factories up on the plateau, or they had unscalably steep banks, like the Crayfish Pond, unsuitable for amphibians, or, like the other pond, the largest pond in the bay, the Etang des Ursines, they were separated from the forest by a highway. A resident of the bay had tacked a sign to a tree, asking that people leave the crossing as free of traffic as possible during the couple of days every year when the toad migration could be predicted; the animals were threatened with extinction. But, and not only because of the note on the tree, inconspicuous even to a pedestrian, most of the locals’ cars drove as they always did, and every time I walked the road in those days, on my way to my writing place, the flattened corpses were stuck to the asphalt, and the few toads that had made it to the water alive were swimming along the edge of the pond, each seemingly all by itself.

Only to the Nameless Pond, in its hollow deep in the woods, far from the beaten path, was it safe to go; from the toads’ regular stamping grounds they had at most to cross footpaths, going more through underbrush, then through swamps, without firm bank lines, and the oil film sometimes floating on the water probably came only from decomposing wood; at any rate nothing flowed into there but rain and a spring, from which the water bubbled transparent. And again and again, for days, the toads hopped past me now on their copulation journey, here and there a leaping procession, some already mounted piggyback on others, and afterward only their eye bulges peeked from the wild water, which eventually looked warty with them far and wide.

Beneath the surface reigned, denser with each passing morning, a great pushing and shoving of these allegedly dying-out animals. The toads, untold thousands of them, clumped together, separated, clumped together elsewhere, chased each other. In time the clumps became quiet, and often it was not only couples but also clusters of several, a black toad on top of a yellow one, and hanging on to this one a brown-and-white-striped one, and when the entire knot drifted to one side, underneath all the rest yet another turned up, again a black one, chieftainlike.

Equally multiple intertwinings, each day more motionless, with perhaps only about a dozen puffed-up skin pouches, producing a soft, piercing fluting, could be seen on land, at my feet on the mossy bank, and when the bodies toddled apart, there turned out to be more and more of them, as with that very small automobile from which, on the basis of a bet, one after the other an entire cohort of students used to scramble. (Where the same thing happened underwater, it was reminiscent on the contrary of the head-over-heels tumbling of a group of astronauts in zero-gravity space.)

And then one day the waters were toadless again, also cleaner than ever before, and instead other unevennesses on its surface, gelatinous masses, black-dotted, with the dots over the course of several weeks growing into the circles and lines of tadpoles, round heads with tails, which soon began to jerk. And since then in all the months I have not seen another toad in my special place.

And the muskrats, too — or is it a new, unfamiliar type of animal, something between a rat and a beaver and a dormouse? — have not been there since fall, while all summer long they scurried every day back and forth between the pond and the land, at home in the hollows of the root mound formed when a swamp birch fell, right at my feet, at the tips of my toes.

It was always liveliest there at the beginning of the week, when the whole tribe of beaver rats, giants and dwarfs and infants, was on the move, around the entire branching water source, gathering food, especially pieces of bread left behind by Sunday hikers on the other, open shore, and almost every minute another animal head would pop out of one of the holes in the root mound, sniffing like a rabbit, the hairs of its beard bristling, translucent roundish cat ears.

As I watched them, I continued writing, and I often used the sight of them, of their reddish, deeply soft coat, of their paws, which looked to me more like delicate white fingers, of their dark, point-glowing eyes, to ponder a word, a connection; their faces, likewise their stocky necks, suddenly of snakelike length when they reached for a morsel, helped me achieve a particular tremulous presence of mind; and with the passing months they no longer jerked back into their hiding places at my writing movements, with which intermittently, at the beginning of a new line, I also sketched their squirrel cheeks, or the apple peels they held between their teeth like a knife — the presence of those muskrats restrained my hand, not always with success, from becoming abrupt.

I also tried simply sitting still with them — but no, only with my writing did they come out of their holes, and similarly only when I was writing did the big turtle sit on the trunk that had fallen into the water and stretch its head toward the sun.

And in the course of the year, of the summer, of the fall, it seemed that when I sat still that way, but yet was busy, events occurred in my field of vision that would never have come about through observation or pure contemplation, even an entire day’s worth; yes, it was as if only my constant writing provoked the appearance of living things previously invisible in the landscape, perhaps not even existent.

Was a certain way of glancing away from the space or the field of vision, of looking elsewhere, all that was needed for a form of flora or fauna unheard of even in this area, including those thought to have died off long ago, to reveal itself, as if it had always been there? A leaf, quietly drifting on the water, suddenly turned, stood straight up, and revealed itself as a primeval animal.

How often in childhood I had crouched in the deepest underbrush, by the overgrown ditches, waiting for an event. Nothing had stirred. But now, surreptitiously, as I sat engrossed in the story of my distant friends, so much was happening, things I could never even have dreamed of in those days, in a more original period, in a still hardly disturbed countryside.

On one of my first summer writing days, quiet, warm, with a high blue sky, on the way to the woods I had had the phrase “eagle-circle day” in my head, and sure enough, at midday, when far and wide nothing more was moving, the embodiment of that notion, an eagle, the eagle, after prolonged circling at the zenith, landed, even if only for an instant, in the highest fork of the sturdiest, most cliff-gray of the dead trees in the pond, with a profile such as has never been seen on any coat of arms, and for whose return I have now been waiting for months; the entire trunk rocked when it flew away, and part of the fork broke off into the water.

And for several days, later in high summer, little fishes leaped up out of the puddle, as if prodded by the blustery wind, leaped in a wide arc, making the water spray all over, each time one swarm of fins after the other, lengthwise over the body of water, with a whiplike crack, which in turn scared into the deciduous forest the bunch of wild doves, which, sitting on the leafless branches above the pond, were more apt to be mistaken for vultures than elsewhere.

And likewise in this succession the water snakes returned, last seen by me a decade ago, in the summer when I moved there, and since then never again; glided from a grassy bay into the pond and made it twice as large by plowing through it, changing direction again and again, one here, one there, thin, so fragile, on their raised heads white blurry spots. Only after the Sundays when the opposite bank became bright (not black) with people and dogs, I often had to wait for the middle of the week until, during my writing, on the otherwise perhaps smooth pond surface in one spot the odd teeny-weeny waves would turn up and then for hours move back and forth on a very curvy cruise.

Each of these animals had its more or less brief heyday during the summer, so that I have a clear impression, for instance, of the week of the water strider, of the day of the hornets, of the dusk of that giant hedgehog, tapping its way, mammoth-sized, through last year’s leaf layers, the hour of the seagull that fluttered into the bayou by mistake, the long, long moment of the giant dragonfly, hovering in the air directly before my eyes, face to face with me, its four-wing rotor transparent, nothing of the insect clearly outlined except the seemingly eyeless face, of an uncanny yellow, or the entire face a single universe-sized yellow eye, in whose omnipresence, after a moment’s pause, I continued my sentence.

That was already in early fall, and then the dragonflies continued to come, even on warm November days, though also never again so close.

The only creatures besides the little birds in the bush that kept me company the entire time were the ordinary pond ducks and the coots. The latter, light in weight, could skim across the leaves that had fallen into the water, or, when they swam, they glided along in a straight line, their tail feathers sticking straight up in the air, beyond the densest thicket of the nameless lake, like Indian canoes, from which sometimes a warning cry sounded.

And the ducks here on the Nameless Pond had the peculiarity that they did not look all that ordinary as they rolled and pitched in the confusion of water, greenery, and decomposing wood, but rather as rare and remarkable as all the rest of the animal life; each, in its appointed time, was a mythical beast (including the few squirrels).

With the people who appeared at intervals on the opposite bank, such correspondences manifested themselves less frequently, and hardly ever on holidays, when, enhanced by the surface of the water, at times something like a human loudspeaker wall was going full blast over there. (But here it helped to remember that the place where I was, unlike a house, did not give me any particular rights.)

Nevertheless, when a dog suddenly threw itself into the water, it sometimes came across as the leaps, along with the splashdowns, of heavy fish, not yet discovered by me, or I heard the whir of the mountain bikes during the downhill swoops of the self-appointed adventurers, more properly called path destroyers, as the sound of the wild doves circling the treetops.

And in the course of the seasons altogether different forest people gained the upper hand in the clearing on the other side, people of whom I sometimes thought, when I had my eyes first on my paper, then over there on them, that they, too, had been sketched in the air or summoned to that spot only by my own activity.

One day a heavily laden group of emigrants or Sherpas trudged past over there; on another the woodsmen were cooking their lunch on a fire so big that even days later I could still warm my hands, chilly from all my sitting by the water, over the residual glow; on a third I wrote until sundown while watching a young man who during all those hours sat on one of the other banks, went into the pond, swam, washed his hair, shaved, slipped back and forth between the swamp vegetation, always almost just as noiselessly, and in whom I eventually recognized an escaped murderer, after his picture appeared in The Hauts-de-Seine News. And Don Juan returned, his mustache neatly brushed as always, and with the same woman!

And the noisemakers, at least those on the weekdays, with their restlessness, never lingered by the Nameless Pond, and precisely the intervals were then filled with a never before experienced sort of stillness, so delightful that often and even more often I felt my eyes grow moist from the feeling; it was not permissible for me to remain alone with this silence; it was supposed to be shared.

And not only because of the many helicopters above me, continuing all summer to shuttle between the peace talks in Paris and the air base at my back, I hardly ever felt outside of time by the water; I was not merely intermittently a witness of world events during the year but also a participant. Sitting in that natural wing chair with my pencils on the bare earth while the waters before me coursed back and forth, I traveled with the day through the world. Who knows of, who can describe to me a lovelier round-the-world tour?

Thus during the day I stayed away from life in the bay. On my circuitous morning route to my water seat, I avoided the railway station square with its shops, the only realm where from time to time, especially on market mornings, things were lively in an ordinary sense. Only in the evening did the time come for moving about there, preferably on one of the straightforwardly loud tangential streets. After the daylong secrecy out there by the damp-black hairy cones of the willow roots arching over the pond surface, among which a crocodile mouth would have seemed almost too familiar, I felt swept by a particular wind on these arteries and highway access roads, as once on the boulevards in the middle of Paris after my dim-room work.

Of course here there were no sidewalk cafés, and hardly passersby. But it had been a long time since I had felt drawn, as when I was younger, to sit on terraces of an evening and people-watch. And the right place for such reflective relaxation was inside the bars, while standing at the counter, following the example of the majority there.

Most often in the evening I sought out those two or three bars in the bay where, because rooms were also available, in addition to the local drinkers, male and female, almost always the same ones, you could also find itinerant workers — though only for one glass; after that they sat down to supper in another room, clearly separated from the taproom: in the Hôtel des Voyageurs by a fabric-covered sliding door that opened only when the individual courses were served to those workers by the proprietress in person; in the Hôtel Rive Gauche by a curtain, carefully drawn by the workers themselves. There in their dining chambers they seemed to be carrying on the only important conversations of the moment, with barely moving lips, inaudible, and came at intervals out to the telephone corner to transmit their decisions to the world.

I did not listen in on their conversations; perhaps precisely because my thoughts were elsewhere, or nowhere, I picked up various things. These itinerant workers were very fussy about their food, and not infrequently a group would change lodgings for this reason. For their aperitif — with appropriate facial expressions, and freshly combed and shaved, they drank or sipped it — they stood in a group by themselves, and afterward sat very straight at their tables, reserved for them, painstakingly set, illuminated altogether differently from the bar, each man as collected as courteous, and all of them always equally unapproachable. Yet their evening meal did not last long; as a rule they went up to their rooms early, in summer even before dark, and sometimes I heard one of them complain the following evening about the noise outside, with a quiet assurance I would have wished to have myself. They also did not play cards or dice as the locals did.

A few of the crews remained in the bay for months; and in the course of the year I also encountered them during the day, at their work, the replacement of the gas pipeline through the woods, the building of a railroad viaduct, the renovation of the bus station. There, on my circuitous routes, it was easier for me, indeed entirely natural, to stop and take in their work (something otherwise done by only the oldest long-term inhabitants here). They pounded stones into place, now and then putting their ear to them, in a manner similar to that in which they spent their time after hours, except that they preferred to be watched at work, it seemed to me. Pride was not the same as unapproachability.

I often stood like this for an hour, for instance when another of these itinerant crews was digging out a spring in the forest, until the moment when shovelful by shovelful the trickle of water became a jet, and one of the workers, in the absence for the time being of a tile, got it to rattle into a hollow leaf. And now we greeted one another. And then we did that as well in the evenings, from a distance, without shaking hands as local bar frequenters customarily did.

Only once did one member of such a team address me in the evening, followed by the man next to him, and so on, until long after midnight. Without their relinquishing their masterful air, like that of dignitaries, it came out that in their eyes it was not they who were shutting out the population of this region, but rather the residents who were ignoring them. No one, except perhaps the proprietor of the inn — but he himself was a foreigner — ever had a word for the itinerant work crews, or even a flicker of a facial expression. And everywhere they worked it was the same, and this one small exception seemed to these itinerant workers such a joyous occasion that they surrounded me, plucked at me, and finally shoved me around like a newly discovered member of the tribe. (On subsequent evenings, however, all we exchanged was greetings.)

With the itinerant workers, the majority of them Frenchmen from the provinces who on weekends went home to their families, no matter how far it was, for the only time up to now I found myself enjoying spending time with people here, being cheerful and in good spirits; the gleaming floor tiles and the snowy glistening of the walls in the dining room formed part of this experience. I have never sat or even just stood around this way somewhere with any of the original inhabitants of the bay, although in the meantime I have come to know there is something special about them; at the very most someone — where else but in the bars or perhaps also on a wood road? — confided in me, and then it was only the deranged or those with their heads not screwed on right; but these merely stuttered incomprehensibly and in any case avoided storytelling altogether, and if a question slipped out of me: immediate clamming up, turning away, end of conversation.

That the original population of the bay, although lacking any allures, was somehow unique and perhaps also wanted to maintain that quality, was something I deduced from a fragmentary local chronicle printed in The Hauts-de-Seine News. The bay, it said, had been a place of asylum since the beginning of the century, first for Russians and Armenians, then for Italians under Mussolini and Spaniards under Franco. Between the two world wars as much as a quarter of the population here were newly arrived asylum seekers, unusual for a western suburb of Paris.

And that was still reflected, it seemed to me, in the comportment as well as the housing of those who were now old: they, too, had been itinerant workers, and here was their residence (for instance with names like “Our Sundays” or “Sweet Refuge”). As far as I could ascertain, they spoke with the quick tongue characteristic of French small farmers, but in their case it was not at the cost of reflectiveness; they combined the natives’ rhetoric with the eyes of foreigners; but wanted, however, to keep the latter for themselves.

During this year, after the one week of escape to Salamanca, I rarely went outside the bay.

After working on my project, I was too tired to stride along briskly, and thus I took the commuter train to Paris, if I was going at all. Only once, on the return trip, did I get off one station early, in Meudon-Val Fleury, and walk home, as I had always pictured doing, through the 3,233-meter tunnel under the Seine hills, in a draft smelling slightly scorched, feeling relieved after all when the occasional “Exit” arrows no longer pointed toward my back but forward, toward the bay.

How astonishing it was each time to see the horizon-wide scattered white splendor of the capital, which during my entire time by the jungle waters would actually have beckoned to me, with all its landmarks, if the wooded hills had not stood between us, as a prolongation of my shoe tip, of the skiff almost entirely sunk in the pond, and the muskrats splashing around there.

Nevertheless, on those few Paris evenings I almost never went all the way into one of its centers. Since I had long since begun to shun the movie theaters, boulevards, and sidewalk cafés — and this year all the more — there were only two destinations left for me in Paris. One of them was those interior spaces that were shaken periodically by the Métro underneath; and it was for that, not the film, that I descended into a movie theater one time. And the other was a certain pissoir, perhaps the last of the old kind, made of iron, painted in dark enamel, with a sort of temple roof, the whole thing a miniature round temple, partitioned in two by a pissing wall, down which on both sides water ran constantly from a gutter at eye level, both halves offering standing room for a man in need, shielded from eyes on the street, except for his head and feet, by milk-glass screens, which gently reflected the sun and the city lights.

This little cottage was located by the Pont Mirabeau, actually on the edge of the city, and it still existed, they said, only because of the taxi drivers who had a stand next to there and resisted having to stick money in a slot to urinate. And meanwhile that had become the only place in Paris to which I felt drawn from time to time. Having got out at Javel station and trudged across the bridge (from which the Seine, certainly mighty at that point, each time seemed less significant to me than my wild little pond) and then being greeted by this structure, otherwise easy to mistake for an empty kiosk, but chimerically changing its form with each of my steps, I would as a rule simply post myself in one of the semicircles, stare for a while at the gutter up above, from which for an eternity the water has been rolling down, wall-wide, listen to it running, also contemplating the spotlights refracted by the milk-glass screen on the other side, and before leaving dip my fingertips into the gutter up above.

And one time during this year I did make my way into a Parisian center after all: that of St.-Germain-des-Près, to contemplate the frieze of the Last Supper above the portal of the church there, from the twelfth century, where the heads that had been knocked off, one after the other, in the revolutionary eighteenth, leaving only the outlines, one of which, that of the apostle John, who has thrown himself on the table before his master, revealed to me the entire planet, the earth.

On the few evenings between the summer and now when I again wandered around the city, I saw the woman from Catalonia every time: not her imperial self, but in the form of other women, and once that of a man.

On one of these evenings I ran into Ana in a Métro station near the periphery, let’s say at the Porte d’Auteuil, as a transient. She was young, tall and broad-shouldered, with long dark hair, and of a beauty that pierced me to the quick. I was surprised that all the lady-killers in the city, in Montparnasse or on the Champs-Elysées, had not caught wind of her and formed a cavalcade behind her. But that was a year in which more and more young women were wandering around, and thus she was alone there in the half-dusk, as perhaps only such a beauty could be, with her bundle of bursting plastic bags, her fur coat in August, and her head askew.

I followed Ana out of the subway up onto the broad square from which roads led out of the city, where nocturnal plane trees rustled as they always had, and from all directions the headlights of cars crossed. She walked slowly, but without the load that hung down on both sides of her she would simply have remained in one spot; she moved crookedly, as if in a squall, following her wind-cocked head, diagonally across the square, dodging vehicles. And finally she stopped in front of a bustling sidewalk café and unexpectedly, with a simultaneous curtsy, thrust out both hands in a ballet-dancer gesture by a table, begging, without success, and had already disappeared around the corner.

Another time I came upon my wife while crossing, let’s say, the Avenue de Versailles, as a woman hobbling along on crutches, except that the foot was not in a cast, it was missing. She acted as though nothing were wrong, moving gracefully, she, too, out and about alone, and with her one-legged hobbling and at the same time rapidly hastening steps, turned her head every few seconds to look over her shoulder into the void, for a contented blink, as if she were marching overland (she made me realize that an individual can “march” as well).

And as I stared after the cripple, I recalled a dream about the two of us. In it I had sawed off one of Ana’s arms, and then did the same thing to myself, and only when I was through with the saw did I become aware that I, too, was now missing a hand, equally indispensable for writing and for something else. And what had the woman from Catalonia said once in response to my story of that time under the staircase in my brother’s house in the village?: “That kind of under-stair person is just what you are, turned in on yourself, warmed by yourself. But again and again a hand reaches out from under your staircase and grabs the person who is passing by outside, or at any rate me, in a way no hand ever grabbed me before.”

Then I once saw Ana as a man, in a restaurant one evening along the outer boulevards. It was a guest just coming in from the dark outside, neither young nor old, a sort of faceless Everyman in a hat and gray raincoat, and as I took him out of the corner of my eye for the woman from Gerona and El Paso, whom he did not resemble in the slightest, I realized that I had been expecting her, and at the same time, from my shock at seeing the angular masculine figure, that my waiting was actually full of apprehension.

And the vanished woman appeared to me one last time in the nocturnal commuter railway, in a stranger, with a very different face, eyes, hair. As I sat facing this unknown woman, I suddenly found myself contemplating my wife of many years.

I had not been able to look at the real Ana this way even once. An expectant calm emanated from her, at the same time impudence or playfulness, or the storytelling urge (as indeed she often said after a bruising quarrel that she had been dying the entire time to tell me how her day had gone). This fellow passenger did not avoid my gaze; she allowed it to have its way, then even responded with a smile, created in her expressionless face merely by my looking at it.

This was thinking in images, wordlessly. In this image the woman from Catalonia had a plane tree from the forest of Gerona as a background, from which a sparrow burst forth like a flying fish. She was a bride, would be that to the end; a needy person; a person pleading for protection. And so were other women, mothers of eleven, murderers of six, strumpets, high jumpers, Amazons.

And an almost forgotten yearning returned. And that was the night when I got out early in Meudon — Val Fleury, while the Gypsy woman continued on to St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines, and hiked home on foot through the scorched tunnel under the hills of the Seine. (And for the very last time I saw Ana in the form of a woman’s lost glove in the bushes.)

It is of course not true that during this year of 1999 I had no contact with a local resident. I even acquired a good neighbor, at least one, a child.

Before the child turned out to be a neighbor, I had already seen him quite often, in the little Russian church on the edge of one of the forests here, and once also on the handball court during a game played by the local team, the pride of the region after working its way up into the First League. He was with his parents, but I actually had eyes only for him.

In the Slavic church he, for his part, once looked during the whole Sunday Mass only in my direction, though alternating between my face and my shoulder, or the empty space above it, back and forth, until I imagined he was looking for another child there. He was still almost a baby, not yet speaking, only from time to time making sounds, once a bull bellowing, then the harsh cry of a large bird, and in between he crawled around on all fours among the congregation.

It was during this spring that his father, with him in his arms, unexpectedly came crashing through the bushes and pounded on my door, his eyes so big that I took their expression for ecstasy. In actuality he had just been informed that during an operation on his wife in the Sèvres hospital her heart had stopped under anesthesia. He asked me to watch the child until he got back, in a stammer that was more Russian than French, and I went on with my writing, holding the small child on my lap, the rhythm making him soon nod off, heavy in my arm, until after some time the father returned with news of her death.

From then on I also met this neighbor away from the chapel, at his house. There, to be sure, I was usually alone with the boy, who was called Vladimir; the man, one of the drivers of the peculiar buses in the bay — of which more later — occasionally worked until almost midnight, and it had become the routine for me to stay with the child if possible.

Whenever I prepared the evening meal for us both, it came to mind how at one time the thought of having a family, my family, had not made me feel strange or beside myself, but rather positively sturdy, with both feet on the ground. To create a family: for me in those days there was, as far as everyday life was concerned, no greater fulfillment; and I wanted to do my work not merely for those entrusted to me but also in their midst, unisolated, without a solitary study. To do the housework as well, washing windows, cooking, darning stockings, was all right with me; I had not really needed the precedent of David Herbert Lawrence, another cottager’s son, who had expertly scrubbed the floor for his aristocratic wife.

Now during evenings with Vladimir, and most powerfully during apple peeling or cutting bread, the memory of that meant it was coming alive again for me, also as something I had been missing after all throughout the time I was alone. The half orphan’s ways intensified this feeling. If I, worn down by my neighbors’ racket, actually felt hostile toward one child or another out there, that was unthinkable with this one here.

When he imitated me, it was never a question of mimicking; he did it in his own unique way, in whose reflection my actions in turn pleased me and made me happy. Thus it happened that in his presence I sketched out on a piece of paper what I had in mind to write the following morning, whereupon he, though only beginning to speak, every time wrote and drew something, which, although it seemed fairly similar, was an entirely different process: his writing was very vehement, yet his drawing was very deliberate. And both were done smoothly, without hesitation, and he always knew when something was finished; with the dashing final stroke and a last mighty drop of spit falling from his open mouth onto the paper came the decisive: “Done!” (But with the start of an undertaking, even selecting crayons, he was choosy, like the itinerant workers.) Compared with his, my own handwriting seemed to me ugly, also insignificant, and I wished it were as indecipherable, dense, and delicate as that of this little child.

When in the course of the year he acquired speech, it was quite an event to hear his first questions. That raising of the voice at the end of a sentence had the ring of a formulation never heard in such a way, close to song. And I experienced an even greater event when Vladimir then, in response to a question of mine, for the first time began to tell a story. That happened completely apart from his usual speaking and even singing; a long, tense silence preceded it, followed by a palpable formation of images and then a rhythm in the deepest recesses of the child’s inward being, a shining forth, and then he launched into it, his introductory sound a rolling of the tongue, a clacking, a positively melodic jubilation.

Yet in his everyday speech, too, he visibly had an object before his eyes for every word, in contrast to so many French children, who before the first image had learned already the words for it, so that even for them as adults the words could never represent something actually seen.

And another special thing happened with him: when he began to stammer. It was not regression into infant babbling, but rather a sort of ecstatic state, from which the child, so fiery and imperious that no one needed a translation, took a position on the world’s goings-on and proclaimed his view of the situation. These speeches always began with a sharply articulated, almost shouted “And now!” and only after that launched into inspired stammering.

If Vladimir could say of someone: “I know him,” the expression was infused with pure pleasure. If he was asked what this person or that “did,” he would reply: “He’s there.” But at intervals he would fall completely silent, and when I then glanced over at him, his eyes would be wide open, focused on me, as they had been for a long time already, almost alarmingly. And when he played, what credulous playing it was — the credulity of play.

Sometimes he merely listened for a while, and it became clear to me, from the birdsong, trains pulling in and out (which in the meantime I had otherwise long since stopped hearing), the rattling of the garbage trucks (here often in the evening), how wide the bay was becoming. With him at my side, it was as if the barking of dogs, as well as the year-round screeching of the ravens, were happening for his and our protection. And when he then slept, I sat next to his room in the kitchen as the household employee on call, and I liked that as much as the unaccustomed view from there through the trees of my own house, with lights on, as always at nightfall, in every room, and looking so mysterious from the unfamiliar kitchen.

“A child,” I thought, “keeps joy going in the world, and what else is the world?” That I had already had a similar thought: all the better.

Then in the course of the summer the business with the mushrooms in the bay began, in time even interfering with my year’s work, and this time the danger came from me myself.

But perhaps I am exaggerating, and mushroom hunting should be seen more as a kind of competition to sitting and recording, a fruitful one?

During that year every species of edible mushroom gradually found its way to my heart, and the main characters, yes, were the cèpes, or, as we called them in Austria, king boletes. I had never been a mushroom expert, and am still not one today. (Or any kind of “expert,” God forbid.) Yet finding them had been a great pleasure way back in my childhood, even if in the Jaunfeld region I had at most had an eye for what we called egg yolk mushrooms, or chanterelles, which often had parasols or umbrellas that more than covered both palms. I recall how after an extraordinarily rich find, halfway into the mountains along the Yugoslav border, when I was out hiking with my grandfather, a night came during which in my sleep I zigzagged from one yellow patch of chanterelles to the next, scooping them up, and in the end that was one of my most enduring nightmares. And no one in the house ate these yellow ones; they were sold (I owed my first paperbacks to the proceeds) to a cooperative and transported from there by truck to the regional capital. And if memory serves me, there was not a single find of king mushrooms in my entire childhood. My grandfather turned up, rarely enough, with one, called jurek in Slovenian — rather disrespectfully, precisely out of admiration? — but he, who otherwise was happy to share, did not reveal his sources to me, his frequent companion, and I still picture stumbling one day upon a sealed testament in which he passes on to me the secret locations.

Not until the summer of my move here on the other side of the hills above the Seine did I suddenly see, without really looking, on a sunken road, from whose crest it was not all that far east to the next Métro, and only a hop, skip, and jump to the Eiffel Tower, king boletes standing there, amazing also in their perfection so close to the mountain-bike ruts, and as if they were there just for me. The hat in the crook of my arm was then wonderfully weighed down by the few light brown caps, whose fresh smell accompanied me through the subway and along the avenues, except that the pedestrians in the metropolis took them, along with the leaves clinging to them, for theatrical props, real live objects like the edibles in the windows of Japanese restaurants.

That summer was also the summer of the king boletes on the future Bordeaux bank, along the forest side of the bay’s main road, grubbed out of the earth by children sliding down for fun. And both finds I cooked for a reconciliation meal with the woman from Catalonia, or wasn’t it simply a matter of enjoying them together, without any particular purpose? And of these meals I still recall that we immediately pushed aside the other ingredients, meat as well as herbs, because all at once these tasted so insistent, even coarse, and put only the white thin mushroom slices into our mouths, one piece only after we had thoroughly savored the previous one; that with each bite the taste promptly became a feeling, not merely gratifying the palate but also the head and then the entire body; and that, if we two mushroom eaters took on the air of conspirators, certainly not ones planning anything bad.

Since then I have been on the lookout every year in the bay, but have hardly ever encountered the king bolete again (except in the autumn at the market on the railroad station square, though heaps of them there, at fruit and potato stands, with a little sign indicating their origin, cèpes de Corrèze, a region considered the most remote or interior in France).

Instead I collected the multitude of other edible varieties, and was happy with every russula, cèpe, or ringed bolete, varieties the mushroom-seeking clubs tended to leave behind. For years I also spent not a few autumn evenings studying a large-format, thick book with the title The Mushrooms of Alaska, simply as a stimulus to fantasizing, at the same time struck by the similarities among a number of mushrooms from the tundra up by the Bering Strait or from the volcanic Aleutian Islands and those here in the bay, for instance in their rich coloration, along with their adaptation to the soil colors, also their woodiness (especially those under birches). And I encountered variations so rare in the forests here that they were not mentioned in even one of the French mushroom guides — which claimed that the chestnut forests and acidic soil around Paris made for poor mushroom country — but turned up in a Slovenian guide, the fruit of an expedition of engineers, as researchers and authors.

The king boletes, after almost a decade in which they had not allowed me to catch a glimpse of them in this area, returned only this year, and again unexpectedly, without my having to search for them, and most abundantly right around my spot deep in the woods behind the Nameless Pond, where I settled down two seasons ago to get on with my work.

One midsummer morning when I arrived there, the first one received me, majestically, right after I had slipped through to the burned-out stump, my backrest. And to convey the sight, I shall use after all what I noted down at the time: “Reflection in the face of a beautiful thing: ‘I have never seen such a thing before!’ And although he had often seen it before, he was thinking the truth.”

I then waited a long time to pick it, traced an arc around my find, first picked one of the much softer and more yielding ringed boletes, in which, when I held it to my ear, maggots were raging audibly. And when I finally took hold of the shaft of the thing, or being, or king — without my fingers’ quite getting around it — I felt a trembling in it, and when I cut it off, with utmost care, using my pocketknife, there was a sound from the last subterranean fiber as if from a string even lower than the lowest guitar string, and certainly not one that was snapping.

As I then took my place, with a glance at the rotund form at my side, it was as if my daily work quota were already done for today.

From that time on, for months, until late fall, I did not once begin my writing until I had found at least a hatful of edible mushrooms, which I first lined up on the forest floor, with all their faces toward me.

Initially there was hardly another king bolete among them; coming upon one remained for a goodly time a rarity. But gathering the other kinds (and they, too, had to be searched for attentively) in the forests around the bay, and occasionally eyeing them, in the midst of my work, could be refreshing and cheering. I then saw myself, while I continued writing about the year here and my distant friends, as having company, one which with its so varied colorations and sizes accompanied me.

And this did not produce a sense of guilt like picking wildflowers: these mushrooms, the fragile, snow-white head of the inky caps (still too young to have ink in their lamellae), the rough-skinned boletes, called birch scaberstalks, repeating in miniature a birch with their scarred-looking stems (though with a reddish-brown mushroom cap in place of the tree’s crown), the bluish russulas, called indigo milkcap, at the same time spattered with the clay of the sunken path — they had all lived for the purpose of being found by someone, by me, for example.

Whenever such a mushroom had already been nibbled away by worms, I had a sense of having missed something, and specifically with this one; as if it had grown not for this brood of worms but only for being consumed by someone like me, and perhaps beforehand being gnawed at a bit by a snail. And it was the same with the mushrooms that had simply dried up or rotted: I felt sorry for them, sorry that at the appointed time they had not become a taste sensation in a human mouth.

No more delicious sight than these intact little mushroom tribes on my right, which had clearly just thrust their way before sunrise out of the earth, and were still damp from it. If I ever had to offer an image of what “virginal” looks like, I would point to the underside of the cap of a baby ringed bolete (the kind that most quickly falls prey to devouring worms), and from there would as carefully as possible peel off the stem casing or dress: never has the world seen a color as pale and bright as in the flesh that would come into view, never such purity as that of the tiny and evenly patterned — in the quintessential hexagon — mushroom fleshland. Come ye and see: when you have removed that spongy underlayer, the naked ringed bolete, or butter mushroom, or whatever name you give it, offers a cross section of a heavenly body on which no human foot has ever stepped, void and pure, at the same time of concentrated fruitiness. You cannot preserve both of those, except perhaps if you consume the mushroom, if possible without delay.

But of course since that one midsummer moment, on my morning circuitous paths to my sitting place, I was on the lookout for further bolete majesties. Even one was a find. It alone could send a thrill through me (even if at the beginning I would usually back away from it in spirals); it contributed to my sense of revelation that, simultaneously with the charm and the power at my feet, bombers were flying over the treetops, from the highways audible in the distance ambulance sirens wailed, or even just a team of mountain bikers, helmet after helmet, came crashing out of the underbrush on one side.

Finding the few king boletes during that summer was something I actually owed almost every time to the mountain bikers. They carved such deep ruts through the several years’ layers of leaves, especially in the steep sunken roads, that as a result mushrooms were sprung from the otherwise covered ground, like stones under heavy tires, and, if by some lucky chance they were not beheaded or crushed, lay there on top in the light of day, ready to pick up.

It could happen that in the tire tracks of the previous days I then found another, one the downhill swoop had merely bumped, which had continued growing, but instead of up toward the air, down into the humus, head down toward the earth’s interior, and harshly bent back against its stem, in the crouching position of an embryo, which also hides its face. For this one I had first to burrow my way in; by itself, deformed as it was, it would never have come to light.

Only after the autumn rains did the finds begin to multiply. Nevertheless, every single one of the king boletes was still a revelation to me. When there came a day on which there were too many for me, that did not mean that I had grown tired of them, but I could not grasp all the revelations anymore: the one giant king bolete that I found that evening growing under the edible chestnut in my yard, as if it had followed me there from the woods, almost belonged in a horror tale — and the next morning I woke up longing for another just like it, under the same tree.

But most of them turned up around the spot where I sat and wrote, beyond the pond, in a space the size of a room, for weeks on end, day after day. And each time hours were spent on looking around, hunting, poking for them, before I finally got down to my project.

But my project, what was it now? A single object like this, as earthly heavy as unearthly in my hand: how could anything I might write down in the course of the day outweigh such a living thing? Even when I felt sure a place that yielded rich finds was empty, at least until the coming year, there, or a few underground flame-yellow root tangles farther along, overnight a new majesty of the forest floor had shouldered its way to the surface and had appeared on the scene or the stage, so monumentally that precisely for that reason it was easy to overlook, next to other, much more eye-catching mushrooms.

In such a moment there came from my lips, without premeditation, and not only once: “My friend.” And first I would dig away the leaf mold from around it, until the oval stem was exposed down to its very base and perhaps even tipped over all by itself, freeing itself from its net of roots; then I would sniff it, taking in the essence of the forest, and only then, much later, would I harvest the king bolete, whereupon I silently displayed it to my gathered ancestors from the Jaunfeld, who had been looking over my shoulder the entire time in a way that I never felt when I was writing — except when it was my mother.

It could happen that one of these finds made when I arrived in the morning was merely child-sized, so to speak, and also correspondingly pale, and I let it grow and take on color until quitting time (though in between I went back again and again to check on it). And only later, when the mushroom seekers appeared — of them more in a moment — whom no king bolete, however infant-sized, escaped, even if I had hidden it under moss and branches, did I pick each one immediately — they were not to have it!

Yet in my desire to forestall the troops of mushroom seekers, as time went by I overdid my own seeking. In my backwoods realm, and that meant within sight of my sitting stump, my pencils, and my writing portfolio, I grubbed up every inch of layered leaves, and soon I was doing it every day, down to the rotted mold and even deeper, into the black, long since compacted, then light and sandy, original soil.

I divided my search area into a grid of parcels or claims, and on one of them, I stumbled one day, in a former grub hole, on such a tribe of king boletes, actually resembling whitish pupae, but with firm flesh, almost all of them lying horizontally, facing in one and the same direction, like mummies in the hold of those ancient Egyptian ships of the dead, buried in desert sand for their crossing to another life and immortality.

I ended up with coal-black fingers that could not be scrubbed clean, and my nails broke off from almost an entire autumn of digging for mushrooms around my writing materials, and when, from time to time, I went for the evening to the restaurant of the prophet of Porchefontaine, almost the only person with whom I had any regular contact during the current year, he waved me over to the corner table “for hunters and woodsmen.”

Even though, after such king bolete expeditions, carried out in one location, I sometimes did not sit down to write until afternoon, dangerously late, it seemed to me, in fact I hardly ever experienced that as a disadvantage after all. Agitated both by the exertion of searching and by the enthusiasm of discovery, I found peace when I finally got down to writing. I recovered my breath while doing work that seemed incidental, also a part or the essence of my free time; I recovered with its help, came up for air. Weak was not the same as lacking strength.

On my autumnal walks home from the woods, for the first time in my decade here one original inhabitant of the bay or another addressed a word to me, because of the mushrooms in my hat.

At first that happened only in passing, in the shouts of fishermen, to the effect that it was “forbidden” to “transport” such things “in a hat!” or in the resounding astonishment of an old woman, who, as she said, had hunted the eyes out of her head every fall, but never yet with success. Then one time an equally elderly loner began, at the sight of the mushrooms, to tell stories, without directing them particularly at me: that the nameless body of water had been created by an American bomb, which was intended for the air base of Villacoublay, in those days occupied by the Germans, but went off course like ten thousand others; that the woods in his youth had been even more of a jungle; and the loneliness was enormous, “rougher” than before; retired people did play boules together, but never had anyone invited him over; at home he was keeping a cepe, at least as large as all of mine together there, for Sunday dinner, “not in the refrigerator, in the cellar!” and this one, unlike my chestnut king boletes, was from an oak tree, with just a bit of a bloom on the cap, otherwise colorless, “that’s the only kind I gather”; at the time of the German occupation, the woods here had been full of cannon, off-limits; and he had never yet found a good mushroom in a bomb crater; the water did not drain out.

And whenever I came home with a particularly good find, a model, an example, a model example, I felt a desire to invite someone, an enemy (but did I still have one left?), to a reconciliation meal, or my noisy neighbors. It was not right to cook and eat by oneself this manna, not fallen from heaven but risen from the earth, unpredictable, untamable, even in this day and age unplantable. And yet that is what I did every time, consumed it all, my eyes closed.

What happened in the process: as I cut up the mushrooms, almost every evening, sautéed, perhaps salted, perhaps drizzled them with olive oil or something else, the kitchen, neglected for a long time, became a place for me again, and thus the house was altogether inhabited anew. Come ye and taste.

And afterward I sat in the very back of the yard and wanted to wake all my neighbors with my Arab kitchen-radio music.

And the dreams afterward at night, no matter how unfathomable they remained, became light in exemplary fashion for this eater.

It was after the autumn rains that in the forests of the bay the mushroom-seeking guilds appeared. The region in the hills of the Seine was not overrun by them; there were only a couple, but they searched all the more thoroughly. They seldom allowed themselves to be seen, and in the beginning almost all I encountered was their tracks. These came from the burrowers; from day to day the light gray leafy ground was punctuated by more mold-dark places, where the deepest layer had been brought to the surface.

Sometimes this resulted in actual seeker-marks — circles, spirals, wavy lines, zigzags, rectangles and triangles, labyrinths, and I imagined a series of photographs, “Symbols of the Search.” But mostly it was scenes of violence, as if a wild animal had suddenly pounced on its prey, except that not a hair of this particular prey was left, save a black, deep hole in the earth.

Later I encountered this or that mushroom seeker in person, or actually only the sounds of him reached me at my open-air seat by the Nameless Pond. Each time it was heavy steps coming suddenly out of the tree-stillness, behind my back on the bank, and then stillness again, followed by more pounding and crashing through the underbrush. Otherwise I never heard a sound from a mushroom seeker, no whistling, certainly no humming, not even breathing. At most a dog accompanying him would begin to bark, and would also do so at tooth-baring range, which forced me to get up and continue writing in a standing position.

It could occur that I would turn toward a master or apprentice seeker, but not once was I greeted by him or even favored with a glance; he always kept his gaze, as if cross-eyed, fixed on the ground, sideways. If I saw such a person at all, he was often standing just as a silhouette behind some bushes, motionless and soundless, in a manner otherwise familiar from exhibitionists.

Yet even those who showed themselves clearly had no face, and likewise no discernible age. I never succeeded in looking one in the eye. They camouflaged their hunting, pretended, for instance with a long pole whose tip ended in a metal point, to be gathering edible chestnuts, and when they came upon a king bolete, it was seized in a flash — the bare space afterward looking clawed up and scratched out — and on they went, as if nothing had happened. They were always strangers, people from elsewhere, at times even with hidden sonar devices and mechanical mushroom vacuums, which, operated for moments at high speed, were promptly stashed away again.

That the mushroom seekers roamed the forest in twos or threes was actually more the exception; as a rule they were loners, and from one fall day to the next pretty much the same ones. And nevertheless even the single ones had something of the air of gang members; at any rate they reminded me altogether of a band of card sharks roving the wooded hills. I perceived these seekers as sinister fellows, or shabby sniffers, or at least as crooked birds, their shoes worn down in an entirely different way from those of so-called hoboes, and with their uncanny scraping at my back, for the first time I felt relieved at the sight of the light and bright, and oh so contemporary runners in the clearing beyond the bayou.

In my imagination the gangs of mushroom seekers were after the king boletes — all other edible mushrooms were casually annihilated with a disdainful kick or scraping of the tips of their shoes — with the help of those long poles, as if made for jabbing into the hole of the mythical beast. And in between they also tossed their knives at a find, as one would a hunting knife. They tore up, like new bomb-droppers, the entire forest floor, these seeker-sharks. Since they appeared, I had taken on the habit, before I settled in my writing place, of arranging all my finds from that spot not just next to me, but rather in a circle, clearly on display, which indeed had the effect of forcing them to beat a hasty retreat. At the same time I was prepared for an attack.

But was I any different in my mushroom seeking? Hadn’t I time and again lost any sense of distance as a result of my seeker’s gaze? Had become seeking-blind, as one can become snow-blind? At any rate the moment arrived once a day when my seeking turned into a form of obsession, close to a mania. In the end I, too, was seeking in an ever-increasing radius, away, out of sight of my writing pages (of which one then blew into the water once). How often I had scolded myself for my seeking, wanting to shoo it away from my brow, as Horace shooed away sorrow.

With the recognition that I could not give up seeking, it became clear to me that I had to seek in a different way. When the seeking was right, I had always known I was having an adventure, whether I then found anything or not. Thus I felt a powerful urge to introduce the seeker into my story, the book, even if only the mushroom seeker. For I know how I went seeking (but not how I found).

How does one become a good seeker? For instance, by having something else in mind while seeking, but firmly. For instance, by not turning away instantly from a mistake, but observing it thoroughly. For instance, by learning to seek where there are no signs, perhaps precisely there, at the tips of your shoes, and immediately upon entering the woods, not only deep into it.

I often stood and looked at the ground until the forms there, of fallen branches, leaves, moss, each began to glow separately: only thus did I get into seeking, without specific purpose. And I went seeking where most of the others did, on the path or close to it, and only late in autumn farther into the underbrush: my most astonishing, my most wonderful finds occurred as a rule where everybody passed through. Whenever I became tired, I rested, continuing to seek more slowly, or caught my breath while focusing on an optical illusion, a piece of rind, a patch of sunlight, also a poisonous mushroom. Time and again I also went seeking with the light shining in my eyes; to concentrate then was a game. I was less successful in noisy conditions, for instance near a highway; only in silence did I feel that I was now in Findland, at least in the find direction — although in time I also knew otherwise.

It was fruitful to look up from the ground at intervals, treetop- and skyward, after which things down below on the ground took on clearer contours; likewise to seek while concentrating on the day before yesterday — almost always something heaved up from underground, even if instead of the Bordeaux mushroom it was merely a little cèpe, the sight of whose flesh flooded my heart with a joyous yellow; and likewise to seek after a moment of terror, because after that my eyes looked sharper, by themselves, without any effort on my part.

Whenever those troops of seekers or plunderers or forest pirates crossed my path, I imagined, in contrast to them, a different, new kind of seeker. He did not seek in orthodox fashion, which in the case of mushroom seeking meant at a distance, actually at a distance from at a distance. What did that mean? For instance, following in the muddy footsteps of the organized, mechanized seekers: it turned out, and not only once, that he found himself facing a king bolete too large for the keen eyes and sonar devices, which otherwise did not miss so much as a button; so huge that the entire forest appeared around it as a Baroque setting, and he stammered at the majesty reposing in glory in its midst, “My, my, where did you come from?”

To seek at a distance also meant: at a distance from time. For instance, my new seeker hardly believed in Sunday finds, but certainly, and without reservation, in those of Mondays. A huge sigh of relief, after the hordes passed through, had gone through the woods during the night and sunrise hours and had had its most immediate effect on the mushrooms; the Monday finds, in the renewed stillness, with cricket-harping, could be counted on to be the freshest, and turned up primarily on the main paths, which the previous evening had still been tramping and bicycle-racing zones. The Monday mushrooms could be so beautiful that the seeker would say at the sight of one: “Boy, you’re so beautiful you should be real!”

But for a modern seeker like this, in addition to the temporal there was also a spatial distance from the distance of the seeker guilds, at a distance from their underbrush seeking grounds or hardly traversable plantations, for example the places behind the cemeteries here in the bay’s forests, where the layers of leaves were not only considerably thicker but also mixed with rotted flowers and such, which had been thrown over the wall. Altogether, it was the delimited, overseeable spots, and not the great expanses, where one got into the right kind of seeking without even trying. The modern seeker had only to walk up and down there attentively, and at the same time selflessly.

Was being free of oneself desirable, then? Yes. And how? Something like this: “Be still now! Be still in yourself!”

And it got warm again during the search, when leaves blown from far away, from trees entirely different from those hereabouts, mingled with the local ones. Then it became a matter of getting one’s head into the searching angle, especially since late fall played tricks on the seeker more and more, to mention only the slanting light, and the mushrooms, under the fallen leaves, took on camouflage colors.

That seeker figure that hovered before my eyes while I myself was seeking moved with a particular seeking step, of unprecedented elegance, in a unique search dance, from one foot to the other, at the same time the most inconspicuous of dances. And from his sort of seeking he had become athletic, and part of it was that again and again he went backward, or turned in a circle for a while (did not merely look over his shoulder), in a fashion similar to that in which long ago, on the Jaunfeld Plain, at the celebration of the summer solstice, the young men carrying torches had swung them around during the procession, according to ancient custom, to get these torches to flare up constantly — a custom which, according to the latest parish bulletin, is supposed to be revived soon.

But what did such renewed seeking lead to, except perhaps to a small meal? Aside from the fact that I have never in my life eaten as well and as nicely as in this year — the different kind of seeker, as I conjured him up in my imagination, let me tell you, noticed in passing more than before: saw in passing the transition in the Seine hills from the grayish-blue Fontainebleau sand to the white sandstone named after the Montmorency region, and in passing the hundreds-of-years-old wagon tracks in the forest, going back to the days of kings, and in passing the boulders thrown up half a century ago already, and now again from the bomb craters, and in passing the often amazingly intricate leaf-covered huts of the increasing numbers of homeless in the region.

And he succeeded, simply through his seeking, even without finding anything, in collecting himself. For what? For naught. And precisely when he made a great, marvelous find he was seized with anxiety: a small, innocuous one should be added to it, by way of confirmation, reassurance. And toward the end of autumn a longing for nothing but modest finds set in, for russulas, ringed boletes, blewits, and ordinary little moss mushrooms — no more majestic mushrooms! And from time to time the seeker actually set out with the motto “Today I shall succeed in not finding anything!” And in midstream, precisely because of his searching, he forgot this, too, and the beauty of the land, the clouds, the trees, and the paths gained the upper hand.

And an ever-new source of pleasure in seeking would be the mistakes. “What a sad day it will be when I no longer make mistakes!” My future seeker would welcome his mix-ups, would fondle them, use them to study the laws governing human error (and himself), would finally set up a room in his house just “for my mistakes”; would use his optical illusions to keep himself impressionable, as he would use the places in the woods searched until completely empty to collect himself. And thus collected, to continue seeking will appear to him as a renewal of the world. It will become bright, within him as well as in the landscape, from his collected seeking.

And what now, in wintertime, in the cold, when there is nothing more to seek for in the wooded areas? Yes, there was hoarfrost this morning on the few remaining mushrooms there, which, one way or another, like the ice-covered pond, across which my stones pinged, no longer had a name. And my three-season writing seat, tipped into the water by children playing, stuck up from among the ice floes. And the hoarfrosted cap of one of these nameless mushroom-people bore the mark, paper-thin, of the foot of a very light, very small, seemingly one-legged bird. And at home, from the window of my mistake room, I contemplated the plaster cast, a present from the priest in the village of my birth, of the Magi, out there under the garden beech, and likewise saw in all the lumpy gift packages, which they held out into the void, in the frankincense, gold, and myrrh, likewise a king bolete, lord of the mushrooms.

In the meantime my son Valentin, on his crisscross journey through Greece, had long since put the site of the ancient oracle in Dodona behind him. It had become a place that he now recalled in approximately the following terms: “That was where, in the morning, when I went on foot from Ioannina up into the mountains, along the road it was still white with April frost, where at noon, as the only guest sitting outdoors in front of the snack shack near the amphitheater, I had a bee fall into my glass, and where, on my way back over the hills toward evening, from behind and in front sheep dogs jumped up on me.” From Dodona he had sent me a leaf from a chestnut oak, so hard that when it was shaken or even just held up in the wind it produced a metallic clanging sound, and I could imagine how the entire oracle’s grove had once droned, rattled, spoken. (Hadn’t leaves also been gilded?)

He involuntarily spent the summer in Athens, for in the great heat the leg that had almost been severed in his accident swelled up, and he lay there, hardly able to move, in a room in a pension. In the course of the month he covered the walls with paintings, motifs, festively colorful people, ditto flowers as large as people, of the sort he had taken note of in the prehistoric frescoes from Thera or Santorini, removed to the Greek National Museum.

And one day the woman stepped through his door whom he referred to in my presence only as “your woman from Catalonia,” his mother, the person with the most reliable intuition (like me more in connection with bad luck), and took up quarters next to him for a while. For the first time she cared for her son, as if only now the moment had come, and was solicitous, so unobtrusively, as was her style, that he was not even alarmed, as was in turn his style. “My mother was good to me,” he wrote me later.

And she was then the one who helped him get back on his feet by grabbing her overgrown son, on the August-dusty Lykabettos Hill in the middle of Athens and dragging him, half naked, through a very special patch of stinging nettles: “The nettle run healed me.” After that, again as was her style, the woman from Catalonia vanished.

Not once during this year did Valentin make the crossing to one of the Greek islands. He had promised his girlfriend that he would visit them only with her, at some later date; he got as far as watching the ferries in Piraeus. In the fall, on the Peloponnesus, he received word that his text on the different winter grays, which he had illustrated with drawings and watercolors, had received a prize, was being printed and displayed in a gallery.

Never would he have thought that he could be so pleased by a success — his first. And now: how bright the foreign lights became, of Corinth, then Nemea, then Argos, then Nauplia; how it gave him, who had meanwhile been feeling the tug of home, the impetus to continue his journey, to set out on foot. There were successes that hollowed one out; not this small first one. “I would like to make something,” he wrote to me on his twenty-second birthday from mountainous Tripoli in Arcadia, “that would put me in a class with the painter of the chambers of Thera.”

Upon receiving notice of the prize, he had bought himself a suit, as well as shoes, which, hardly worn, he is wearing today as he waits, in mid-December, in Patras for the ferry to Brindisi to dock. He long ago learned not merely to read Greek but also to speak a few words, whether ancient or modern, such as helios, sun, and cheimon, winter, and in every place he immediately found the one roomy café, each time with a high plaster ceiling and the most elaborate neon-light patterns, where he had his spot, with or without drawing pad, amid the clicking of the dice tossed by the old customers, and no matter where he was, he called it Neos Kosmos, New World. (Didn’t kosmos originally mean “decoration”?)

Now in wintertime the shrill chirping of the cicadas had long since fallen silent, yet in the rocky expanse, especially that of Arcadia, one could imagine it all the more vividly. Only a short time ago, toward the end of his year’s journey, Valentin informed me that he encountered his father a few times, in the form of doubles, and very strange ones indeed. This happened to him, however, almost only by hearsay, once in Delphi, where in a tourist café there was talk of a rather scruffy fellow who had introduced himself as “Gregor Keuschnig, writer,” had let others pay for his meal and then disappeared with the loveliest woman in the group; and then again in a restaurant, estiatorion, by the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where on the wall hung a postcard, addressed to the proprietor’s lovely daughter, with my signature forged, and above it thanks for help in time of need and for the unforgettable hours with her (postmarked Paris).

And one time Valentin even saw me in person, by the Piraeus ferries to the Aegean islands, where “I,” barefoot, ragged, younger than in reality, “the writer G.K. in crisis,” was offering to sell to my fellow countrymen waiting in line cartoons that I had drawn myself and carried in a portfolio. Again and again my son in his days as a disc jockey had played a song by the singer titled “I’ll Throw My Father Off My Back”: there, at the sight of my double and counterfeiter he recognized that he had stopped needing to do that a long time ago.

This morning in Patras, on the stone steps, in the upper town, he had witnessed a man trying to lure his escaped parrot back into its cage from a tree. The bird’s master did this by calling up patiently to the escapee, for hours on end, in a very tender voice, while the bird talked back to him, and he had the cage on his head, its door open, and on the tip of the cage, the sharp spike there, he had stuck an apple, which he turned now and then, or also tossed away into the air, while out of the tree only sparrows flew constantly.

In between the man put down the empty cage, withdrew, and waited in silence. The escaped bird did not budge. More and more neighbors approached, cautiously, and softly offered advice. And then, as the midday ferry was already blowing its whistle down in the harbor, my son came over and gave the apple on the spike a gentle push, so that the stem, instead of sideways as previously, now pointed straight up toward the pappagallo in the tree. And in that moment the parrot dropped, as if in free fall, jungle-yellow.

And now Valentin is making his way slowly toward the bay here, for the reunion we are all going to celebrate.

My friend the priest on the Jaunfeld Plain had been constantly on the move all year, but hardly outside of his parish, except for the visit, occasioned by his sermon defying the Pope, to the bishop in K., who, without a word’s being spoken between them about the whole matter, agreed with him that the caption under a photograph of the two of them in the next church bulletin should read that the child of Siebenbrunn had merely come into town, as farmers often had in earlier times, “to look at the clock again.”

It was chiefly on account of the dying that he could not get away, even though he did long to now and then. There were no more of them than usual this year, but the need seemed to have grown, among the old as well as among the young, for someone like him, since no one else did it anymore, to stop by, every day if possible, with his disdainful gaze, and lay on his hands. Then they wanted him to stay, even if he just gazed out at the landscape, with his back to them, or read the paper. He was in agreement with the Protestants in at least one respect, namely that faith alone was decisive, and was close to disapproving of so-called good works; these, and here he was of one mind with “his” writer, the apostle Paul, should be refrained from, “lest any man should boast.”

Except for those who lay dying, all year long hardly a soul in his parish of many villages asked for him, and only very rarely did his appearing cause eyes to light up anywhere; the majority even turned away, not hostilely, only sullenly: “Oh, him again.”

At the end of October he telephoned me, as promised, because on the Jaunfeld, in the village of Rinkolach, and on the house of my ancestors there, the first snow was falling, “flakes feathered like arrows,” falling in town, on the contrary, horizontally, looking in the headlights of the dense stream of rush-hour traffic like towropes; besides, my brother had discovered his singing voice, the last one in the family to do so, and was singing in the church choir, with such a beautiful voice that Urban, as happened every time when he succeeded at something — and he succeeded at almost everything — broke out in lamentations at his own life-weariness.

In dark November, lacking sun also because of the mist off the dammed-up Drau in the west, the priest dreamed a repetition of the event that had preoccupied him since that night in the Lower Austrian seminary for those called late to the priesthood: again he found himself, as in reality there, lying in the bed of someone else, who was fast asleep, as he had just been, and he? How in the world had he ended up in this other bed, next to a huge strange body that left him no room? Where was his own bed? How would he be punished? Expulsion from the institution? A mark of Cain on his forehead, for life?

Then at the beginning of December came such a heavy frost that the bed of the brooks flowing through the Jaunfeld toward the Drau, from the Petzen and the Karawanken Mountains, froze over from the bottom, up over the pebbles, enlarged into ice balls, whereupon the water on top, forced upward, spilled far over the banks. And for the first time in decades the villagers became skaters again, out until late on full-moon nights, as if things had never been any different in the interval; and blocks of ice weighing tons were cut, as if for the icehouses of a different turn of the century.

Advent had long since arrived, and there were still a few refugees in the rectory, from the German civil or cousins’ war, refugees from the north and west for a change, instead of from the south or east as usual, Bavarians and Hessians from larger cities, driven out by the Saxons or Frisians or Saarlanders, then seized here by a kind of paralysis, incapable of going home, although since the summer peace had returned to their areas; perhaps they also harbored thoughts of remaining forever in this rather empty land of pines and wayside shrines.

For a while these few traumatized individuals were lodged in one of the abandoned schoolhouses of the area, speechless, their eyes lowered, and just last night, before his departure today, he had said Mass for them there. While at the Kyrie eleison, the sentences from Scripture, the Hallelujah, his heart as always was suffused with warmth, and, he told himself, as he did every day, he could get along without any celebration except, for all eternity, that of the Eucharist, of thanksgiving, of Communion, with the transformation of bread and wine into the divine body and the divine blood, still he gazed at the refugees’ absent or confused faces with such scorn, increasing as the moments passed—“Could you stop boring the whole world with your misery!”—that the final blessing with which he sent them forth was hardly out of his mouth when all of them burst into laughter, at first still awkwardly here and there, then unanimously relieved.

And this morning he sat by the window of his office and waited for daybreak — while yearning for the winter’s night to last a good while longer (as the weeks of Advent meant more to him than Christmas itself; for its celebration this time the priest from the next parish would take his place). He, without domestic help, had ironed his shirts, rinsed out his coffee cup, had even, long before sunrise, gone skidding over the most terrible roads around the Rinkenberg to give his vehicle the patina of a forester’s car, for my sake, and the day before had instructed all the dying to hold off until the new year and his return, and was now sitting, as he otherwise seldom did, quietly, in his traveling clothes, the heavy tome he had just been reading balanced on his shoulder.

Down below on the icy path, likewise as if for the first time since all the wars and events of the century, a glazier with his rack of panes on his back, which caused a glittering all around in the first rays of the sun. But his main attention was focused on the holes, the ventilation pattern in the wall of the tumbledown barn across the way, shaped like a circle of sunflowers, in the middle an opening in the shape of an acorn, like that of the ace in a deck of cards. Pavel had already been waiting a long time for something to waft into his face from these pitch-black grids, like that third calling. And what if this one revoked the two previous ones?

With my other distant friends I shared during the year here in my bay fewer such moments, perhaps because they all ended up too far away, and furthermore in places of which I hardly had an image (or too definite a one), perhaps because they were either too young or less old than my son Valentin and Father Pavel, perhaps also because I received no word of them, as was the case with my singer.

Nevertheless, even without a complete train of images, I continued to see the wandering through the world of each individual friend — I had only to point my thoughts in his direction — in a sharply delineated light: this was like looking through the telescope in my house at the moon, the full moon, which each time made me feel as if I were not only seeing the glaring white surface but were also gazing into the depths of the smallest crater, at the bottom of the basin there with its boulders and their shadows.

Thus almost the only thing I knew about the architect and carpenter was that he, more in the latter role, had been on the move until now, into the winter, from one mountain village to the next in southern Japan, and was offering to work for farmers, repairing their wooden structures. As a rule he did not even ask, but without ado worked his way in from the outer edge of the property, from a lean-to in the meadow, a turnstile, a rack for drying straw, the lattice door of a root cellar. Just the sight of these Japanese villages, huddled together with their curved, bronze-dark roofs overlapping, as if dedicated to the heavens, made tears sometimes come to his eyes. Not to jump onto the train of images like so many architects today, but to add his own to the organically developed image!

If he was not remunerated every time, he was at least tolerated, especially since he promptly went to work in a way that brooked no contradiction. He did, to be sure, stay out of the way, yet did not behave like a stranger, but as if he were at home, on the karst or in Friuli, except that now, abroad, he finished every one of his projects. And after his return he would adhere to this pattern on his own building site. “It’s time to build”—this was one of the few messages I received from him.

The tools for his repair work, work which had the aura of inconspicuousness, he fabricated himself, or the Japanese farmers occasionally helped him out with tools that had long since been deposited in corners, behind the machinery: there were still carpenter’s pencils around, for marking boards, no different from everywhere in Europe, the special short-handled hatchets, the long, flexible string, and to go with it the old carpenter’s cans with a red liquid through which the string was drawn and then snapped against a tree trunk to mark the cutting line, a smacking sound on the wood probably heard everywhere in the world.

Occasionally he also came through large cities like Osaka, and noticed that there all the physical or “dirty” work was usually done clandestinely, by strangers like him, only with darker skin; the screens in front of new buildings under construction allowed one to see in even less than those elsewhere, and it was also as if the workers there had explicit instructions to remain out of sight: a rarity when in the midst of the construction noise a human figure could be seen in a gap in the screen, and then with his back to the street, a rear view, and promptly swinging hand over hand back into the wings.

For a few hours, during a night in a hotel by the station, somewhat like one in England, made of brick, except that it was in Tokyo, after he had looked out at the maze of tracks in the railroad yard until the last commuter trains pulled in, from which station officials with long poles with hooks on the end fished out more and more drowsy drunks, in suit and tie, with briefcases — a constant staggering back and forth over all the platforms, combined with being shoved along, push after push — the carpenter in wintry Japan went insane. In him, this patient man, it was more the eruption of an impatience he had been holding in for a lifetime, or the sudden cessation of those different experts’ voices in him; it jolted him out of his sleep, whereupon he paced up and down until daybreak, repeatedly and with all his might pounding his head with both fists; the last time this had happened to him he had been a child. And he would have continued in this fashion if, with a small billowing of curtains, the Mongolian woman, the bride of Hokkaido, had not appeared to save him, putting him to bed and silently taking him between her legs.

And the following morning, alone again, Guido set out toward me in the bay, with a stopover in Alaska, where he wanted to study the characteristic wooden shelters known as cachés, which were built on stilts against bears and had always interested him; and on the telephone he promised to build a window seat in my study, with a writing surface above it.

Since the flight from Narita to Anchorage did not leave until late in the evening, by way of farewell on his last day in Japan the architect took for the second time the commuter train to the Eastern Sea of Kamakura, to try, weak as he still was from his night of madness, trembling in every limb, to gain new tranquillity before the house-sized Buddha there. And afterward he had time for the beach on the Pacific, where at sunset yet another (or the same?) group of girls in dark blue school uniforms yet again threw very long-stemmed roses into the waves, like lances, at intervals, into dusk, in which the colors of the flowers drifting out to sea, especially the red, became things unto themselves.

Perhaps I succeeded least in traveling along later on with my woman friend: “Because you (thus that master of explanation, my petty prophet of Porchefontaine) lost, with the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, your wife, any image at all of a woman.”

But as I now think back to those months, to Helena’s moment by the sea-flooded stone sarcophagi in the Turkish bay, I see that somewhat differently. I felt as though I was there when she, weary of the eternally wine-dark sea and of the ship’s helm, merely simulating a gathering of people with its jerky movements, in between turned back toward Dalmatia, heartily laughed at there by her two children, who, as always, were no longer and not yet expecting her, and in the following autumn set out again, this time to Egypt.

Instead of continuing to wander around there, she worked until now, using a skill she had once acquired, one of her many, on the restoration of an early Christian Coptic church in Cairo. She was the oldest in the group. Yet no one would have noticed that; she presented herself as an apprentice just like all the others, and during this time made herself, as only she, the beauty queen, could, invisible.

Although there, already fairly close to the edge of the city, or at least in an enclave far from the center of town, almost exclusively natives were at work, in the barely chapel-sized building young people from all over the world had come together, youth such as was perhaps to be observed only here, at this little-bitty restoration work, on the door ornamentation, the inlays, and especially the frescoes, and otherwise nowhere else on earth.

From outside one’s eye at first fell on only scattered individuals, for instance the girl up in the tower, who, her upper body leaning out of an opening, yet without twisting, was scrubbing down the wall. The interior, however, was packed, up to the ceiling, with similar young people, busy scraping, injecting, stroking, brushing. Each of these hand movements required hardly any room, took place in one spot, like a dot, close to soundlessness, at the same time with an intensity that bent all parts of the body to the task. Often elbow to elbow with the next person, from one level of staging to the next, they all had a place to work in and radiated that certainty, as uncramped on their knees as on their tiptoes.

The satisfaction, so quiet, that emanated from the restorers — along with a little transistor-radio music, whether the Mississippi sound of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Central European Tyrolienne of Haydn, or the inner-Arabian singing of Uum Kalsum, at whose sound the walls of Jericho came tumbling down in an entirely different way — was, as the work progressed steadily, one that resulted from having time; or, as if what they were doing were something like gaining time, the most precious thing, not only for them, the young people, here alone, but of general utility and general validity: no matter what troop of warriors, to whom in their killing-training camp such a restoration might be shown on film, would have their eyes opened to the fact that in the current era there were other images besides those of the evil empire in their video games.

Yet away from such activity my woman friend was caught up in a state of near oblivion, menacing as never before. Not the fact that she was constantly losing her way in Cairo afflicted her, but that her wandering each time led her into seemingly permanently ruined and garbage-strewn areas, where the dusty lump of rubble that she just barely missed stepping on was the face of a human being, very alive and not at all old, lying there amid rags and charred animal skulls, and the rusty tin can next to him was his blood-warm hand. Once, thinking herself completely alone in an expanse of smoking tatters, she had, crouching down to relieve herself, almost done it on one of these seemingly camouflaged people, asleep, or unconscious, or dying.

More and more she felt the urge to fall down beside them. Into the North African winter she did not speak another word, remained, except when at work, silent even with herself, no longer knew her name (that single name that otherwise tripped off her tongue with such gentle self-confidence). It did her good, in between and on days of rest, to turn away from the unchanging, also all equally round and naive-eyed faces of the Coptic saints, which day in, day out were as close to her as under a microscope, and look into those so differently alike faces of Egyptian antiquity, and at the bodies belonging to them, by no means so childlike, inside which, in the heart muscle, the pyramids had palpably been first of all, even before the actual building, like funeral barges ready to set sail for infinity.

Two cards Helena sent me, wordless ones: one of just such a broad-shouldered ancient Egyptian, striding along with a curved space between his trunk and the arch of his shoulders (unthinkable in Christian figures of that region), onto which she had sketched on one side the moon, on the other the sun; the second with a papyrus, as the hieroglyph for “green.”

Before her departure, she took the train to Helwan, up the Nile, where the deserts were closer, and also because of the similarity of the town with her “Helena.” (The river itself remained for her not only nameless; with time she had also forgotten it so completely that one day on a bridge her heart stopped at the sight of the oil-streaked water in the unsuspected depths.) In Helwan a December rain was falling, a child was making its way carefully through the wet part of a puddle, as if to wash off the citywide mud, and my woman friend sat down outside of town on a pile of rubble in the Arabian Desert, which appealed to her more because of its darker coloration, also the absence of human beings, than the left-bank section facing Libya. The sand there also had coarser grains, and the rain could be heard very clearly plashing on it, also more into the wide-open spaces, all the way to — here articulated thoughts finally resumed inside her—“the Red Sea,” over the empty, rippled expanse, which appeared tinted and inscribed like the roof-tile landscape back in Maribor outside her bedroom window. And here, too, there were sparrows.

The painter lost in the course of this year just about everything that could be lost.

The Catalan state, whose reestablishment he, previously the world-famous artist of that country, had cursed—“This state is an injustice, its establishers are traitors”—confiscated his estates there. His foreign properties burned down, along with the arsenals of paintings. A new iconoclastic movement, fleeting as a dream and all the more lasting in effect, also destroyed his works in museums (his black was stamped over with Day-Glo corrosive paint). The banks once founded specifically for painter-princes went bankrupt. One of the last gallery owners announced an exhibition with my friend’s few remaining paintings and then disinvited him, without explanation. His film, which premiered in the fall in Madrid, in a theater so full that the audience was also sitting on the steps, was crowded out a week later by an American film, which the theater owner had to run, lest he be prevented from ever showing another Hollywood film. The one copy disappeared, and the original cans of film, the negatives, without which no further copies could be made, were tossed out onto the rails as worthless during a train robbery, run over by the train, and, it was reported on the news, shredded beyond repair.

And still, after the time spent filmmaking, he was incapable of going back to his painting. “I don’t know anything about painting, have never known anything — except perhaps what not to do.” For a time there was probably a voice inside him repeating over and over that he was finished (or something of the sort). Yet the moment then came when he no longer wanted to have that said of him. To be sure, he seemed to accept it when on his trip up the Spanish meseta, to the sources of the Río Duero, here and there, in Tordesillas, in Burgos, in Soria, an old admirer expressed pity for him. Yet within himself he had long since achieved the Roman amor fati, love of fate. Yes, he was glowing with love for everything that had happened to him during the year. In the pitch-darkness within which he moved, his eyes opened wide not only with watchfulness but also with passion for knowledge. He was ready for a battle, though in his own way, instead of with clenched fists with fingers spread wide.

Later in the summer he then turned away from the water of the river, as if he did not want to see himself comforted by it anymore: it was comfort, in fact, which seemed to awaken in him that sorrow he had always resisted, out of the experience that it was almost certain to be followed by bad temper and even world-weariness. He swerved off to the south and all fall roamed back and forth across La Mancha, that almost shadowless rump and residual landscape, so easy to recapitulate with every glance, where the few watercourses had been dried out for years now, and as if forever.

He also ended up there farther away from the parts of Spain “behind the mirror,” Vigo, La Coruña, Pontevedra, the fjords deep in the interior of Galicia, where he had shot his film and which, it seemed to him in retrospect, had been damaged by the picture making, the spotlighting. Although the camera had always remained at a distance, it was as if the areas had been plundered by the process. And only now, with time, and also with his, the responsible party’s, distancing himself, did these areas gradually return to their senses and go back, recovered, like grass that bounces back after being trampled down, to their place behind the mirror, into the very special light there, which arrayed them as if nothing had happened.

And he, as far from the sea as also from a source, now became in barren La Mancha — the end of sorrow and of guilt, and no one left who recognized him — entirely free for his love of fate, a love that more than anything else drove him to create, but what? For the time being at any rate Francisco simply kept on reading that kindly master, Horace, who taught him that a god did not have to intervene in a situation until “the knot is worthy of such a savior.”

And now, yesterday, on a winter evening in Albacete, the city of knives, seemingly only recently bombed to pieces in the civil war, after one of his daily trips to the movies — the latest Hollywood him — mothered by the movies as in his childhood, the painter stumbled upon something in a corner of the open projection booth, without a projectionist: the copy of his As I Lay Dying that had disappeared from Madrid, six reels, too heavy for a man, but not for him: already they were stowed in his camper, ready to be shown when all his friends were gathered here in the no-man’s-bay. And last night there appeared to him Horace, son of a freedman, with a little paunch, and instructed him to go out and simply ask a young person: “What should I paint?” Upon awakening, Francisco resolved to pose this question to Valentin, Gregor Keuschnig’s son. He would have an answer for him, and he would act upon it. And the following morning the few paintings by the painter that had been spared by the iconoclasts revealed changes; for instance, mine here, the only piece of art in the house, had acquired a black rocky mountain hovering in the air, a hole, or rather a place where one could see through, while the other undamaged pictures changed their coloration.

And soon after setting out for the north he drove on the high plateau past a shallow depression, apparently dug out centuries earlier, an empty square a little lower than the plowed fields already sown with winter rye, a former livestock pen, overgrown, with bristly grass, the remains of a wooden fence, also of a shed, with shreds of horse tethers, on the ground a donkey’s hoof, a bird skeleton, and he thought: “This is Cervantes’ world! This is Spain!” and then: “This is what my next film will begin with,” and then: “How the human race needs such ridiculous, pointless, and one-sided heroes as Don Quixote from time to time!”

The reader, on his tour of Germany, long after the end of the hostilities there, sparked his own civil war — to be precise, one day in some small city he took an iron rod and hurled himself at the tribe of automobile drivers lined up at a traffic light as if at a starting line, revving their engines and honking at each other. As a result of this violent act, which was leniently punished, to be sure — as an extenuating circumstance the “nosogenous” or illness-generating glitter of the thousands of chrome auto parts was cited — he had once again become incapable of doing his reading, and to this day has not recovered, and the reading policewoman from Jade Bay was far away.

In this state of deprivation, however, he gained the ability to articulate what reading had meant to him, and would mean again. “When I could still read, I looked at the individual words until I saw them in stone or on bark — except that the words had to be the right ones. Heart of the world, writing: a secret matched only by the wheel and the eyes of children. I must read again. Reading would be a passion, a wondrous one, if it is a passionate desire for understanding; I feel compelled to read because I want to understand. Not simply to plunge into reading: you must be receptive to a particular story or book. Are you receptive?”

In compensation for having forfeited his reading for the time being, he had become capable — again as a result of loss? — of a kind of looking fundamentally different from contemplating: an accomplishment, a very rare and precious one. The object looked at, however inconspicuous, could expand into the entire world. Looking in this way, he had the paradigm of the world before his eyes — only he could no longer say it. “So I simply have to say it anew!” And in looking at an object until he had become part of the object (just as during his reading period he had looked at many a word until he became the word), he became disarming, of himself first of all, and had a contagious effect.

And for this period, for the summer, for the fall, and up to this day, in winter! objects in his Germany, previously inexplicably abstract and downright nauseating — an old phenomenon, not merely since the last Reich — finally also became concrete, just as, from time immemorial, so many, so wonderfully many German words had been. After the civil war, a clothes hanger in a German hotel room, a lamp, a chair, a wheelbarrow up on a German railroad platform took on — an unprecedented occurrence — shape, were nothing to be ashamed of, O peace! the sight of them no longer pierced one to the heart. During this autumn they filled out and actually acquired color, even “apples from German orchards,” and then, when on the same day the first postwar snow fell, from the Kiel Canal down to the Saarland, there was a new generation of children, who, unlike the previous ones, upon seeing snowflakes when they woke up, no longer merely stared at them dully.

To get beyond individual objects: in the months following the domestic blitzkrieg, all of Germany seemed liberated from whatever had been weighing on it (for how long?), as a massif is said to have become lighter as a result of erosion and could even grow higher, or as the melting of a vast expanse of glacier freed the earth’s crust underneath to heave upward. In fact, even German landscapes had taken on different features, in that, for instance, between skyscrapers vistas suddenly revealed themselves in the sky where none had been since Hölderlin, or the Spree River in Berlin, until then puddlelike and sluggish, unexpectedly began to rush, and thundered again over cataracts and waterfalls through an ancient river valley.

Understanding was so powerfully abroad in the land that for the time being the opinion molders in the newspapers of Germany remained alone behind their office windows with their brain-swelling language, and my former enemy, still active with his book interrogations and sniffing-out, no longer found gawkers for his word-spectacles and for the first time was forced to leave his ghetto, condemned to take walks out in nature, which he heartily despised, where from every flower and every bush nothing but his own mug stared back at him.

Instead, altogether different from that literary Old Nick, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had passed by just recently, flesh and blood as only he could be, on his two hundred fiftieth birthday, coming through the side door behind which he had been sitting all the while, not like Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Mount So-and-so, but in a picture, and had taken the new, enlarged Germany in his two hands, with the expression “dear little place,” the sort of diminutive otherwise used by him only in conjunction with observation of his beloved plants.

And with him the Brothers Grimm once again set about collecting fairy tales; Novalis returned, as a sculptor, at the sight of whose sculptures people, themselves turned to stone, at the same time continued on their way lighter of foot; Eduard Mörike went out and bought an answering machine for his rectory; August Sander prepared to do photographic portraits of the German faces of the twenty-first century; and entire army groups on their newly saddled horses mobilized in underground clay pits all across the country — not to seize power but merely to send a signal. The reader’s tour through Germany became a trip around the world.

On the eve of his departure for the bay here, he sat by that pond on the forest’s edge where once upon a time he had seen himself and his love as one in perpetuity (and the very next day they had already come to a parting of the ways). The water was in an entirely different place from the original water, and yet was the same, down to the very reeds: the period now — or the interval? — had made every individual place in Germany interchangeable with all others; one place there contained them all.

Over his shoulder, in the last light of this December day, he had in view a field with apple trees, one of them in its leaflessness still chock-full of golden-and-white fruit, and below at its foot, in the already almost night-dark realm or little place, the silhouettes of two children, both with an apple in hand, as the last spots of brightness, in each of which he saw an open book, held out toward the other, or a palm frond. And a dream appeared to him in which he, surrounded by marksmen and dart throwers, had said, “Enough. This is my house, the reader’s house. Get out!” The throwers and shooters obeyed, and one of them even said, “We have need of your steadfastness!”

As Wilhelm turned from the apple tree back to the waters of his youth, he saw himself there as a silhouette from those days, now with the first stars, whose silent reflection in the pond was crisscrossed by the shadows of bats. The grass on the bank was furrowed by tank tracks, and beyond the apple orchard stood a dark farmstead, abandoned by German emigrants.

From the singer no word had been received to this day, since his hike in the summer snow way up north on the Scottish island of Skye. In the eyes of the world, he was missing and presumed dead. At the same time he was spotted going on a bear hunt in Skopje in Macedonia; as a mercenary in Africa; dancing with a native woman in New Guinea; covered with blood as he came to the aid of a woman who had had an accident on a highway in the Tyrol; lying drunk on the steps of a Moscow subway station while hordes of passengers stepped over him — and all that on one and the same day, and at least as many similar situations on each of the following.

I myself saw him driven far off his original course, as had always happened to him on his hikes to the ends of the earth, only more willingly this time than ever. Precisely as a result he would bring back all the more from his journey. And that was of course what he had in mind: to return to us with a song such as had never been heard in the world, his “last” insofar as after it silence would reign, once and for all, also for further last songs, to be sung by others, not by him.

Thus on the move, in the meantime hardly off the beaten track and alone anymore, but in the midst of masses of humanity, he sang, as I pictured him, not a single note during the entire year, likewise gave anything explicitly designated as music a wide berth, whenever he could, which was becoming increasingly difficult toward the end of the century. In order to expand, and also to break, albeit harmoniously, his own voice, with which he never wanted to be finished or completely trained, he sought out and sampled, from continent to continent, unfamiliar voices, not those of singers, but rather of people who were merely talking, unheard of and unsung. How rare in the world was a voice de profundis, from the very depths, at the same time light as a bird, at the same time piercing. When he thought back over the year, from everywhere almost exclusively insulting and angry speaking voices came to mind, and the most angry ones, also the most ugly and despicable, were as a rule the authoritative or indeed the trained ones; what a relief, for instance, to hear for a change, coming from a train loudspeaker, the voices of the railroadmen themselves.

If he tended to seek out people on the margins, he did so not because the oppressed, minorities, and refugees were to be found there, but because of the voices there. If elsewhere the laughter and even the weeping of passersby seemed corrupted, in the shadows and the underground world he encountered at least occasionally a sound he could then allow to resonate in his song. And also without weeping and laughter: how beautifully many an Albanian in Kosovo spoke his Albanian, many a Georgian in Azerbaijan his Georgian (and vice versa), with what purity many a pair of lovers spoke the language of their country, many a dead-tired or angry person said whatever he said (the conventional folk music was something else again).

Thus the singer learned for his voice. The melodies and rhythms, on the other hand, just came to him as always, when everyday sounds continued to reverberate in his ear — an accordion door closing, steps running in the salty desert, branches brushing against the bus window. What he was finally still lacking for his “last song” was the lyrics, except perhaps for the snippet “soul of lovers, sound of the people” (not by him). Yet once he had the right voice inside him, quietly stored there and ready to be amplified at the right moment, in a way the world had never yet heard, why shouldn’t simple humming suffice — even if for an entire hour — and it would be a revelation (with room for another)?

Yet now he still needs the concluding voice, the fade-out, the fade-away, and for that he must go to the region he comes from, here in the no-man’s-bay. To be sure, yesterday, Christmas Day, he was recognized in Venice, pissing off the Rialto; in an old-age home in Dublin, playing Father Christmas; and in New Zealand, watching a charity rugby game all alone. But I knew that Emmanuel was in one of the cemeteries here in the wooded hills above the Seine, taking part, as the third mourner from the left to the rear, in the funeral of a resident of the bay, unknown to him as to me, in the course of which no word was spoken. Next to the house of the cemetery watchman, among the graves, children’s clothing was hanging out to dry on the line. On not only one of the edge-of-the-highway bushes did I see scraps of a poster with the singer’s face that had blown there, though for a concert of the previous year and in another city. And at the same time, or so I pictured it, he was standing at a densely populated central intersection, among the passersby, a pad in the crook of his arm, on which he was sketching out his song, note by note, roughly following the sounds on the asphalt, a somewhat different kind of pollster.

Hardly any of what happened during the year in the bay became public knowledge, except for the emergency landing of a visitor of state, on the way from Villacoublay to Paris by helicopter, in a clearing here: a photograph in Parisien libéré, though only in the suburban edition, of the man with his entourage standing with a drink in the Bar des Voyageurs.

Even in The Hauts-de-Seine News there is space for items from the bay, but the only news there remained the regular announcement of that storytelling hour (more like a “fairy-tale hour”) in a community hall, even a detailed program, simply to fill up the column for the area. Theme for this week: the only surviving local legend, in which a long time ago an unregenerate noisemaker was stoned by the original inhabitants — to be precise, at that pointe or spit of land.

Whereas in Clamart, Meudon, Boulogne, Sevres, also in the much smaller Ville d’Avray, to judge by the newspaper, week after week there were all kinds of happenings, with concerts, exhibitions, building projects, births, weddings, deaths, if I wanted anything eventful here I had to turn to the sports section, where in a dozen pages I might find a few lines devoted to the local handball club, or just the score might be reported, with the team lineup, the majority of the names Portuguese, Italian, Arabic.

Not that there was no news in the bay worthy of publicity: there was simply no reporter available. At the beginning of my stay here I at least found notices of births and deaths — in the meantime, under Naissances, as well as Décès, the only notation is always Néant (nothing). When this past summer the traditional bay festival took place by one of the ponds, the News repeated word for word the article from the previous year, and that in turn, with hardly any variation, is familiar to me from my almost eleven years here.

Instead I kept up to date, day by day, during this entire year of 1999, with the Spanish provincial town of Benavente, where I have never been. A reader who has lived there all his life sends me, day in, day out, the section of La Opinión, which is published in Zamora, devoted in words and pictures to his town, the simple facts from there, the page with the local news (editorial opinion, according to my Spanish reader, a member of the guardia civil, is to be found, in plenty, on the front page). Thus I am informed about Benavente, far off in Castile, on the Portuguese border, much better than about my place of residence here. I know all about the constant well drillings there, made necessary by the water shortage; about the processions of pilgrims in May to the Cristo de la Vega, in the meadows; about the schedule at the Avenida, the only movie theater, with a thousand seats, from which on a summer evening I sometimes heard behind me, when I was out in my garden, a member of the audience nibbling his sunflower seeds; about the tax inspector who was beaten up by the proprietor of the Viena restaurant; about the town gardener, Eustaquio B., who is supposed to have exposed himself to a nun and for whom his brother provided an alibi the following day; and even about the departure times for the buses to Madrid, the same all year long, and nevertheless scrutinized by me in each clipping so intensely that eventually I at least felt the draft of the morning bus making its loop at the Estacion of Benavente.

What was transmitted of the history of the bay, even over the centuries, did not in itself yield enough for a book.

The author of the chronicle The Locality from Ancient Times to Today, which then appeared this year, had felt obliged, in order to give his account book length, to devote most of one main section to facts drawn from the history of all of France. What is known of this particular region could be recorded, at least from the point of view of a professional historian, on one page of the community bulletin (which does not exist here). Almost the only thing I recall from my reading is that during the French Revolution more soldiers were drafted from the forest bay than from elsewhere, since those eighteen- to forty-year-olds had neither a profession nor an official position “essential to the life of the country”; that in the mid-nineteenth century the township was the poorest in the entire departement; and that of the new arrivals in the local refugee asylum, from the beginning of this century on, each demanded the food of his country of origin, “which was not possible.”

The other main section in the chronicle of the bay was devoted to the building of its churches. Was this history, when none of the churches here even predated the older inhabitants? No matter: these building histories, or so I thought then, were something I wanted to go on reading for a long time. And they came from someone who, a chronicler, was also noticeably well disposed toward the actors and their most inconspicuous actions.

For almost a thousand years, until after the Second World War, the bay had lacked a church. For Sunday Mass the natives had gone up the hills through the woods to the plateau of Velizy. When the church there was destroyed by bombing in 1944, the inhabitants of the bay built themselves a chapel out of wood, with their own hands, dedicated to Joseph, the carpenter. The wooden tower, standing apart, went for years without bells. Attendance in the postwar years, far above the country average, required expansion of the barracklike structure, which thus acquired a transept, and then the decision was made to erect a proper church, a basilica, of stone and concrete; the chronicler cited the precise day and even the house where the decision was reached, complete with street and number.

The bay at that point was not yet an independent parish, only an apostolic zone, provisionally. The photograph of the cornerstone laying on the edge of a cleared stretch of forest even showed a sight particularly disconcerting here, the figure of a bishop, with his crooked staff, something hardly ever seen before in the bay (“1857: Confirmation — For the First Time in Thirty Years a Bishop”), and at any rate never again since; and that great crowd, according to the caption present for the celebration: has anything like it ever gathered here again, no matter where?

For this church an architect had to be called in, and it was the same one who had designed the low-income apartment houses right next door, and since I discovered that, I have viewed both structures somewhat differently. The cross, of iron, was made by a locksmith/stove fitter. The Sunday offerings — this I gathered by way of additional information from the parish newsletter, appearing more and more irregularly — were meager and steady in the bay, the same expression used by the chronicle for the donations of churchgoers through the centuries.

There is no connection with the fact that no Pope, neither the present one nor any other, will ever kiss the ground of the no-man’s-bay. And no conqueror or liberator will ever place his boot on one of the former royal border markers (the few remaining ones are, by the way, not mentioned in the chronicle; are as obvious as secret; the crown chiseled into them looks fake at first sight).

The wood crickets seemed to have finally fallen silent for the year, after unexpectedly announcing their presence time and again on the occasional warm, sunny day far into the fall, sometimes after an absence of weeks, the last time being in the middle of November, though only as a little fading chirp somewhere, to which no second voice responded.

Or was I merely imagining that? Even when I now walked the wintry paths, the summery cricket calls piped up, especially if I stood still now and then, and also in the dead of night, in my house, I heard them recently, impossible to tell whether outdoors or in my head; it woke me up, more easily and instantaneously than usual, and in the dark I allowed the sound to spin on.

During the summer, what the crickets were engaged in seemed in fact to be the creating of a web. With their voices, as it sounded to me, they were knotting the silence into a tissue. Noise-sick, as I so often was when I got to the woods, I promptly felt, once in their realm, a wonderful soothing. More gently and reliably than the rustling of the trees, they healed my noise-worm-eaten head. Although the chirping of the crickets emanated from the ground, from the earth’s interior, it drew me upward. I had a visual image of the sound: a Jacob’s ladder, knotted from the most delicate ropes. And thus I also had an image of the crickets themselves: thousands and thousands of them rocking in a heavenly wheat field. No other animal, no bird could call this way, so monotonously and intensely, and in even, sonorous unison; more than an image, an infinitely repeating ornament, which, to be sure, broke off at once as I approached or made my presence felt.

The crickets were most likely to be heard in the more inaccessible and at the same time sparse parts of the forest, on the steepest crest of the sunken roads, behind seven-kindling-bundle obstacles, and on still days. Often there was nothing for miles around to be heard but them, whom, however, I never actually got to see. But even among so many other sounds theirs remained the penetrating and decisive one. I felt when I heard it as though I were standing on tiptoe. It summoned me to listen, as silence alone could hardly do anymore, and that then appeared to me as the task to be completed, a sweet one. The cricket concert was moving, and in its furtiveness spoke to my heart like no other sound in this year. Yet I often found myself thinking only of a clock, or rather of the winding of one, as quietly as possible, on and on, close to the limit of audibility.

I have no reason to miss the cricket music now; but I would have liked to play it for my friends when we celebrate our reunion. But did it even come from crickets? Didn’t it sound more gentle and at the same time more choral, more far-flung than the shriller, as it were more constricted, Austrian chirping that I have in mind from my childhood? And why am I also unable to imagine as its source the crickets from those days, black as they were, roundish, robust, armored? Isn’t it more likely those particularly tiny grasshoppers or locusts of which I found one on an already cold evening in my chimney corner, grass-root-pale and fragile, perching motionless and silent on the side of my finger? And that is how the animal remained when I held it up to the full moon; except that for the moment its silhouette became gigantic.

In the first months of the year there was a particular group of itinerant workers in the bay who were cutting down and sawing up trees in the windbreak sections of the forest. They not only worked in the forest; they also lived there, in huts on wheels (not the same as house trailers).

During almost my entire time here I had been running into them, and always there was at least one woman among them, often children and dogs as well. But this year’s workers had no family members along, and, as far as I could tell, there were never more than two of them together. Laundry hardly ever hung out to dry, and since they had only the one unit of housing, there was no circle or kraal as in previous years. They were either at work, with their one-man chain saws, often at a considerable distance from one another, or in the evening in the hut, by kerosene light behind the always drawn curtain over the doorway, smoke eddying from the pipe in the roof (or not, as the case might be), a teakettle, slim as a minaret, with two spouts! on a camp stove outside, and incessantly piping Arab music, audible far off at the edge of the forest, yet not turned up loud at all.

They had hammered together a table of birch logs outside, the seats consisting of oil canisters, the Islamic half-moon on their sides indicating their origin. Yet I never found them there, and only once outside the forest, at night down in the settlement, or only one of them, the older one, when he joined us in a bar. The woodsman said something, in sounds that were incomprehensible not because they were in Arabic or Berber, but unlike any language ever heard; and without even raising his voice in the racket of the bar. All that was certain was that he was not placing an order, or begging, also not asking a question, but rather making a request, a large, plaintive one, in which the only clear thing was the movements of his mouth and his eyes, at the same time half in shadow, because of the distance between those standing at the counter and him, which he made no move to reduce. He addressed everyone that way, from a distance, except me, probably the only one he recognized, from our daily exchange of greetings up there in the woods. I was dying to have him finally turn to me, as if I alone could have been of service to him, and on the other hand I acted as though I did not know him, and as if in his eyes I was supposed to behave this way. The old man left; the others had long since focused their attention elsewhere. He also hardly gave me time, and I missed the moment. And out on the streets, whose darkness was so different from that of the woods, where I subsequently ran into him as he continued his roaming around on that one evening, it was too late. He did not need anything now, or did not show it, or could not show it anymore.

A little while ago, almost a year since that evening, when I again passed the two woodsmen’s campsite, not the slightest trace remained, neither the birch table nor even a spot of oil. Nothing but a feeling, as broad as the cleared ground, was there, for which I sought the fitting image for writing about it, but in vain.

And what happened later with the birds’ sleeping tree, that one plane tree on the square in front of the railroad station?

The sparrows spent the night there all through the summer, merely becoming invisible in the dense foliage. They could be heard, however, in early evening, from far away on the side streets, through the sound of the trains and the noise of the cars, jockeying for position or conducting other negotiations. When the square underwent repairs in August, they at first stayed away because of the jackhammers, also at night, but toward Assumption Day they returned and when the asphalt was put down, they were the first (not, as is usually the case, dogs) to leave their tracks in the still-soft material, in the form of large loops and suggestions of meanders, made not by hopping but by running.

Late at night it happened sometimes, and without one’s clapping one’s hands down below, that they, or a couple of them, would fly up out of their foliage, which would suddenly crash apart, and like a swarm of flying fish would plunge into one of the neighboring tree crowns, though every time soon returning, each separately, to the original tree; likewise none of the new plantings on the square became a second sleeping place; though the new bamboo stalks served during the day as swings.

In late fall, in the bare time of year, the best place to observe the sparrows perched in their limb forks was indoors behind the high glass façade of the Bar des Voyageurs, from its counter. Several steps led up to it, and thus I had the birds, at least those in the lowest story of the plane tree, at eye level, without making myself conspicuous by craning my neck, as I would have out on the sidewalk. On one side they were sharply illuminated by the café’s neon sign (and brightly daubed by its three-coloredness), and on the other side lit by the strong yellow lighting on the railway platform behind them on the embankment, which projected their shadows, close enough to touch, onto the glass door, very distinctly and larger than life, with blackbird or even raven beaks.

With this view of the more or less sleeping birds, I received indoors from the bar, and also from outside, more stimuli than I had probably ever received from any observations of whatever kind. I participated in the video games — in whose variations I then saw nothing much different from the sparrows’ jerking of their heads — as well as in the hurrying home of those who arrived by train, which occurred in batches, with their classic light brown baguettes, across the dusky square. On Sunday evenings the silhouettes of large, heavy suitcases crisscrossed each other there, almost always carried by single passersby, unaccompanied, and the duffel bags of young soldiers called up for duty, who often set out on foot through the forest to the fighter-pilot base on the plateau.

The inhabitants of the bay, with the exception of those standing at the bar, almost always the same people, also showed nothing but their silhouettes. It was something else again with those without a permanent residence here, who, until the first cold weather, often even after dark, even in the rain, perched together on a bench next to the station entrance, they, too, very visible in the lighting of the square. The majority of them looked to me pretty much like those everywhere, although in the course of the year at least one had joined them, who, still young, was different.

I first ran into him in the woods, always alone, either as a mushroom seeker, rushing along, his head constantly twisted to one side, or as a tree-stump anchorite, sitting there as still as if he were studying entrails in the sand at his feet all day long. He had thick, curly hair, a narrow, stern face, wore a windbreaker, and he made me think of an anthropo-sophic teacher or an apprentice, who, to complete his course of study, had to spend some time voluntarily in this remote spot.

Once, when I wished him good day in a clearing, he even answered me, with a hardly noticeable but all the more noteworthy nod, while his eyes, unchanging in their sternness, showed me his pure, undimmed color of sorrow. Then, still in summertime, I saw him for the first time sitting with the suburban vagrants by the station, much larger than they, erect, with the most balanced face, but in his hand a beer bottle like the rest. Yet it was not completely natural to him; among the others he seemed rigid and wooden, without their melodramatic gestures and voices, and his head constantly jerking to one side, where no one was sitting.

In the months there on the bench, a transformation then began to take place in him. At the same time it seemed to me as abrupt as those in an animated cartoon. In the twinkling of an eye his smooth skin erupted in grayish-bluish swellings, his lips elongated into a trunk, his ears grew into his skull, his forehead was flattened, his hair stuck to his head, and finally he joined the chorus, reverberating over the entire square, of bleating laughter typical of clochards; not even the jerking of his head, away from the group into the void, is there anymore.

But from time to time he also unexpectedly came striding out of the darkness past the glass bar, with an elegant, slow stride, in his clean blue windbreaker, his face unmarred as before, the handsomest person in the bay here since the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, a figure of light, and threw me such an impudent or amused look that I wondered, as I had initially, whether he wasn’t actually engaging in a masquerade, for instance with the intention of writing a book about the region, among whose characters one, and a fairly odd one at that, would be me.

And then again, one or another of his drinking buddies, just a moment ago one big urine spot from his belt to his shoes, and a billow of stench, would stroll one morning across the square as a gentleman in a camel-hair coat, his hair combed back, Clark Gable engaged in casual conversation with Miss No-Man’s-Bay on his arm, or with his very own son, not in the slightest ashamed of his father.

And then again: the only one in the group of seated boozers who had ever directed a word at me, except to panhandle, was, as he said, there “because of the secret of this place.” Did this mean that only the mentally disturbed knew that this region was a place? But: they, or the one of them there, were not to be interrogated on this subject! First of all, no answer would be forthcoming, and then, in my life, every time I tried to interrogate someone, I always lost my substance, or any substance at all.

And meanwhile, on this cold December night, the sparrows puffed themselves up in their sleeping tree almost to the size of pigeons or vultures, and suddenly shrank to their natural tinyness upon waking and tiptoeing away. For a time during the fall some of them did try out the neighboring plane trees for sleeping, but now they are all together again in their original tree, even if there seem to me to be far fewer of them than in the previous winter.

Last night there was a constant splashing from the branches down onto the square: not their droppings, and not they themselves, but the melting snow. The day before yesterday, however, in the pre-snow frost, two of them were sleeping as I had never seen sparrows sleep, side by side on their limb like Siamese twins. Not even in their giant shadow on the dusty bar window could I discover any movement. And the last tattered leaf fluttered all the more violently back and forth above them in the night wind. And in the background of the square, along the retaining wall below the railroad yard, passed the bay’s one painter, who paints landscapes here in the open, by the ponds, in the forest, although on his easel I always saw a region entirely different from the one he had before his eyes. And at my back a brainsick man with a deep scar on his temple, whom his mother was bringing back to the nursing home after his Sunday outing, was drinking beer with coffee; he was spilling most of it; the old woman was dabbing it up, again and again.

I must also tell of an attraction here in the bay, indeed the only one. And that is the hanging gardens on either side of the commuter-railway cut, from the end of the mile-long mountain tunnel under the hills of the Seine to the spot where the cut meets the station embankment.

They always struck me as something special, and when I was riding the train they always gave me, according to my direction, the most powerful impression of leave-taking or homecoming. Yet it was only in the course of this year of 1999 that I looked at them more closely, up above from the highway overpass and then down below from their midst, on that strangest of paths that ran along the beds and toolsheds.

As I descended into the cut at the one spot that was accessible — because of a house under construction by the bridge — I was doing something forbidden; but there was no one there to stop me; the gardens had no connection with the bay houses behind them, were separated from them by gateless fences or walls. At worst I could be tooted at by the train engineers, as I have experienced time and again while walking along the tracks. They were the property owners, so to speak; the gardens, as I deduced from the padlocks on the sheds, belonged to the national railroad company. Not once did I encounter on my sneaky excursions — no, I was not sneaking — one of these gentlemen on his home ground, though sometimes from the train I saw them on their plots, as a rule all by themselves, probably already retired older men, otherwise unfamiliar to me in the region.

The gardens, between the tunnel mouth and the railroad station curve, took up an entire stretch, and were staggered on more and more terraces in the direction of the eastern hills, one above the other, finally even as many as four. They were not fenced off from each other, and you could pass along an uninterrupted, several-kilometer-long field of beds, planted with all sorts of things. That footpath was actually the course of the irrigation channel, its water drawn higher up from the forest-edge pond, and overlaid at precise footstep intervals with stone pavers; in between, in the even gaps, the water could be seen flowing under the walker, so that, from one step to the next, stone and sky reflection alternated.

The attraction seemed to me to consist even more of the beds and sheds, with their surroundings. At each of my illegal crossings of the much-terraced railroad-garden territory, undertaken in an ever more upright posture, I always encountered, among dozens and later hundreds of types of fruit, at least one kind previously undiscovered by me, even if merely a cultivar.

In the smallest space there was often so much crowded in together that one noticed the fine distinctions only when crouching down, and then again a single bed could expand into an acre, a little espaliered tree could be the beginning of an orchard, in which ladders as tall as houses leaned; a forest of dill gave way to a raspberry patch, this to a border of lavender and thyme, that in turn to a row of cherry trees, with trunks thicker than I had ever seen, these finally to a sorrel meadow, into whose middle a peach tree broke, at its feet a bed of artichokes or the most ordinary carrots, turnips — purple and yellow — or cabbages in every imaginable color, almost identical with the Japanese ornamental brassicas, or with nothing at all, spiked with several years’ fallen leaves.

The sheds as a rule were made of corrugated metal, without windows, but often with wooden doors, which came from somewhere else entirely, and wooden additions of the same kind, roofed like porches: there, or in front under the cherry trees, a table and chairs (never more than two), here and there wreathed with grapevines that dangled from forks in the branches.

The hanging gardens first revealed themselves as an attraction, indeed as a sort of cultural monument, in their totality, in their delicate and yet rich and spacious being-in-themselves, next to which all the surroundings, the apartment houses, the wooded hills, receded into mere background, except for the bundles of tracks running through them and the tunnel opening, from which, with every train pulling into the bay, a scorched iron smell puffed over the slopes and their fruits and vegetables, but in harmony with them.

And thus even the individual phenomenon there became worth seeing, and along with the rollers, the wheeled storage chests, and the railroad retirees’ special boules court, merited a detour, as did the rose trellises on a metal shed or an old French door serving as a ladder. And even the former entrance gate to the gardens, standing alone in hip-high fringed grass on the embankment, with the seemingly same-aged willow bent over it, its head touching the earth, forming a round-arched portal from which, on top, thousands of yellow-reddish shoots thrust up toward the heavens, seemed worth a trip to me — what do you Spaniards, Swiss, Americans, Swedes down there in the train want with the palace of Versailles? This is where it is!

And another thing in the bay’s hanging gardens acquired value for me in this particular year: a square, carefully edged in blocks of sandstone, an entirely empty, pebble-strewn square next to the wall of a bower, raised above the beds, at the same time much smaller than these, drip-irrigated as artfully as pointlessly, in years of lying fallow, by a roof gutter, at which I always thought: “This a railwayman built in memory of his wife.”

The only gatherings in the bay in which I participated all year long were the Sunday Masses (other gatherings — were there any at all here?).

I did not go to the French Catholic church for them — I was there almost always only in passing — but to that Russian one, likewise on the edge of the forest, diagonally across the way, which was log-cabin-small, and where the Mass was in part read or sung in Slavic. I had already visited it earlier from time to time, with Ana, whom I was once able to embrace there as hardly anywhere else, with Valentin, my son, whom I once, when I turned to look at the adolescent, saw crying, and who never wanted to go to church again after that.

But in this year of 1999 I made it a rule not to miss a single celebration of the Mass, if possible; it took place in any case only twice a month; the priest also had responsibility for another congregation in the Seine hills. On the Sunday morning in question I became impatient to get there, was afraid of being too late for the Kyrie eleison! went all the way there at a jog trot.

From outside — no sound ever issued from the building — the chapel with the blue onion dome on top, the only instantly distinct color in the region, seemed, even when one was standing right in front, always locked up, yes, as if abandoned, closed down — unlike the church vis-à-vis, its bells never rang — and on the way I never encountered another churchgoer. And only once past the outer door, in the porch, could one see from the shopping bags deposited there, with baguettes and bunches of vegetables for Sunday dinner, that the building was occupied, and inside was waiting, each time a surprise, a whole crowd, even if it was perhaps only two dozen, one head next to the other. And at the same time, when one entered, it was unexpectedly as spacious as in a dream, perhaps also because of the candles and their reflection on the wall of icons, likewise because of the priest’s chamber beyond the arched opening, which led back as if into the depths.

In the cold months the church was always overheated, and that such heating be safeguarded seemed to be the first condition for the continued existence of the congregation: would the priest otherwise have reported on the Sunday before last with such joy on the yield from the collection, taken up for this winter’s heating?

As for me, the so-and-so from the Slovenian village of Rinkolach on the Jaunfeld Plain, going to Mass was something that had to be done! To hear Slavic spoken, here in the cosmopolitan bay, every second Sunday, in the company of a few others, was not the main thing. But it opened me up first of all; no, ripped me open. No matter how high the notes became, the sound seemed very deep to me. It did not bring back childhood, but with it I became the person I am, often tremulous, yet not defenseless. Without my ever singing along, my lungs expanded. I found myself blending in with the rest, yet I did not once have to open my mouth.

That I was hearing my ancestors’ Slavic at the same time as a Mass was an essential part of the experience. Only in this form did my participatory feeling become as monosyllabic and as emphatic as it was supposed to. There was a joyousness in me, which, however, could find its way out only through the company of others, this company, for instance. And the gradual unfolding of the Mass made me patient. Furthermore, even if I merely stood quietly in the back for an hour or so, it was a form of physical exercise more refreshing than any kind of gymnastics I could name: free of my aches and pains, I went on my way sound as a bell, and with both feet on the ground. And above all, from the ceremony Gregor Keuschnig saw the things he did only for himself as grounded and illuminated, at least for a short stretch of his way back home to continue his work. And all too soon he felt the urge again to go back to the church to find peace.

Right inside the entrance, on a chair at the foot of a staircase, for the first few months there was still an old man sitting, who usually nodded off during the reading from Scripture (the spot has been empty for some time). Now and then during the year, when the priest called upon us to think of the victims of the world’s civil wars, he left out the names of the countries involved — there were so many of them — and merely said, in the singular and inclusively, “in the civil war.” Whenever a member of the congregation had read in singsong Russian from an epistle, almost always one of St. Paul’s, the priest would respond, “Peace be with you, reader!” When he disappeared behind the wall of icons, he hoisted his Bible onto his shoulder. And of all the readings, the one that has remained most forcefully in my mind is that sentence addressed to the people of Ephesus that says more or less that as the entourage of the Crucified they are now no longer passersby but have a house.

How bored and annoyed I sometimes was by the heathens, of whom I quickly became one myself once outside. Although I listened to the Slavic words of the Lord’s Prayer so much more attentively than to the French, that was still, along with the Credo, the only part of the liturgy where I felt excluded. I also missed, from my familiar Catholic Masses, that moment when the priest cried, “Sursum corda! Lift up your hearts!” (Or have I merely failed to hear it until now?) And it struck me as odd that the priest of the Eastern Church, to have the bread and wine become flesh and blood, had to make a point of speaking the appropriate formula, whereas in the Catholic ritual all that was necessary for the transubstantiation was the simple narrative: “On the evening before Jesus was crucified, he took the bread …” This transubstantiation brought about simply by narrative was closer to my heart.

Whenever the singers drifted out of the melody, someone, usually on the sidelines, would join in and bring them back together with his strong voice. And after Communion the wings of the icon angel were kissed. And the eagle, the emblem of John the Evangelist, with its damp-looking robe of feathers, seemed to me as if it had just escaped from deep waters, into which it had been drawn by a monster fish; yet it flirted with its eyes, with no one in particular. And at another Sunday Mass I again saw in the picture of the Evangelist that eagle swooping down on its prey, and, instead of striking it first, conferring shape on it.

My father died during the year, far off in the house on Jade Bay, found only after his death (in the otherwise spotlessly clean bathroom, snippets of whiskers on the razor blade); which of us two was David, and which Absalom?

And that kindhearted salesclerk in the shopping center on the plateau of Velizy, of whom I had thought for a moment that all that stood between us, not only him and me, and a new, eternal brotherhood was one blink of the eye, has not been seen since spring. And the footprint of my son, at that time still small, in the asphalt of the sidewalk, beyond the hills, in the first place we lived in, the place where from time to time I went for my oracle, was tarred over during the summer. And that ball of clay, the only impractical thing on my writing table, cracked to bits on the day I hit myself too hard on the forehead with it. And the eyrie of the mythical beast in my garden, created when I cut off the top of the spruce tree, has remained empty to this day (although on the most windless day in August a giant shadow floated over me there, and once, when a wailing sound suddenly broke out behind the house, followed by cries of pursuit, for a moment I saw something with gray stripes diving down under the cherry tree, flying low, almost brushing the grass, a falcon, as it swooped off through the underbrush, half turned onto its back, its claws stretched out sideways, and one morning in the eyrie a wide-open beak moved, which then turned out to be the ears of a nest-robbing cat).

A the beginning of the year a hare showed itself to me in the woods, far off in the sun, and since then no other. The shots in late fall, however, were aimed more at wild doves, of whom then entire rows, shot down from the sky, cloud-gray-blue, lay displayed on the butcher’s marble counter. On the other hand, the foxes have multiplied, and, as I gathered from a remark made in a bar by one of the old-timers, who usually pointedly keep silent on the subject, are larger than ever before. At the beginning of winter, I myself encountered, on another midnight walk home through the wooded heights, as many as I normally encountered only as eyes peering out of the darkness, now standing boldly along the road. And from the long since depopulated foxholes along the banks of the sunken roads, the poles stuck in by children playing have disappeared, which gives the impression that they are occupied once more.

The minibus, the bay’s public transportation, which circles all day long and appears at the same places approximately every half hour, has been given a colorful high-gloss coating instead of its subdued white, and also dark-tinted windows. Nevertheless the heads of the passengers can still be made out, cut off at the bottom because of the low seats, as children’s usually are, and the landscape thus visible on the other side through the rather slow-moving bus — the forest-edge trees, the ponds, the railway embankment — appears, as before the reconditioning, as part of the vehicle, grown together with it. And even now it can give me a jolt whenever I catch sight of the few people waiting at one of the poles marking a bus stop that is probably obvious only to the natives; they are leaning against a lamppost, for a bumpy ride that will take them two side streets farther, and I get on with them, just like that.

The reconditioned bus is missing that display space on the back intended for the community’s barely leaflet-sized posters announcing events, perhaps because films are no longer shown anywhere here, not even slides of the Amazon or other places. Even though the display frame passed me empty for a long time, I still see there the weekly classics announced in the bay’s movie theater: Vera Cruz—a man sentenced to death flees, Rio Grande. Perhaps I shall become a moviegoer again soon.

If I ask myself what happened all year on the long, hilly, yet perfectly straight street that for me constitutes the main street here, this is what comes to mind: the many moving vans, some with Cyrillic writing, others with Greek lettering on them; the flight attendant waiting, long before midday in the otherwise empty landscape, in front of the sandstone school, for the children to be let out; the young women in a hurry, coming from where? in the morning, with the infants, who, taken in hand by older children at the door, likewise disappeared as quickly into the houses as the mothers into their cars; and of the few pedestrians, the one ordinary original resident, recognizable from the window of my study, no matter how far away he was, through the spyhole I had cut in the hedge, by the white of his cigarette, always at an angle, flaring up for a moment in front of a dark garage door, and along with it his barking cough, each time linked with the sight of his wife in their cottage around the corner by the edge of the forest, scrubbing wash outdoors behind the house, on a board with a drainage hole, though only her husband’s handkerchiefs, because his smoker’s-cough mucus would otherwise stain all the other things in the washing machine. And one time on that long, straight, hummocky stretch an old woman was walking alone with a shopping bag over her bent arm, and the next time I looked she had dissolved into the water-gray asphalt.

The market, set up as an experiment, with barely three or four stands, once a week, along the main street by the athletic fields, from which balls were constantly crashing against the wire fence, right behind the meat, fruit, and cheese, was given up again in the course of the year; the one on the station square was sufficient for the bay?

And what kind of main street is it, almost without stores, with only a single café, the street’s middle section bordered by a forest, with king boletes right there on the bank every year, and, at its end, going uphill into a sunken road roofed over by bushes? — I saw it as such, again and again.

One of my noise neighbors, the most indefatigable of all, had an accident later in the year when one of his mini-machines slipped (achieving all the more racket production and power output), and he bored his way home with it. Or was he torn apart by his noise-sensitive German shepherd? Only subsequently did I hear that he was a philosopher and teacher, much in demand, author of a story with the title “The Legend of the Holy Noisemaker,” of a book called Zen and the Art of Loudness, and of the brochure “How Can I Kill My Garden?”; a man like me; a colleague.

A couple of his neighbors in turn moved, or pitched their tents somewhere else. In their place came, from the civil-war-torn regions, refugees, the kind of people for whom the bay had always been more than a mere reception camp.

They settled in, here and there around my house, as if forever. They have been very quiet, at least until today, and I have already caught myself asking in the morning at my table, “Where has all the noise gone?” as though I needed it now for getting to work.

These immigrants resembled the original inhabitants, now long since in the minority, except that they were much younger, and even shyer or more timid. They clearly did not wish to be seen, and I sometimes used the child Vladimir, as I walked along side streets holding his hand, to get a good look, so to speak, at the new arrivals. Because it was natural for the child to keep stopping, they could not become suspicious when I imitated him and then perhaps simply followed his gaze.

It was even easier with their possessions, in front gardens and courtyards, or the changes, never major ones, and additions they allowed themselves with their houses. Astonishing that they decorated the exteriors far more with this or that from their new place of residence, the bay, than with things brought along and mementos from their own countries. More than one created a pattern of low miniature beds on the bit of ground between the street and his tiny house, surrounded with wooden posts cut from branches in the local forests, filled up with soil also from there, and planted at regular intervals with local tree seedlings, with plants that no one else, not even I any longer, would have noticed, and which in this region were generally considered weeds.

All this seemed remarkable to the refugees, and feathery mountain ash seedlings as well as the mullein, fox grapes as well as cattails, were given stakes, and tied, often with proper sailor’s knots.

It made me realize that my own ways of doing things are still determined by my once having been a refugee, and not only during those few weeks in my childhood right after the Second World War when my mother and I, leaving my father in Wilhelmshaven, made our way back and forth across the forbidden zones in Germany to equally forbidden Austria, our only papers consisting of a letter from my grandfather: in his house, with both of his sons killed in action, a downstairs room was available, and there was work in plenty. Even years after our arrival in Rinkolach, although the local people who had survived the war showed me almost nothing but kindness, it was still as though I had no right to be in the country, and a large part of that feeling had to do with the fact that on all my report cards, from elementary school to graduation, the space designated for “citizenship” was filled in in different hands with “stateless.”

And in observing my new neighbors I also recognized that my own occasional skittishness (quite unlike my mother, who soon after her return home was pretty cocky again) does not stem from the way I was later transferred so abruptly from my village to the boarding school, but rather from the twisted sense of being a refugee and illegal that had grown into me. And a difference between me and these new arrivals also became clear, in the form of a play on words, and why not, for a change?: they, the immigrants, and I, the emigrant.

And sometimes I simply stood there in the sun in front of the property of these newcomers, holding the child Vladimir by the hand, my mind blank; imitated the child’s quiet, wonderful waiting and watching in the sun or just in the daylight; lost myself happily in the music of his various expressions, or in the sight of his hands held behind him as if to take a running start, as if to fly.

My year in the no-man’s-bay was almost at an end when a new or previous publisher invited me to a discussion of the manuscript, wherever I pleased, in Venice, Granada, Andorra, Potsdam, in any case in “a beautiful place.”

I invited him to meet me at a pub by the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, from which I could see the little square with that delicate iron and milk-glass pissoir. I brought him a couple of pages, photocopied at the only bookstore in the bay, also a toy store, having selected the pages chiefly for the names of beautiful places that occurred on them.

As far as the title was concerned, the publisher asked me to consider that the word “no-man,” like “threshold” or “flight,” on a book jacket had a negative and off-putting effect, and that it was old-fashioned to situate the main plot — he had seen through me — in a remote suburb; a contemporary story had to take place in an urban center; yet the book might find readers in spite of that — because it was me. And then he unexpectedly put on a scholarly air, noting that my text’s way of turning verbs into nouns — instead of “I stood,” “my standing,” instead of “the sky turns blue,” “the blueing of the sky”—corresponded precisely to what had happened to Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages.

Once, after glancing at a couple of lines, he did say — and I noticed for the first time that this man sitting across from me had beautiful eyes now — that despite my declaration in writing, I was still not finished with myself. And afterward on the bridge he offered this to me in parting, to take back to the forest bay: “Both of us know what to think of each other.” What did he mean by that? I brooded, alone in the nocturnal commuter train. And later I thought he probably had the decisive qualification for a book, intuition; but since his life was elsewhere, he despised this.

Something to which I also paid particular attention during this year here was the time thresholds — less the accustomed sequence of plum, cherry, and other blossoms than those that had previously gone unnoticed. Thus it occurred to me once in passing: “Now is the time for the hazelnuts’ neck ruffs to have grown over their heads,” or “It is already summer, but still too early even for the early apples,” or “These are the autumn days when the acorns in the forest are no longer falling singly, but en masse, constantly, and it is advisable to stay away from the forest with children,” or “Yesterday was a pre-winter day, since the ash in the yard dropped all its leaves in the course of an hour.”

It was also such a time threshold when on the main street a skylight that had always been wide open during the day, long after summer, with a giant mirror on the back wall in which nothing but the sky was reflected, was now, in the November rain, more and more often closed, and one morning remained closed entirely, as if sealed up, and that to this day; or the late-fall period at my sitting place by the Nameless Pond, when, under the edible chestnut tree, I had to hold my writing portfolio over my head to protect myself from the periodic pounding, as if of stones, of the tree’s fruits raining down on me, announced in advance by the sound of the husks splitting, while my other hand continued to hold my pencil, and my ears picked out the difference between the drumming on the cardboard and the melodic plunging of the chestnuts, like the plucking of a musical string, deep into the water at my feet, whereupon days followed on which nothing more happened there than the clouding over of the surface and the rising of cold from the bottom of the pond, more and more aggressively. And likewise All Souls’ Day sticks in my memory as such a threshold, when until evening it remained unprecedentedly quiet around the house, and I imagined that even the most incorrigible noisemakers were now visiting their dead in the cemeteries.

By contrast, eternal sameness was embodied for me in the bay by the seasonless palm trees (although they bloomed like other trees, were trimmed, and carried their array of fruit, their dates), perhaps also because they were so sparse, and furthermore usually hidden.

To the palms I always went to find the present anew, nothing but the present. And then it seemed to me as if these took on, from the fundamental material of light, even that of night, material or physical form, through their many-fingered fronds, layered over each other, and became rhythmic, not only from an air current but simply with the constant double image on my retina and the layering of the fronds, from which the entire tree, even in the absence of wind, flickered frenetically: “Jazz tree,” I thought one time.

And only now, in winter, thanks to the child Vladimir, who suddenly opened his eyes wide, did I discover a previously overlooked palm tree, now the eighth in the bay, in a gap allowing a glimpse into a backyard, and yet an object as obvious as any other; since which moment that part of town has borne for me the name “behind the temple,” even if the site of the nonexistent temple occupies the place of the cottager-like Street of the Emigrants, with the uneven wooden electrical poles and tangles of wires dangling high and low in confusion, depending on the uneven heights of the houses here.

I worked less in the yard than in previous years, in recognition of the fact that, contrary to the view that gardening was relaxing, it actually induced in me that very state of agitation I wanted to avoid for my main task.

Of the cherries, I harvested only those that fell past the blackbirds’ and ravens’ beaks, and on the pear tree, which throughout its time threshold had displayed a single white blossom, without a leaf in sight, there was then, without a frost, only heavy rain lasting for days, not one fruit.

I was more apt to continue cutting, raking, hauling in my lane, because of the few original inhabitants passing by there, to whom my activity, like my walking elsewhere with the child Vladimir, was intended to demonstrate my harmlessness. And we actually fell into conversation, always thus: “Good day.”—“Good day.”—“Hard work.” —“But enjoyable.”—“Good day.”

So many pencils have I used up in this one year that the drawer is already having trouble closing from all the stubs stuffed into it, and from each I have taken leave, on another sheet of paper, in writing: “Thank you, Spanish pencil! Thank you, Yugoslavian pencil! Thank you, white pencil from the honeymoon hotel in Nara, Japan! Thank you, twenty-second black Cumberland pencil! Thank you, pencil from Freilassing in Germany, even if that is perhaps not a beautiful place! Thank you, pencil from the bookstore in the bay, even if your lead kept breaking during sharpening!”

The path deep within the forest, with the thick white sand and the lizards along the bank, where the stonemason from the turn of the era sat on a tree trunk, was graveled and tamped down in the course of the year, and the story of the stonemason, although I wanted to trace it like those of my friends, I left lying somewhere.

Of the boat, no, the skiff, in the middle of the Nameless Pond, already in spring half sunk, but still clear in outline, there now sticks out, like the remains of a pile dwelling, only a piece of the once-lacquered hull, without the earlier blue of Istria or Wyoming.

From the one hundred-year-old façade in the bay, the four deck-of-cards emblems in the corners of the half-timbering, the painted diamond, spade, heart, and club, have fallen away along with the mortar.

The vegetable bed, in the middle of one of the bay’s cemeteries, by the warden’s house, bursting in summertime with tomatoes, pole beans, squash, arugula, and separated from the bare field of headstones by a row of arborvitae, seems to have been leveled, and not merely for the fallow months; yesterday a lone bean pod, blackened, still hung by its stem, scimitarlike.

Although now almost an entire year has passed, I still do not see this as “a time,” and simultaneously something within me resists saying I to the person who was sitting at this table here in January.

I, that was back then, like today, the one who time and again lay in his bed at night lost to the world, and who, having gone too long without friends, was overcome by fear of death. Walking, looking, reading, writing were not enough for me; I needed talking, for reinforcement.

A sparrow is running just now right along a gable across the main street, up, down, back: now he knows, as well as our Pythagoras ever did, what a triangle is.

I still get lost here; and I find that all right for this region of mine.

3 — The Day

The day on which my friends were supposed to arrive in the bay fell between Christmas and the new year. That was considered the darkest time. But as far as I was concerned, since childhood I had had during that time the dreams of which I was convinced that they did not apply to me personally but were owed by me to the world.

The night before, I went to bed earlier than usual, and then during the night saw on a wall in medieval Siena a picture, about which disagreement existed as to whether it was by Giotto or not. It portrayed a procession of people, shot through by the rays of a sun, which, the dream said, was the “essence of sun.” Finally the disagreement was resolved as follows: the picture had indeed been painted by Giotto, though not in the town of Siena but outside in a suburb.

I dreamt this during the night before the day before yesterday, and today I am still convinced that the painting is hanging hidden somewhere in Tuscany or elsewhere, and that the circumstances are as they were communicated in the dream.

I got up while it was still pitch dark, and absolutely silent: it was new moon, with, far from the sky over the metropolis, stars shining all the more brightly, soon covered by clouds, so that finally the only light shining into the house came from the transmitter high on the eastern range of hills, the one installation in the bay that was constantly in operation and to which I once said involuntarily, while walking home on a summer night, “Our tower!” as if it belonged solely to the population here, and I in turn to this.

There were days when I completely forgot about the sky: this was supposed not to be such a day. I immediately set out for the forest, to which, after the lane, it was only a short side street. No one else was out and about; still a good while until the first commuter train. It was below freezing. But the nocturnal darkness, both that between the houses and the even denser, more substantial darkness under the trees, warmed me, as it had long ago during the early mornings of Advent on the way to the worship service called Rorate (“thaw out!”) in our village church — one of the few periods in the year when even in boarding school I did not mind going to church. But what then fell from the sky was, instead of dew, a fine rain that hardly wet me.

With my entry into the forest, the forest gave my head its measure. I climbed up to the top of the Seine hills on the familiar Absence Road, which I called this because its fill consists of construction debris, rubble from foundations, brick walls, bathroom tiles, thresholds, doorframes, a discarded street sign, even a piece of a ceramic house number and a crushed milk can, as if from a farm, sticking up from the bed of the path wherever one looked, forming humps, curbs, and inclined planes, a sunken ship, as it were, along whose keel, facing up, I had often picked my way in the course of the year, zigzagging and leaping, in order to keep myself impressionable, to quote old Goethe.

The morning of the day before yesterday I let this path become nameless again, and after that likewise the High Path up on the edge of the plateau, which in sweeping curves followed its spine, and on which one can circle the entire forest bay, as if on cliff paths close to a precipice; free of names, from below ground for the moment the creation rose up.

I made a little detour from the forest to the office complexes of Haut-Velizy, one mirrored in the next, as glaringly lit up as empty, except for the night watchmen, whole divisions of them spread over the entire plateau, each by himself with his dog in his booth in front at the barred entrance. My Sunday evening walks during the year had been primarily for their benefit, and thus at least one, when he turned his head away from his tiny television monitor to look at me, his thermos bottle in his hand, raised a finger in greeting. And there was also something new: on the terrace of an abandoned office building, the company having gone bankrupt, weeds had sprung up.

Back in the forest, heading downhill on the Green Path (because of its grassy surface), instantly restored to namelessness, I smelled smoke, and then deep in the woods came, in an almost inaccessible preserve, through which I had fought and shimmied my way on many a morning (if ever a path for learning impressionability, then such a one), upon a fire, lighting up only the area around a hut, in whose middle it was, in a loose circle of fireproof poles, which led up, cylinder-shaped, to the smoke hole in the thatched roof; on one side the casbah was open, protected by the dense thicket; a layer of leaves on the ground; no human being.

But I met one, as it was gradually getting light, down in the clearing with the hollow occupied by the Nameless Pond (even it did not have its name anymore), by the spring behind it. Sometime after the lava flow from Mont St.-Valérien, this spring had become warm, which I did not notice until I was walking past one night, slipped, and ended up with my hand in its rather meager flow. It was far warmer than from even the warmest rain, and it smelled, in nose proximity, of sulfur. Later, right at its source, recognizable by a clear-clear pulsing, I dug myself a sort of tub and sometimes gargled there, or soaked my bruised, more than sore, numb feet: relief.

Early on the day before yesterday, however, I found my spring spot in the swamp beyond the bomb-crater body of water occupied by the person in whom, back in the spring of the year, on Lizard Way (this designation also canceled), I had seen the stonemason from the twelfth century. He was sitting there, up to his knees in the sulfurous water, and greeted me — here in the bay it had always, up until now, been I who greeted first — what a nodding of the head! and shifted to one side. There was room enough for two; he had built an earthen bench, lined with stones, around the spring, in the suggestion of a half-moon. The stonemason seemed more like a gardener, in the bareness of winter.

When I untied my shoes, I noticed that they came from different pairs: my mistake in the still-nocturnal house. With my feet warmed, I took off my hat in spite of the rain, and thought, gazing over the muddy surface to the edge of the pond, that it was no distance at all from the mud long ago behind my grandfather’s farm in the village of Rinkolach to this mud here now. And then, picturing my almost three seasons of writing by the root hill of the tipped-over birch, at the same time a hiding place for muskrats, I swore to myself that for me no path would lead away from this place into a so-called public arena. And at the same time I was seized with pain at the thought that I would never again sit there by the water to write, where, with my work in hand, I had been able to be with the daily world as never before. And then I saw that my year’s seat, the burned-out half tree trunk, last hauled out of the ice by me, had once more been rolled into the pond, certainly not by children playing. And then in the distance ravens flapped low over the forest floor, like black horses galloping soundlessly through the trunks of the trees.

The bomb-crater pond trembled, and trembled, and trembled, the different winter-morning gray grayed, and grayed, and grayed, the stonemason kept silent, and kept silent, and kept silent, and then he said: “I wanted to go south, and I ended up here. I am not the only one scattered to the winds. When I was young, we worked as a brotherhood, under the direction of my father, whose mark in granite was also that of our group. First we were stone breakers, then stonemasons, or both at once. For splitting we had hardly more tools than a hammer. First look, then strike! What counted at the beginning were eyes and ears. With the latter we listened to see whether the stone sounded as it should — even a small off-note inside, and it was no good; with the former we saw in what direction the stone was to be cut, whether lengthwise or crosswise, or, as a third possibility, and just as important for building, in the direction of the interstices, to obtain the keystones, as support; as anchor; as resting place; and as a bridgehead for additions. In the meantime we wander alone from project to project, or have disappeared in war, and at any rate we stonemasons no longer chisel our signs anywhere, and where does the scar on your shin come from?”—“I burned myself there as a child,” I replied, and invited the runner to join me for dinner with my friends in Porchefontaine.

When I then stepped out of the forest, already in daylight, I noticed that it was still silent as night in the bay, even down below on the bypass, and then came upon glare ice, even before I saw it, stretching far into the distance, a rigid gleam, so different from that of rain, covering and raising the asphalt, and even the pebbles in the lane, as I slithered home. Was it this way throughout the country? Would my friends be delayed by it? Then the bugles of the railway linemen, short and no-nonsense, but still lingering in the air for a long time afterward.

As I circled the house a few times in the yard, where even in the grass the ice crackled, I made two discoveries: on the one tree that I had believed all year to be without fruit, unexpectedly a pear, dwarf-sized, to be sure, and wizened, but unfrozen, and the one bite — that was all it yielded — of a sweetness that stayed with me all day; and about the other, the ash, its foot concealed by a hedge, the fact that it, which I had always thought grew on a neighbor’s property, grew on mine; belonged to me! It had followed me from the former cow pasture at home in Rinkolach (where I wanted to go right after the book, to sniff the air of my birthplace).

And I promptly propped a ladder against the particularly straight, smooth ash trunk, glassy from transparent ice all around, trimmed the branches so that they resembled the heavy rip cords of a parachute, and declared the tree a monument to that unknown American soldier who, after an emergency jump, got tangled in a thicket on the Jaunfeld Plain and was beaten to death by the crowd that gathered — perhaps also one of my relatives among them? — using all those tools that today are to be seen almost exclusively in local history museums, where they exude venerability.

And in the process I made yet a third discovery: on the evergreen shrubs all around the ash there were garlands of leaves, as if from crystal chandeliers, made of ice, frozen solid after the rain landed on the leaves, which had broken off as a result, so that only their ice forms hung in the air, attached to the woody branches by ice stems, true-to-nature copies, just like the lanceolate forms pointing away from them, in whose delicate glassy bodies the snapped-off leaves were precisely copied, the midrib and all the side ribs, but in reverse, and thus all the way up the bush, green and glassy leafage in one, except that in the latter the sky shone through at the top. “That can’t be!” I thought at the sight, which again meant that it seemed to me as real as anything could possibly ever be. “This empathic spelling-out means more to me than anything else.” And: “For us today how much more there was to tell about our days than about our years. And all the more difficult to find clear lines to follow.”

And what else happened the day before yesterday? The postman, who, probably like other postmen in the world, during this year of more war than peace, had stopped whistling while delivering the mail, gave me a letter from the woman from Catalonia, postmarked Girona, rather than the Spanish alternative, Gerona, the residence of her father, meanwhile become the first president of the new state of Catalunya. She wrote: “As you always wanted of me, after all: I have had enough of your reluctance, like that of an unmarried man, and curse it. To experience fragmentarily and dream comprehensively will not work with me. Why can I find no support in you? And why do I still believe, in spite of everything, that no better support can be found than in a vacillating, yearning person? As for the rest, I am finally free of parents, and besides I have now slept here so long in my girlhood bed that I am a young girl again, though differently than before.” Ah, those Catalan curses, those Catalan oracles, those Catalan fairy tales.

And the day’s news from the Castilian town of Benavente in the province of Zamora: on the flat steppe outside the town gates lay a corpse, smashed by a fall as if from a great height, presumably an illegal immigrant, fallen out of an airplane before its landing in Santiago de Compostela, having previously already frozen to death in his hiding place. And above the church of Cristo de la Vega, in the meadows, in an otherwise bright blue sky, a cloud had hung all day, motionless, the meadows in its rigid shadow, while round about the entire meseta lay in winter sunlight.

After that I was in a mood to stay outside in the yard for a while. I raked the almost leafless grass, merely to see it green up and to see the earth beneath it blacken — what a color — accompanied by a robin, not for my sake, but for that of the earthworms writhing under the fractured ice; observed next to the house foundation the “bay en miniature” that I had constructed from a piece of moss, with the moss representing the forests, the crushed rock protruding into it representing the houses in the settlement; swept the steps to the house and the paved part of the yard with a broom made of those wonderfully flexible tamarisk twigs, found in or borrowed from the railwaymen’s hanging gardens (what needed to be swept there?); loosened the crushed rock path, in the process of which a button from the uniform of the general or gendarme, one of my predecessors in the house, found its way into my hand and I smelled the hundred-thousand-year-old oyster bed from the underground of the bay; washed a cellar window, out of which probably no one had ever looked, as well as the brick threshold the painter had once fired for me with the inscription from the Gospel according to John: “The son shall remain in the house for eternity,” and thought once more how only physical labor really got my blood to circulate, and in addition made my hair soft and smoothed my skin, and how nevertheless of all my activities it was only through my writing that I had ever been able to feel something like a connection with the world.

In the meantime a repairman came to fix the oil burner in the cellar, and I watched as he took its innermost core, a valve as small as a cherry, between his child’s fingertips and then finally blew it clean with Neptune cheeks. In parting at the garden gate, he pointed out a hitherto overlooked, still empty blackbird nest in the cypress, made, along with grass, moss, and inner bark, of narrow tape from thrown-away music cassettes, and prophesied snow and a change of heart for mankind in the third millennium.

Before I then went back into the house, I stepped back a few paces and saw it, also with the heaps of leaves that had blown into the old shoes outside, standing in pioneer territory, for instance near Fairbanks, Alaska. Why was I not there? But I was there. It occurred to me that anyone who can have a yard and does not have one is a wrongdoer, by omission. But what good did a yard do? Wanting to go out into the yard, again and again. And without the yard, my hummocky world, I did not want that.

Indoors the same dark, clear light prevailed as outside, and I wished that this initial light might remain always, similar to the sun the commanding officer orders not to set until the battle is decided. Emptying out was lightening. The few objects, made from the salt-bleached wood of the saltworks, did not fill the house; a grayish-silvery stool caused all the living spaces to float.

And what happened then? I rubbed the long dining table with sandpaper, and rubbed and sanded and washed it, with my nose almost touching it until I was inside the smell of the wet planks, the most Sunday-like of smells, and then watched the drying, until this tabletop stood for the entire house.

But after that, additional air could come only from language, and so, after I had showered, with a powerful cold jet hitting my heart chamber and my armpits, and had already dressed for the evening, I sat down in the study to write.

And there was peace for a while there on the day before the day before yesterday, a tremulous one. Next to the door, which led straight outside, leaned the wrinkled, already long-standing backpack, and when I got up at intervals and sniffed inside, the smell of all Yugoslavia wafted out. And in between I read in the book of Samuel the story of David and his rebellious son Absalom: how he had suffered as a very young boy, once not being allowed to see his father’s face for years.

A quiver ran through the now ice-free grass blades outside. The reproduction of the Kings of Orient from back home, in the backyard, by the beech tree, had suffered from the year’s weather; the faces of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar seemed twisted, like those of the homeless on the square outside the commuter station, and what they were holding could also, along with gold, frankincense, myrrh, or king boletes, be a beer bottle each, and what they had on their heads had probably been from the beginning, instead of crowns, the caps of bakers and masons.

Through the spyhole to the main street white had flashed for the twinkling of an eye from a cigarette, and then again upon the return of the Eternal Smoker, and in the house across the way the woman was shouting as never before at the child entrusted to her for the day, which was screaming, likewise as never before; and then from over there silence; and I resolved to write my first letter to the editor, to The Hauts-de-Seine News, on the subject of such day-care mothers (what was the word in French?).

The depression in the wooded hill, at one time called the Poussin Meadow, revealed itself by the trees’ there being, not brown and gray, but inky, and at the same time each tree seemed transparent for the next, and so on, and each a planetarium unto itself, such that despite the old saying I saw the forest for the trees for a change, “in its essential sun,” while in the foreground almost all the chimneys were smoking, in the shape of tails, like the cedar branches even closer to my windows, only bright, so that I thought the expression in a chronicle, centuries ago, for the properties in the area, feux, fireplaces, was still appropriate today, and furthermore: “The chronicle does not capture the world,” and furthermore, as once almost every day: “I have failed, all is lost!” and furthermore: “Today I shall find something I thought to have lost forever! There are such days,” and furthermore: “My table here is too small for an epic,” and furthermore: “No, too large!”

And what happened then? I wished I could put my head down on my writing table, with my arms stretched away from me, and once again I could not do it. And then I did it after all, and fell asleep, while a raven, right by the window, watched me, amiable and curious, waddling on the sill like a duck (from now on I shall see ravens differently). As sleep goes, it was at most a wink — the expression my North German father used — and having shaken it off, I woke up in an unexplored part of the world that had just descended with the dew, dew drops even in the tops of the trees, one of which was of bronze or amber.

And after that it was time to set out, around the bay and through the hill forest on into the neighboring bay of Porchefontaine. It was not raining anymore. It was clear and dark. The wind was blowing off the Atlantic, not cold, not warm. I bent down to the blowing through the grass. Along the lane, with his wares on his shoulder, an elderly rug dealer was walking, and asked, “Are you the owner?” and I said, “Yes!” From between the rows of cypresses a heavy, soft lilac bush tickled my forehead — but no, it was winter now. Lovely, strange transition from the almost roofed-over quiet lane right into the roar of a highway. And in the attic room across the way, suddenly, in the middle of winter, the skylights were open again, in the giant mirror in the background the morning sky, although it was long since not morning anymore. And in front of the mirror stood my sister — but no, she was dead, after all. The thought of my origins: it still cleansed me, stood me on my feet, and showed me the way.

In the front garden of the Russian child Vladimir lay a fork, its tines facing up, and I turned it over. To hear him as I passed roaring like an ox and a lion from deep inside the house spurred me on. It was full of playfulness, as the entire child was full of playfulness, contagious.

In the street of the immigrants or refugees, the longest, narrowest, and straightest side street in the bay, against the background of the railroad embankment, an entire procession of people was moving along, as had become almost common in this year, one behind the other, with shopping carts, suitcases on wheels, also handcarts. But for the first time, one of the cottage doors there was open, as wide as possible, uninhibitedly, and allowed one to see all the way inside: there are supposed to have been very few years, perhaps only two, in the Roman Empire when in its capital city the doors to the temple of war could be closed — and today instead the open door of peace here. In some places the walled-up gaps between the buildings had been reopened, and one was a rabbit hutch, another a baking oven area, the third simply a new vista, or seemed, if it remained dark, full of treasures, treasure-dark; the whole place was actually blooming with in-between spaces, or the brightness of bird feathers prevailed. On the carts, the immigrants had long since ceased to haul their possessions or produce. There was a glint of time-and space-eating machines.

By the railway embankment I joined those waiting by the kiosk for the bay bus and watched the commuter trains up above, where the passengers, who for a good part of the terrible year of 1999 had almost all sat motionless behind the panes, had begun here and there to wipe off the steam again. From the nearby station the loudspeaker became audible, which for foreigners on their way to Versailles called out the name of the station for a change: Hakubutsukandubutsuen! (But wasn’t that a stop in Tokyo?) Let those people on the train see me: I was proud to be standing here, precisely in this place, and obviously also to live here.

Those of us who got onto the small bus, with my neighbor as driver, to whom I said, “Dober dan!,” greeted those who were already sitting there. It was a day when the children were out of school, yet because the seats were so low we all looked somewhat like schoolchildren, and also perched there, squeezed together like children in school buses. The newly tinted windows darkened the view from inside much less than the other way around. From the most remote tip of the bay, the camel herd with rocking humps again headed for the Turkish Mediterranean, and the large, snow-white bird that calmly strutted across the street ahead of the bus, right at the crosswalk, and then rose into the air on the other side, was no seagull but an albino raven (“There is no such thing!”). Two boys sat across from me, with Serbian-Balkan faces, of whom one then leaned toward me as if to hit me and picked a white hair off my collar, with the comment “Old!”

We got a good shaking from the vehicle, and I wished it were even more. As we passed the Etang des Ursines, you could tell by the water there that it had been frozen over not long ago, the ripples in the pond were so fresh and the water seemed to be flowing. We were thus circling the bay by a northern sea. The sky spread far beyond the densely stacked little houses, the drooping electrical and telephone wires like those above a fleet of boats drawn up on land for the winter, and I thought that only after all my years here in the suburbs had I seen for the first time, upon returning to Rinkolach, a sky over the Austrian village. Then a bus in the other direction crossed our path, with the autistic children clumped together in the back of the bus, who were sometimes hauled through the bay all day long, in the hope of relieving their isolatedness within themselves.

I got off by the tunnel and the railwaymen’s hanging gardens and observed there from the overpass the Seine hills all around, mountainlike almost everywhere, here as a riegel, there as a saddle, though every individual spot was a saddle, and where was the “yoke”?

And having climbed over the bolted gate, under the wreathed arbor formed by the willow branches, in the silence of the wintry garden rows, on the edge of the track cut, I laid the tamarisk broom back in its place, took in return an unharvested turnip from a bed, peeled and ate it, which made me, so shortly before the end of the year, feel October more intensely than ever in reality, stumbled, next to one of the corrugated-metal huts, upon a previously overlooked fig tree, full of fruit, though withered, and thought, with nothing in my ear but the path-narrow, fast-flowing canal under my soles, covered from step to step by flagstones, that this was the place now for snowing.

Its moment, a single one, I then missed, for the first time in my life; a railroad retiree, stepping unexpectedly out of his shed, pointed his finger at me and then brushed something from my collar, which was a snowflake: “Neige!”—“Ja, Schnee!” I said, involuntarily in German.

Once out of the cut, I knocked the snow or mud off my shoes and continued on my pilgrimage, keeping to the edge of the forest, past the Russian church, where I greeted the dark blue of the onion dome and the light blue of the porch door, on to the old-fashioned remains of the bay, the length of castle-high stone wall with the well-preserved gate opening, until the day before the day before yesterday still called the Lion Gate of Mycenae, because of the two boulders sticking out on top, a door with access not to the Castle of Mycenae but to the hill forests above the Seine.

And there in the arch, in which the tree trunks, their image sharpened, shimmered, a trinity of suburban vagrants were stumbling and weaving homeward into the underbrush, among them the year’s new addition, with the same plastic bags as his confreres, the same scratches on his nose from blows and falls, and even his head-wobbling, just a short while ago still maintaining a counterrhythm, already showed agreement, with puppetlike self-confidence.

And thus he also laughed at me over his shoulder, framed by the Lion Gate, with a huge toothless mouth, yet with his original wealth of curls, and said, “I don’t need to be rescued.” And the day before he had been sitting on the sidewalk outside the supermarket, next to him one of the bay’s idiots, who was preaching to him, at which the handsome young drinker merely kept grimacing.

And what happened then? Having set out on my loop back to the railroad station, I had the encounter with the other fool or idiot of the bay, who stopped me on the sidewalk, with barely room for two, and said straight to my face that right there in the underpass, at the thought of Christ’s sufferings, tears had come to his eyes. Sometimes God caused him pain (a fist blow to the chest), grabbed him, shook him, did not leave him in peace. It was too bright inside him, and this light was his fear — whereupon he jerked the pencil out of my hand and with glowing eyes sack-hopped away, as if nothing had happened. And I stopped at the nearby gas station, where the attendant lent me his ballpoint pen for a note.

Then I went into the Bar des Voyageurs and was recognized just from my profile by the proprietor, whose head was bent: he put the usual down before me on the counter. I was so engrossed in thoughts of my book that I again said my thanks in German; and the proprietor answered me in his Arabic.

The weekly Hauts-de-Seine News was lying there, and I leafed through, looking for the column devoted to the bay: nothing, except the announcement of the fairy-tale hour: “The story is that of a poor woman who lives with her three daughters in a little village at the foot of a mountain. One fine day she discovers at the market a picture that will change her life.” And then another fairy tale: “A princess is seeking a husband. But the suitors are all too loud for her.” And I added in my thoughts: “Have I in my life as a writer ever got beyond such prehistories? I always felt a great story within me, and by the time I had finally told the prehistory, the book was already over. And hasn’t it been exactly the same this time?”

I read the news from beginning to end; it was a special kind of pleasure to be a contemporary. In the man at my side I then recognized, for the first time in a bar in the bay, a neighbor, the one who on Sunday afternoons, with a face as confused as the one with which he was drinking his beer here, had the habit of burping into a battery of megaphones — to test them, as he now explained, for the fair. I treated him to a glass, as he did me. Then we remained silent, and whenever the proprietor in his taproom let one of the refrigerator compartments snap shut, my neighbor jumped, and I read from his lips, “Quel fruit!” (What a noise!)

In the course of the year in the Bar des Voyageurs, some of the video games had been replaced by the original pinball machines, which banged ceaselessly with free turns, and likewise a table soccer game, at which a few young people stared as if this were something that had vanished forever and they were its rediscoverers.

The battle-ready characters in the come-on images of the remaining video games kept pumping themselves up, their movements more like those of a sleeping flock of sheep, and when no one set them in motion against each other, the notion occurred to me that of all people the players at these machines would someday become the new readers of books, soon. And were the heads of the table-soccer figures all that different, after all, from the broad-lipped, full-cheeked roundheads of the early Middle Ages, to whom, as for instance to the kings in my garden, I went to be able to draw deeper breaths? And what did I see before me as I drew my deepest breath? Writing, or readiness for the written word.

The proprietor, with always the same presence of mind, had something of the air of a hostel father, and sometimes it was one of his customers who bought the bread for the itinerant workers’ supper, placed the tables on the chairs, swept up the debris from the bar, and the day before the day before yesterday one of the usual steady customers unexpectedly turned up as the help, well-mannered and with authority. How old had the patron become in this year? And how about me? I contemplated the pattern of spots on the back of my hand; they had the form of the Big Dipper.

Behind the glass façade the day was unchangingly dark and clear, and I stayed until the first couple of sparrows appeared in the sleeping tree; they were gathering there, however, long before they were ready to go to sleep. Their wings, constantly whirring up and down the tree, provided brightness on this dark day. The smooth trunk of the plane tree, in its dew-dampness, still looked iced. And behind it the heads of the commuters in the trains up on the railway embankment repeated those of the sparrows: “If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes,” my thoughts continued, “you would never want to be anything else again. Stay that way! If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes, fragmentarily illuminated, in buses, trains, métros, in planes above the clouds, and these pictures would be the new Georges de La Tours.” And in the plane trees on the plaza there were still multicolored lights from Christmas Eve, among which the sparrows were the other Christmas illumination, or simply a more living component.

Outside there was a smell of fish from the morning market; shreds of jute with Chinese and splinters of crates with Spanish lettering swirling into the air, and sparrow footprints on the asphalt, already slightly blurred, had the formation of the fighter wing that at the same time actually thundered over the plaza, dark as a storm cloud, heading home to the base on the plateau. But it was still the case that I gained deeper insights from the birds’ traces down below on the earth than from anything in the heavens.

And I thought further: “But isn’t believing in human silhouettes, at a certain remove, which must be preserved, my fundamental mistake? Wouldn’t it have been essential for me to get closer, but how? To cross the threshold between silhouettes and — well, what? The figures just now in the bar: if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate life stories, from their first fear of death to their first murder and their mother’s letters to them during the war. I have not asked, not once in this entire year.”

Having set out for Porchefontaine, I first took the footpath between the railway line and the suburban houses, heading west. A woman was running along in a zigzag, shouting again and again, “Where’s my paper? Who’s seen my Parisien libéré? What’ll I do? I have nothing to read. What’ll I do?”—followed by two police officers, a rare sight in the bay, who asked whether anyone had perhaps seen an old man, “in pajamas, without glasses,” while at the same time they peered farther down into the railway cut; also followed by a woman in a fur coat who said as loudly as calmly, “I’ve lost my husband”; and finally followed by an unknown person who took aim at me — did he shoot? — at any rate he made the noise with his mouth, and I continued on.

The palm at the crest of the path represented the bay’s western cape. I paused in front of it, and at first only the kinked fronds of the palm moved, slightly, calmly, as if tuning up, and then suddenly all the fronds swung into motion, skyward, earthward, one-hundred-handed, pounded the keys of the present-day air, and following their example, I spread my fingers, let the intervals blow through me, and thought, nonetheless: “In my appreciation for music I have never got beyond the blues.”

From the cape I turned to look back, with my entire body, at the no-man’s — bay once more (meanwhile renamed thus), while on a side street another person also turned to look back, but while walking, once and then once again, and more in sorrow than in high spirits. The route through the broad hollow to the hill horizons on the other side led as if through one vast runway, while the veil of mist hovering over it made it seem as if something were being hatched there; as if, without factories, office buildings, research institutes, something were going at constant, silent full blast there. I saw, on this different sort of world map, finely drawn, the first, the New World. Or: the forest bay as a book, open before my eyes, clear, voluminous, colorful, airy. And this was not, as I had once thought, to be achieved through slowness, but through carefulness, or deliberateness, whether slow or fast.

But what to do with it then? Had I done anything with it? In the backyards of the bay, the clotheslines were hung with nothing but the usual tiny dust rag — of a widow? of a widower? — and the lit-up bus there in the background, at full speed, was a gym, in apparent motion from the children running along its horizontal bars, and as always I felt sad when after the last yard no other came. To leave the place seemed to me each time like a leaving-in-the-lurch. In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.

It has been a long time since I went out to Porchefontaine.

Our year’s-end celebration there had been discussed on the telephone by the proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles (The Ladders) and me. How long ago it is that I saw the man over there beyond the foothills and myself as those two cottage dwellers on the Japanese scroll in the Kyoto Museum, each of them on his own side, to the left and right at the foot of a knoll, in an infinite, otherwise unpopulated mountainous landscape with heavy snow falling silently, as they sit at their work behind the windows of their hermits’ huts, with the most serene expressions, in the knowledge that what they are both doing fits together, and that they will shortly visit each other again.

Farther up the path, the picture became more lively, without any need for snow. I was developing an appetite, not only for my friends, but just as much for my petty prophet. And that almost painful appetite in my breast was called longing.

And I also had in mind what one of the guests in the Bar des Voyageurs had just remarked: “There are no borders.” As special as my region was, the one through which I was now passing differed from it in no respect, at least during this hour’s journey. All day, dark and clear, as it remained, the houses in the next suburbs stood just as well anchored on their hill foundations, or growing out of them, and the overlapping regions exuded a strength unlike that of any skyscraper metropolis; and when I considered it now, I had never been anywhere, with the exception of the boarding school, where I had not eventually been happy to be.

By the boarded-up arcade of the long-distance railroad embankment, the walled-up former weapons depot used by the Germans, a young couple was lingering, distraught with desire, and on the decorative dice mounted on edge on top of a garden wall the dots had been repainted, as had been the billiard queue along with the black and white balls on the flank of a drinking trough. Not only the gaps between the houses, but also the spaces under the steps leading up to the houses, which in many places were as if barricaded, had been cleared out in the course of the year, and many a house, with its outbuildings and crushed-rock paths, the courtyards expanded into plazas, formed an entire village.

And then cats leaped from windowsills, the whistles of express trains echoed from the hills, people stood in telephone booths with their backs to the sidewalk, driving-school cars went by, on a terrain vague a circle of pale grass served as a reminder of the recently departed little circus (to which children now, to paraphrase Rilke, went to smell the lion), in a pediment above a sundial stood in Greek letters the inscription “God is forever measuring the world.” And a procession of workers came toward me, with flags, on the last day of their protest march to the president’s palace in Paris, to prevent the closing of their Land Rover factory far off in Brittany.

And then? The one moment of sunlight that day: like another epistle. And then the forest again. It occurred to me that it was Monday, the quietest day, on which things in nature, mistreated during the weekend, revived. Branches and sections of trunks lay across the path, snapped off by the morning’s ice. Here was the range of hills between the two inhabited spits, and the wind was growing stormy. I plunged off to the side through stalks of wild currants, a single one of whose tiny fruit balls in summer had the taste of an essence, and thus came upon, put on its track by a raven with something round and yellow in its beak, the tree, long since sensed, with the wild apples (but edible only in dried form, like dehydrated pears).

Striking how often in the course of the year I have got my hat and hair tangled in the thicket of the forests, almost hung up on a branch, and I thought again of Absalom, enemy of a father who stayed out of sight, and in his war against this father inescapably caught by the hair by the forest and then beaten to death by his pursuers.

Up above on the crest was a large clearing. I was dizzy and sat down there on an oak trunk. The day remained dark and clear, and whenever I closed my eyes, there was a flaring of retained images, as only in winter.

From the forests all around came a mighty roaring, to which I surrendered myself. Just as there was the expression “ravages of war,” now for the stirring gray-on-gray all around there was the expression “ravages of peace.” From the ground up, all colors contributed to it, and the garlands of clematis, with their appearance of gray roses, looked brighter than the white of the birches and darker than the black of the alders. “My son,” I thought, “or someone else, will one day recite the epic of this thirty-times-thirty-fold winter gray, how it has overlapped and will continue to have its accumulated effect, backward and forward into the cosmos.”

And I thought further there in the clearing, in my style of jumbled thinking: “I still have much walking to do. Going on foot, precisely in this automobile-dependent civilization, is more adventurous nowadays than ever. Walking, easy knowing. Too close to the human race, I feel horror. I have love of the world. It is within me. Except that I cannot keep love of the world at the heart of the story. For that I had to go to the margins. The silhouettes: I feel the weakness in them, the lack of presence. And yet a fieriness emanates from all of you, scattered as you are. The world is full of dark colors from commonalities among people unknown to one another. Perhaps the outsider is in fact best equipped to see you as all together. Long ago, during my time in court: justice came not so much from the presiding judge as from the associate judge. And since I have been here in the suburbs, I have come to see myself as such an associate judge. As a reader. To read a book of a new-blown world. Once more I should like to feel the gray wind of Yugoslavia rounding the bend. Where do I belong? At home at the edge of the field. And here I am closest to that. And yet here I walk past walls different from those in my homeland. The time has come for different words. But which ones? When something has disappeared, it means that something different is now to be found. My friends and I, we are not in any sense victors, but also not doomed to extinction. But perhaps I am lost to nature. And a terror has taken root in me, deep and ineradicable. And Ana and I: such a waste. The two of us together time and again became the black planet. And yet in my life I wanted to bring something home every day. Bring home where? To those entrusted to me. What have I given up in the course of time? The legal profession. And rightly so. My homeland. And rightly so. But not right that I gave up my family. When alone I appear to myself again and again as a villain. How often I wish I could shoo myself out of my own head, as a mother might shoo her dozen children out of the noisy house. And then again, at the thought of being alone, upon contemplating in the evening a rustling plane tree along a highway exit, I should like to spend my whole life this way. How unburdened all those men in bars used to seem to me, long since without housemates. And how does that song of the singer’s go? Who knows, who knows. And how did I wake up this morning? With a hair in my mouth that was not mine. Dream and work! — that was on those factory workers’ banners I just saw. Do not exhaust the possibilities of the day; put it all into the book; that is where it belongs. And where are the readers? Mysterious brood! Passersby, hieroglyphic mankind. No new time? Did I write that? This year? Oh, man of little faith. Those who have not undergone metamorphosis have done themselves in. New World: like walking on a street in new-fallen snow, where no one has been but a little bird.”

At my feet piles of dark droppings shaped like olive pits: did that indicate there were still rabbits here in the woods? Two heavy fists pressed down on my shoulders, which were then the hoofs of a horse that whispered something into my ear.

Everything splendid I have experienced since my birth awakened in me, and I wrote my ancestors the following postcard: “Come. Get yourselves here!” “And my friends,” I thought further, “in just a little while they will tell me their stories from this year, altogether differently from my versions, and also entirely different stories. Away! Out of the forest!”

Porchefontaine belongs to Versailles, yet the palace is far away. I have never felt really drawn to it, as though there, unlike in no matter what churches, final extinction reigned. The kings would never return? And a royal city without a river, even without a brook? Who knows.

Porchefontaine, more a suburb than a part of the town, has at any rate become dear to me. And at the same time the Echelles proprietor, with his establishment there, and I argue incessantly about whether his region has more to offer than mine. If I cite our transmitter, he counters with his “more essential and also more graceful” water tower (which, however, is not located within the township); if I praise our railwaymen’s hanging gardens, he rates the couple of flower beds at the Porchefontaine station above them, because the (sole) shed there is made not of corrugated metal but of solid railway ties (yet the majority of the beds have gone to pot, and no trace of terracing); and even if he concedes that there are hardly any palms in his region, he still considers the only two there, which, standing side by side, constitute a pair, more interesting than our eight or nine, in that they are “like an entire forest,” whereas ours are isolated, in my Goethe’s expression, merely “huge stalks.” The only things for which he envies us are our very own buses — those of Porchefontaine, long accordion vehicles, wide, space-devouring, belong to Versailles, the capital, which has priority. Yet we are in agreement on the fact that the houses in our two bays, with forests round about, are in all respects ideally sisterly, and therefore would not need sister cities anywhere in Europe (except that in his bay there have been rumors of the construction of an underground highway, straight through the foot of the mountain).

The day before the day before the day before yesterday, on the way there, going downhill, I pushed leaves with my foot over the traces of the wintertime mushroom seekers, if possible more violent than their predecessors, the earth churned up by them as if in a hasty burglary; or weren’t these perhaps the traces of birds going after worms? And at the campsite of the foreign-seeming windbreak workers, this time I found debris, an empty pack of not at all common cigarillos and likewise a bottle with the label of a fine Bordeaux. And a desperate dog went panting through the woods after his master.

It was stormy. An express train, visible halfway up on the Porchefontaine embankment, let out an Indian war whoop, while many passengers nibbled on shish kebab as if on a train through Greece. A temple bell rang, a muezzin called out over the sea, the settlement spread far inland along a fjord, by the sunken road at my back Scottish dunes overlapped, before me lay a giant’s glove, I brashly stuck my hands into the winter stinging nettles; didn’t they sting? Oh my, yes!

And what happened then? Evening could come now. The light down below at the edge of the woods was rocking in time to the wind in the branches, between flaring and fizzling. From the already dark thicket a stone flew past me, no, a bottle. A child playing? The transformer, long before the first house, was clothed in marble, as one might expect of the palace town of Versailles, and was called sirène. Then in the first house a woman was sitting in the lamplight, snipping stitches out of a piece of fabric, while two cats sat in front of the house like a pair of shoes, and an adolescent asked me the time (my answer, as I saw later, was wrong), and a few steps farther on the first driver asked me for directions (my information, as I realized too late, was completely wrong), and the next one asked me for a light (I had none, and he drove on, cursing).

I went, as the proprietor and cook had instructed me, to buy bread, watched, in the evening line at the bakery, as the inhabitants of Porchefontaine, at least the older ones, fished for coins in purses as shabby as those in my bay — which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks — and carried my sheaflike load, which my arms could barely encompass, to our place of celebration, hearing halfway there, from a sprawling orphanage, otherwise silent as the grave, the voice of my son echoing.

The restaurant gave the impression, as always, that it was just being renovated, because of the ladders leaning on all sides against the isolated building, all the way up to the eaves, so close together that from afar it looked as though they barred all access; and high above it all another ladder swayed, fastened by ropes to the ridgepole, of rubber, inflated with helium, covered with electric bulbs, which now at night were on.

The restaurant, looking from the outside otherwise like a house no different from the others in the area, stood, with a garden in between, at the foot of the embankment where commuter and express trains traveled at different levels, both above the roofline. The proprietor had secretly, immediately after moving in, uncovered the source of the Marivel brook, located there, as he had discovered from the original maps of the area, and long since integrated into the sewer system, all the way to where it flowed into the Seine at Sevres; he had lined the trickle according to the model of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in front of his earlier tavern. For the first time after almost a hundred years under ground the Marivel has thus become visible again, at least up to the end of his property, and also sounds decidedly different from the way it sounds through the manhole cover down the street (whose course even today, as long ago, faithfully follows the windings of the vanished brook).

On this evening our tavern had a garlanded entrance, not very conspicuous, because so soon after Christmas other doors in the village were also decorated, only differently.

Inside, in a space unexpectedly as large as a barn, the master of the house was standing alone by the fireplace, and it seemed to me I had already come upon him decades ago in his stirring up of the fire, in the same black custom-made suit, standing erect, with a very long poker that allowed him to do what he had to without kneeling. And as always he was showing his Egyptian profile.

But in his face, usually so unapproachable, which he surprisingly turned toward me, there now seemed to be realized what he had once so fervently invoked: “I should like to see a picture of myself as a child, and I mean a picture of me shouting, crying, lost!” There it was. And at the same time he led me, his hand on my shoulder, quietly and amiably as never before into the kitchen, where he even allowed me to help him continue to prepare the food.

I put down the just-found last mushroom of the year, from one of the bomb craters, where my searching had previously been in vain, a so-called blewit, of all edible things the one with the most delicate smell, adding it to the king boletes on the table reserved just for them. Although still deep-frozen, these also seemed freshly picked, firm, heavy, as rosy as Snow White in some illustrations, before she opens her eyes to life again: thanks to the chef, who before freezing them had extracted some of the water (the person who collected them had been someone else, however).

The swinging door to the kitchen was propped open with a chair, and there was thus an unobstructed view of both the entire curtainless restaurant as well as the bar area, separated from it by a screen.

Indoors as well the house was trellised with the proprietor’s ladder collection. By now there was not a corner without rungs, and yet I did not have the same feeling as in that other restaurant in the hills of the Seine, now long closed, where every spot, ledge, niche, windowsill was occupied by a rooster in porcelain, plaster, clay, fabric, in all colors and sizes, neck after neck stretched for crowing, which made my head reel on every visit; the ladders, often set up in pairs, like husband and wife, the latter with the broader end up, had with time become an unobtrusive pattern that at the same time allowed the background happenings to enter their very own clearer, well-rounded sphere.

Such structuring was accomplished even by those fairly numerous pieces which, in conformity to a preference of the collector’s, had unequal spaces between their rungs or were missing some altogether, and even by the few chicken-house ladders from five continents, simply nailed with cross-slats, boards almost without gaps.

But the eye was drawn farthest by the natural ladders, where nothing had been added, at most something taken away, like the numerous tree trunks leaning against the walls, hardly ever more than arm-thick, often left in their bark, merely capped, and the branches on the sides trimmed to just about sole-worthy rungs. And among these, my chief attention was drawn to one that, instead of segments of branch as footholds, had rock-hard tree fungi, alternating, now left, now right, actually grown out of the trunk at rung intervals, and that all the way to the top, firmer to the step than the branch stumps otherwise, a spirited formation, and furthermore in its white-on-white a handsome contrast to the blackish wood of the inn: but the person who had discovered this natural wonder in his meadow, cut it down, hauled it through the woods and over the hills, and added it to the other ladders in the restaurant, that was once again not the ladder fanatic himself.

Otherwise the dining room in the Auberge aux Echelles in Porchefontaine, as I noticed that evening, had gained a column in the middle, which, from the base up, represented a tall, shrouded figure.

And behind it, between the rung patterns, two suburban streets crossed, one leading from the railroad station in the direction of the forest, the other the local main street, with the bus line in the direction of the center and the royal palace. And here, too, outside a wide-open window, there was a birds’ sleeping tree — as I was entering I had promptly received my share of their largesse on my good suit — in the prophet’s view more densely occupied this year than “yours over there,” also more variously, for the sparrows let in other birds as well. Just now it was the moment in the tree for competing for perches and making a racket, along with the whirring of wings like splitting pieces of bark, as indeed the rest of the evening traffic out there was also more lively.

By contrast every one of the chef’s actions indoors took place almost imperceptibly. When pouring seasonings he seemed to reach into midair with both hands. And I did as he did. And likewise I drank tap water while working (“no comparison with the water in your bay”).

And then the familiar signal for another of the petty prophet’s devastating tirades: the humming, without any particularly intentional derision, of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”! And, this breaking off abruptly, there came, as if out of the blue: “What is left to narrate at your eye level? No one deserves a story anymore.” Or: “Where is the person who has not gambled away his potential story during these decades? The number of animal species is declining more and more, and the human species are increasing steadily. And to be interested in these people you would have to be a botanist. But worms, which do not undergo metamorphosis, still belong, according to your Goethe, to the plants. Storytelling survives at most as a disease or as phantom pain. The heavens have disappeared, like a book turning in on itself, the book has disappeared like the heavens turning in on themselves. Life still exists only in the spandrel realm between railroad tracks, runway, and highway. Perhaps for each individual the book of his life continues to exist. But what is in it? A person without ideas is even more dangerous than one without feelings. Ideas: those would be arms, durable — but I see only stumps. Metamorphosis was demanded of you. But haven’t you just continued to swindle? What has fallen away from you but a rotten toenail? You could not be deeper, warmer, more alert in the world than in your book. Are you still in that book? As a storyteller you are no longer needed, and as a chronicler you are being chased away. A ladder, quick, a ladder! were Gogol’s last words. Rainbow light, yes, but no rainbow appears. All of my chillun are weary.”

He fell silent sooner than usual, and I said, “Marina Tsvetayeva wrote of a friend: ‘As a farewell he made a fire in the stove for me’!” Whereupon he replied, “She used to come often to my place at the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in Meudon, and in the middle of the woods she complained that there were no woods there. I wonder whether she is still so upset. On the other hand: if a poet is not upset, she will die.”

“On the other hand”: such an expression I had never heard from him before.

For the moment the prophet had nothing more to proclaim. Previously he would have favored the pedestrians moving past outside as if on wheels with the remark “Scurrying do-nothings!” On this evening, for the moment when they came out of the darkness and took on first form, I saw them as an infinitely repeating ornament, lacking only — but how! — linkage. This linkage, however, seemed achieved with the behind-the-ladder painting, the only one on the restaurant wall, which portrayed the great meteor of Mecca, surrounded by a huge, solid mass of people (a linkage that did not suit me, a deceptive one). And at the same time, outside, very much by himself, a black street sweeper went by, on his head, to protect him while he was vacuuming leaves, earmuffs — but no, it was not yet autumn.

How instructive, how full of visual impressions, such waiting could be; “willing waiter”—that could have been another name for me at one time. On the railroad embankment above our heads trains were passing, for a while almost without interruption, the express trains so fast that one saw only streaks of light flashing by (accompanied by a shuddering in the restaurant from the ground up), while in the commuter trains they were passing, windows and heads remained distinct; altogether a racket that, after my time in the noise oven, spoke to my heart. At the same time, the owl’s hooting from up in the woods, which could be heard intermittently, traced the outlines of all the bays in the world. And on the kitchen radio Arab music was playing, a man and a woman in turn, each snatching the last note from the other’s mouth, as it were.

Then we paused to watch the news on television.

In a war zone, hanging gardens that covered an entire slope, nothing but purple wisteria, in the form of a frozen waterfall, were blown up — what a splintering.

Altogether, there were strange wars going on now: those of the hikers against the bikers; those of the smokers against the drinkers (“the good drinker is proverbial,” the proprietor and prophet remarked, “but good smoker?”); those of letter writers against telephone callers. In another part of the world, in a muddy arena in front of a hundred thousand spectators, a larger-than-life pig and an equally enormous so-called pig fighter were rushing at each other in a life-and-death struggle, with monstrous squealing, trumpeting, snorting, and gasping, in which one could not distinguish what belonged to which. An old priest, from the looks of him the abdicated Pope, climbed into a pulpit for his last sermon, and spoke: “I shall say nothing, so that all may be made new!” whereupon his young successor called out from below, “I am afraid!” A war criminal who had slit the throats of innumerable people had to, while he factually reported this, repeatedly swallow hard. And finally, on the foreign television news program, there was a picture in which nothing was happening but a slow, steady snowing in the Pyrenees or the Alps.

And then the waiters summoned to help out for the evening arrived and were dressed by the proprietor; among them, being held by the hand by his little son, the Russian bus driver and widower, who, looking at the mushrooms on the table, announced that they were nothing compared to those in Russia.

Night came on. As usual here in the suburbs, the bustle outside, just a moment ago that of part of a metropolis, instantly subsided and even seemed almost completely at a halt. At approximately the same time all the bars went dark, and of the shops only the North African grocery store remained open, the illuminated standing scale out on the sidewalk the indication of its being open. A wind from the steppes was blowing. Between trains there were suddenly large intervals, and the buses even became as infrequent as overland buses on their way to a remoteness very far away yet similar to the one here. Up on the railroad embankment, now just a sort of stop, half in darkness, a young man was burning a letter. The couple of pedestrians, seen through the windowpanes, then also turned out to have been pretty much the last. The sparrows, along with the one dove, in the local sleeping tree were rocking silently in the forks of the branches, or rather being rocked by the night wind.

And what happened then? I waited at the ladder bar, at my feet the child Vladimir, who was rolling a spool of thread back and forth across the room. “The children were running beneath the wind”? No: where the children were running was a different wind. In the upper section of the window, above the line of the wooded hills, the huntsman Orion appeared, the blinking of his shoulder and belt stars seeming all the more menacing through the wisps of clouds that hid it for moments at a time. Beyond the horizon a mighty ringing of bells sounded, which was then a squadron of night fighters booming forth from there.

Little by little my friends came through the door, one at a time, at short intervals, from all directions of the compass, and none, so far as I could see and hear, first got out of a vehicle.

They came along so quietly, also inconspicuously, that the child hardly took notice of them, and at any rate was not frightened by them; and I was reminded of my grandfather’s comrades and how they, likewise seemingly on tiptoe, one knee in the air, a finger to their mouth, freshly bathed, in their best clothes, with playful expressions, had stepped over our threshold in Rinkolach for their regular Sunday afternoon card game. At the same time my friends’ step was firm. Only Valentin, my son, came running, for the first time in a very long while, toward me.

And I? Felt at the sight of each of them as if I were being butted from below, at the knees, as if by a goat, from sheer joy. And all of them, I saw, had hangnails on their fingers from fumbling around in their pockets in foreign lands. And each had spent at least one night during the year lying in a mortal sweat. And each had celebrated his birthday alone in the course of the year. And now we celebrated the birthdays together.

The standard word of greeting among us: “And?”

But the singer was still missing. And perhaps I was a drowning man, without knowing it? All of us? Yet it remained true: a catastrophe, when it set in, first made me stiff with fear, then avid for adventure.

What we ate I have already partly given away, and of the rest I shall give away only this: it went with and enhanced it.

And then true: when the moment for storytelling arrived, the friends told of their year things entirely different from what I have told here. Common to them was that in one way or the other I had the notion that all these stories bore some resemblance to turning hay or turning and relayering, again and again, apples in a farm cellar. Each of them, even the stonemason in his festive doublet — his year is written on another page — mentioned his own situation merely in passing, and yet in this intimation the listeners found the world.

The only one who then delved all the way in was the Russian refugee child Vladimir, wide awake as no adult could be. He bellowed like a primeval forest, said his, “And now!” and then, sitting on the floor Indian-style, he shouted, shrieked, joyously hurled his version of the story of the year into the faces of those assembled, amid pounding and a spray of saliva, not comprehensible word for word, but the only one with meter, from a time even before hexameter, a chanting that rose through the air, whereupon, after his concluding shout at just the right moment and his immediately falling asleep, we sat there not only amused but also in slight uneasiness, and his father, by now seated with us at the table, remarked that at home Vladimir sounded altogether different!

To the accompaniment of all the stories, there stood outside in the ladder hinterland, by the opposite sidewalk, in the illuminated circle of the streetlights, in Porchefontaine (a section of Versailles), more luxuriously and generously than in my bay, a delivery truck in front of the mason’s house that belonged to it, with shovel and broom in a pile of sand still in the back, as the emblem of the trade.

As the last daytime object, the fruitery’s scale disappeared from the street; an almost painful moment when, both trays swaying, the pointer trembling, it was carried back into the shop, a bright menhir. In the single remaining lighted window, barely above street level, someone was sitting, older than all of us, with the curtains drawn back at an angle, like a tent opening, and writing and writing. Almost empty and then empty down to their poles — pole-emptiness — the buses to the royal palace drove by. A nocturnal jogger sped by with such strength in her shoulders that in the middle of the street she left a path of her own. At the one set table in the garden, next to a leafless tree, the white cloth billowed, whorled like a pyramid, in the wake of the express trains up above (if any, only these were still running).

On the embankment there the Mongols of Ulan Bator were walking. Among the strollers on the Stradun in Dubrovnik, this evening every one had the same turning point. From their lairs among the birch roots poked the sniffing snouts of the muskrats of the Nameless Pond, by which a lone fisherwoman was sitting, waiting for the magic catch. And in the house beyond the eastern foothills, all sorts of beds were set up, peacefully floodlit, and was it snowing now? no, these were flakes from the chimneys. And each of these scenes was as close as the branches of the December cherry blossoms in the vases before us, to be touched through the rungs of the ladders.

“My dream entered into the fairy tale and became land.” Who said that? I thought it, and in the same breath it was spoken by the chef and petty prophet, long since at the table with the rest of us.

He was then the last to come out with his story, and not merely that of this one year of nineteen hundred ninety-eight.

I have noticed several times already that precisely the cursers, complainers, and cynics, as soon as they forget themselves and fall to telling stories, are the most profound, warm, and all-inclusive storytellers; I have never felt more tranquil inside than when I have been listening to such a Thersites, metamorphosed into an epic narrator.

The proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles of Porchefontaine (formerly Fontaine Ste.-Marie, formerly the Upper Nile) began by laughing, and he was laughing at someone, himself in fact, with that wild anger he usually directed against others. As if energized, he then fell into his humming, but this time instead of the “Ode to Joy” it was the saddest melody I know, called on my Jaunfeld “World-Weary,” a waltz more for dragging around than for dancing, or a dance of the dying, of a woeful, indeed deathly boring slowness. While humming, he yawned in accompaniment, according to all the rules of the dramatic art, and reminded me of that dying man who almost to his last gasp had not left off yawning. It was as if he needed the singer for help in striking up his own song, as indeed the prophets of old, they say, needed a musician before they could open their mouths — only then was the hand of Yahweh held over them.

The prologue to his story went as follows: “With God’s summons to me, my eternal summer came to an end. Why did I not remain with my sheep in the desert of the steppe? Why did I listen to the voice from the burning bush? Or: why did I not simply continue to listen to the voice in the bush and do nothing but continue to repeat it? But as it was, I heard a command in that voice: Take action! and followed it, and set out into history, never-ending, and all of my kind were thus: false prophets. As the lover of history I was the eternalizer of hell. But how to deny history? Does it not matter in what country you raise your head to the heavens? Yes, in my despondency I clung to everything, even to my fatherland. And that merely pushed me deeper still into despondency. In my history time I was the crooked flame, not the straight. And yet all the time I had a photograph of myself in my memory, as a newborn, full of bright joy. But in the actual photo, when I saw it, the person with joy was the one who held me swaddled in her arms: my mother. Why did I not remain where I was from my earliest days, in the desert? The larger the desert around me, the richer the wellsprings of fairy tales within me. When I had the desert sparrows in focus, I was at my peak. The burning bush, that was them.”

Here began the merging of the petty prophet into his storytelling, the first word today, more than a week later, in the new year, still echoing within me: “Afterward”; followed then, hours later — in the meantime the last passerby had long since disappeared from the wind-tattered main street, a three-legged dog, wandering home — by these essentially unconnected sentences: “If you are once driven from your promised land, you will return there only by insistently remaining elsewhere. One who is not in the world is impatient. Odysseus was patient. Gilgamesh knew distant parts. I have ceased to spit fish into the desert. Enough of the prophet. I encounter such people now only in certain suicides. And yet I have seen it: during this century another has passed, is still with us, will continue to make itself felt, for instance in the airy dustiness of the suburbs, here and elsewhere. To move things into their place will also be the New World. At the moment numbers are the last refuge. And thus I see the circle of the world renewing itself in counting. From the two histories at odds, a third will emerge. And how will it go? For instance: When I was still slow. Or: When empty shoe-polish containers were still a treasure. Or: In this year I have not swum in a single river. Or: Once at midday a bird was hopping in the tree like a garment hung on it. Worms capable of metamorphosis represent a huge step in nature, and only then do things get lighter and have more air. Thus it is like a fairy tale when one watches the creatures. And fairy tale means: to have penetrated most deeply into the world. He who fetches the blue from the sky makes it richer up in the sky. I have dreamt: The creator went unnoticed, and the creation took heart. I have dreamt: A savior of mankind would be the great forgetter. I have dreamt: I was a handball player looking for fellow players. I have dreamt: By the way in which someone ate he created a work. I understand all the doers, amok-runners, warriors. But the only vision I know is reconciliation. Why is there no peace? Why is there no peace? The great are those who make peace exciting, not war. Homer today would sing the epic of the souvlaki eaters on the train from Corinth to Athens. And this morning I thought: Incomprehensible that one is not immortal. And on another morning: How certain I am, even in the world’s worst times, that everything is different. And on yet another morning: Even if human history should come to an end soon, even in terror, something will have taken place in that history, from the beginning, and will have continued steadily, so glorious, so childlike, so gripping, so interconnected that it could happen only once; as human history in the universe could not possibly be better and more beautiful. God does not see me because I do not let myself be seen by him. Hair-root wind, from-the-ground wind, Habakkuk wind: it is still there, it still exists. The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope.”

Meanwhile in the night sky floated a cloud in the form of an octopus carapace, as seen long ago in the American Appalachians, with whom? (When a memory comes back to me this way, each time it seems to me someone was with me.) And I thought: To be one with the singer, without having to sing: my ideal. How falling was in me constantly, day after day. And now peace, the great eye. And at the same time: Oh. Goodness. My, oh my! How long had I now been on the road with the book? And the footprints outside in the pale winter grass of the inn garden were mine. I was the mythical beast? Amazement. Eternally amazed, we sat together, each on a ladder rung. The adventure of life showed itself in the form of a single rolling wave in the otherwise tranquil sea.

The last word in that night of Porchefontaine came from the woman from Gerona in Catalonia, Ana, my wife. (I have not yet said that she, meanwhile having climbed down from her pedestal in the middle of the restaurant, was among our company — my first thought: What is to come of this now?”—as was the sweetheart of Valentin, my son, from Baden near Vienna; the wife of Guido, the carpenter, from Hokkaido, Japan; the woman companion of Wilhelm, the reader, that policewoman and reader from Wilhelmshaven on Jade Bay; the Dalmatian husband — or Turkish or Egyptian lover? — of my woman friend Helena; and in addition Filip Kobal, the writer from the shadowy village of Rinkenberg behind my sunny village of Rinkolach, not at all unwelcome to me, for I was happy to have one of my own kind there with me, at least for today and tomorrow — and this time it was I who seized him around the hips and hoisted him from the ground.)

While in the sidewalk window across the way, long after midnight, the old Georges Simenon continued typing away at his Apothecary of Erdberg, and then another automobile driver, obviously lost in search of the palace of Versailles or some other palace, rolled past outside, in his highly polished vehicle, as if not of the present — we later invited him to join us — the woman from Catalonia spoke the sentence with which she had always sealed our breakups, only this time without the usual meaning and undertone, not out of the blue and more to herself, but as if she were taking the word from the mouth of the one who had spoken before her, and were guiding it onward, as gently as possible, as factually: “This is the end.”

Still missing was only my vanished friend, the singer Emmanuel, with his voice, the essential piece.

Was he missing?

“Was he missing?” With that began his new, his Last Song.

— January — December 1993