During the day I then sat more and more at one of the windows, which as in all the old southern Slav peasant houses was very close to the ground; leaning one elbow on the unusually broad windowsill, the grass of the little orchard in front of the house at eye level, I was merely an observer; I did not touch a writing instrument once during that year, and even longer.
And just as on that evening among the blocks of stone along the harbor of Piran when I was a young man, I had forgotten all knowledge and also no longer had an opinion or a judgment on anything. My
brother teased me for having become so tolerant. “Where's all your anger gone?”
And it was a fact that my way of just staring resembled that of a village idiot. Whatever I saw, I liked. And in the same fashion I accepted everyone and everything I could. In this I felt not limited but slow-witted. Only as one who was slow-wittedâthis I had experienced again and againâdid the person I was awaken in me.
It implied no contradiction that I continued to enjoy studying, even if that was confined to the leaves and blossoms of the weeds in the area, which altogether, the longer I bent over them, swung into motion in a marvelously varied and yet symmetrically delicate round dance. They had namesâspurge, valerian, hemlock, plantainâyet for now I wanted only to take in the colors and forms, all intermingled. “Remain impressionable” â¦
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he out-of-the-way and rather inconspicuous vegetation was almost the only thing in which I became engrossed during this time.
So how did I define my metamorphosis? There was hardly anything from earlier, from childhood, to see anewâthis I recognized. The old mushroom places in the woods, for instance, were bleak and bare, and the clearings, if any forest was left, had shifted, like moving sand dunes, often without the strawberry and raspberry patches that had previously been there. Even the field paths, along with their deep dust, had disappeared or now took an entirely different course; on the other hand, they had cleared even more logging roads through the hills. The Crab Pond was now that in name only, just as the Inn on the Bend was now located on a straight stretch of road and is supposed to be renamed the Trout.
And in spite of all that, in my eyes nothing about the area had changed. And just as before I was reluctant to block my view of these things with historical reminiscences. Of these, practically the only story people still told was the business with the American soldier, a black, who was dropped by parachute almost at the end of the Second World War, and got so hung up, head down, in a tree by a field that people came running from all direction with flails, scythes, and sickles. I went
only so far as to examine, in the rectory, that turn-of-the-century chronicle in which house by house the occupations of the inhabitants were noted. Again: what was Gregor Keuschnig's metamorphosis?
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ince during this year he understood everyone, even the former SS man and the future one, he soon enjoyed an uncanny general confidence. He joined in all the celebrations, was a favorite partner at card tables, and the fact that later on he often confused himself in his memory with one of the othersâ“Was it me or was it you who was drunk and fell off that ladder in the apple tree?”âproved that he really was part of the village community. (On one thing he even became the expert: on lost objects, in particular the small and smallest ones. He could be counted on to go straight to the right spot in the general area, bend down, and even in the thickest gravel come up with the lost bead or contact lens.)
In his black rubber boots and floppy blue pants, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, he more and more resembled a native, one from earlier times, and he himself, when he sat there with his palm turned upward or sternly looked up and inspected the person facing him, sometimes saw a double image of himself and his grandfather, which the third party then also noticed.
In this region, as out-of-the-way as ever and lacking a middle class, he became a sort of authority, and not only as a finder of lost objects. Finally he was even offered an official position; don't ask me which.
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t the same time he remained aware that he did not belong among people. The same thing would happen to him as in elementary school when he had his only role in a play; as a dwarf among dwarfs in the background, he had nothing to do but sew, and kept pricking his finger (which, to be sure, only his mother noticed), and then in boarding school, where he was chosen to make up the rules for a new game, which turned out to be completely unplayable, and then as a magistrate during his year in court â¦
But only the children caught on to his chronic unreliability, for instance the child next door, to whom, while in the next room the child's
father lay dying, gasping for breath, to calm the child down he read a fairy tale in which someone's heart was torn from his living body.
The person who at that time understood almost everyone, disarmed, reconciled, convinced peopleâthat was not me. So, for the third time: That was supposed to be a metamorphosis?
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ertainly, all that year I felt an authority in me, but far from the community, alone, as I remained for the most part, and often half asleep. If a metamorphosis, then one without deeds; without external consequences.
And at the same time it was the year during which the Rinkolach chess club won the Jaunfeld championship, during which in Carinthia a former partisan was elected head of the provincial government, and the Blessed Virgin appeared to his defeated opponent in the Bärental, during which, on the other side of the border, representatives of the youth of all the southern Slav peoples gathered and sang “Jugoslavija!” again, during which in Germany part of the population committed mass suicide, during which Japan erected its Great Wall, during which the world acquired a second moon, and at the end of which, on the highway bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso, U.S.A., and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, for the second time, after exactly a decade, one and the same Austrian from a South Carinthian hamlet and the same Spanish woman from Catalonian Gerona, after both had in the meantime gone or stumbled their separate ways, were reunited.
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t had become time to leave Rinkolach. Now my place of birth was to be only a temporary stopping place. What else could I do there, aside from whitewashing rooms, chopping wood, picking fruit, except let the sun shine on me, let the rain splash on me through the open front door, let summer and winter come (although I had a special liking for all that)? What did I write there except perhaps, and that merely dictated to my brotherâanything but touch a writing instrument!âone report for the community news bulletin on the annual meeting of the local water company (although I had a hard time with it, cold sweat and groping for words as always).
And the villagers, despite their tactfulness, a characteristic of small farmers, were relieved to be rid of me at last (although oneâthe innkeeperâthen sent word that the village seemed empty without me). At last they, even the priest, even my brother, could be by themselves again. My presence made me the superfluous one; I was all right in their eyes only when absent. Even Filip Kobal in the neighboring village of Rinkenberg, already a popular figure there, found it embarrassing after a while, despite all the cordiality with which he received me, not to be the only writer in the region, and I could understand his feelings.
Only the dead seemed to need me there at home. At any rate, every time I left the cemetery they fell upon me in the form of an angry swarm of flies.
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had a wife, and now I had to go back to her. Without her as my Other, it was all over; this was my thought, an entirely new one for me.
I asked my sister if my son could stay with her a little while longer âor was it she who asked me?âand set out to find the woman from Catalonia, who in the meantime was back at the United Nations in New York. She knew of course that I was on my way to her, but not that I would take a detour by way of the bridge over the Rio Grande, which I did with no purpose other than to catch my breath before our reunion, just as with everyday appointments I had the habit of loafing around beforehand. It was always as if I wanted to gain time that way, but for what?
And why even now, when our reconciliation was overdue? All this while, I had been enthralled by the thought of my distant wife. Compared with her, even my childlike son was only incidental. I had very persistent dreams about us, in which we made love and just stayed together all night long, in majesty and affection. Similarly, during that period of separation, I often felt the woman from Catalonia there with me, invisible, for days at a time, and whether alone or among others, I would again and again turn toward her, looking over my shoulder into the empty corner; unlike in her presence, I made an effort not to do anything that might displease her, and when I did not succeed, my look
over my shoulder became a plea for understanding: “Look homeward, angel.”
Later, when we were newly together again, I had such a conviction that she had been with me in certain situations that when we wanted to recall them together I complained each time about her poor memory.
And now our first exchange of glances was repeated when we met, a day before the appointed time, far from the appointed place, I coming from Mexico, she coming from North America. Although preoccupied with her in my thoughts, I did not recognize her at first, and turned to look at her perhaps only because this woman appeared to me so amazingly “pale and young.” But afterward: heaven help us! And she, too, she told me, had recognized me only when she looked back for the second time at someone who, literally, “looked so pale and young.” How tired each of us was then, how tired.
But only her return banished the last vestiges of the crotchetiness I had developed during my period of solitude. She loosened my knotted limbs and relaxed my false fists, and through her new presence I learned to be there with my entire body in every movement, a forcefulness that at the same time could be as little as a gentle touch.
In the Japanese imperial city of Nara we made up for our skipped honeymoon, and then I lived in her two rooms high up in the Adams Hotel on 86th Street in Manhattan, with a view of the reservoir in Central Park. Our harmony there had a trace of amiable irony about what had been done to each of us by the other during the previous decade, and that seemed to make it durable. (And yet a decade later we lost each other for the second time.)
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oward the end of winter I then had the courage, with her in the next room, to sit down at a desk again. All the snowing in New York also made me want to write, especially in the evenings when the lights of the constantly landing airplanes were switched on and in them one could see from my skyscraper window the snowflakes whirling from the potholes in the street up into the heavens.
It turned out to be my shortest book, also because at that time I expected the narrative to unfold more from my groping my way back
and questioning myself than from a masterful windup and playing of my trump card, with all the components that had seemed to me to have been part of my repertory far too long.
My piece, although ultimately it was supposed to be nothing but a story, was called “Essay on Neighborhood,” and was a sort of description of the life of one person through the voices of the various neighbors with whom he had had dealings since childhood, and then, privately published, under the pseudonym Urban Pelegrin, by my friend the reader, a printer by trade, it became my worldwide success. The Peking
People's Daily
called me a progressive humanist focused on the here and now; the
Osservatore Romano
(Via del Pellegrino, Città del Vaticano) recognized in my language something related to the gaze of a rural laborer, to whom, sitting on the edge of a field after many hours of toil, the only pleasure left is to gaze at the sky;
The New Yorker
printed it in English translation before the book appeared, and invited me to a party at the Algonquin Hotel (except that by that time I was long since here in my Paris suburb bay, and did not want to leave anymore). Only
The New York Times,
swollen with daily reality, could not find its reality in mine, and on the other hand saw my way of writing as too emotional, or too cold, or too subtle, or too old-fashioned. And my enemy in Germany, who meanwhile had become the much-flattered first-name buddy of my former publisher (but even before that, whenever I went to see the publisher, my chair would still be stinking hot from the other man), exclaimed, when I crossed his pathâno, he had no path, he was everywhere and nowhere âas he deviled by, with the rolling eyes of a mad dog that to his chagrin was kept away from the object of his rage by a fence: “So, Herr Pelegrin-Keuschnig, how's sales?” (Once again he thought he had outsmarted me; what he did not know was that Keuschnig was also an assumed name. And as always he, otherwise so adept at sniffing out and tearing to shreds, lost the scent when it came to things that mattered, for these have almost no smell.)
I had actually written my little book simply by lying down and snapping my fingers. All the sentences took shape when I was half awake or dozing, drifting in and out of consciousness, and whenever a sentence came clear, I would jump up and write it down. Word after word emerged as soft as it was immutable, and up to the final sentence, when
in the next room, where my wife and lovely neighbor was sitting, a summer wind already wafting through the open window was rolling the pencils back and forth on the table, not a single one needed to be changed.