When the woman from Catalonia and I, on the evening of the same day, were waved by the elevator operator on the top floor of the Adams Hotel into his brass cage, and on floor after floor during the leisurely trip down, more of the monthly and yearly guests got on, until at the end all races and ages were represented, it was decided that the moment had come for us to be with our child again.
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ew York at that time was the last big city in which I felt at home.
But in the meantime every town offered itself as the hub of the worldâmuch as more and more individuals, without particular deeds or natural gifts, took on the roles of heroes and srarsâincluding Sp. on the Drau, renamed on the signs Sp./Millstatter See, where I went to pick up Valentin, while the woman from Catalonia, who could break out in a rash at the mere sound of Austrian dialect, waited for us in Paris, deserted now in August.
My sister lived in one of the satellite developments in Sp., built in what had once been the meadows along the Drau, now officially called the Drau River, and with her husband operated the only restaurant in the area, located in the next block.
On a late afternoon, in unwaveringly harsh light that reflected blindingly off the densely parked cars, having reached this wasteland, covering the last stretch on boards laid over mud, after I had got lost again, the same as every other time, and had asked myself why in such places, despite the impressionability I was always cultivating, I immediately lost my keen eye, I saw, sitting under an umbrella on the concrete terrace of the Blue Lagoon Bistro, the only guest, a young man whose face from a distance immediately came within a finger's breadth of me, as sometimes faces do that bend over you in the moment of waking up, and only when he jumped up, with a long-contained cry of dismay, did it turn out to be the child's. It was the last time up to now that at the sight of me Valentin came running, and from a standing position, and how he ran.
(Much later he told me that at that moment he had finally seen me in my weakness; he could never stand it when I acted strong; even when I held out my arms, he wanted to push them down.)
He was wearing glasses, and the once-dark gaze of distrust had been transformed into the calm, watchful gaze of a researcher. My sister stepped out through the beaded curtain in the doorway, invoked the name of the Madonna, and disappeared, for much longer than necessary, and that, too, was something new: that she, so alien to every tradition, having renounced any origins, voluntarily and self-confidently nothing but a figure in this no-man's-land, here manifested the ageless behavior of Slavic village women: in her surprise and pleasure she first went off and hid. It accorded with this image that she then returned with bread and smoked ham, served up by her husband, a former ship's cook, whom my sister constantly put down in my presence, so much so that it was only from quick looks they exchanged that I could tell how much they loved each other. (Though he later left her alone in her hospital room on the day she died; he said she had already long since been unconsciousâbut I am certain that she was conscious to the last, that all the dying are conscious up to their last moment.)
While we sat there together, until long after the first batâthey had them even thereâthe first mosquito, and the first star, I secretly resolved that if “my sales” allowed, I would help her buy another eating place, on a public square, like the Fontaine Ste.-Marie, or, if she preferred, at the end of a dock on the Wörther See, with Udo Jürgens as a regular guest arriving in his motorboat and with me as silent partner.
And once during this evening I asked my son, “Where are you?” and he, who in between was serving the few guests, pointed by way of an answer at himself, with both hands, but not at his chest but into his armpits, and even stuck his fingers in there.
And then he described, with my sister as a witness, how I had done everything right as a father. But I knew better.
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hat has always suited me best is to narrate from one day to the next, as the
Odyssey
goes from dawn to the rising of the stars, and to continue this way the next morning, or in general just to treat a single day in this fashion.
But how to narrate the decade from our reconciliation to the beginning of this current year, since which I have been sitting here at my desk, and in the briefest way possible, for the story of my seven friends scattered over the world, as well as the chronicle of my year here in the bay, has been crowding in and knocking all this time, at every threshold? I shall try. I will do it.
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s my, and our, future landscape, now mine forever, only the hilly suburbs here, open in all directions, could even be considered, with their unstuccoed clay-colored sandstone houses, the settlements poking like long or short fingers into the forest dunes that defined the visual image, and with a silence that made one prick up one's ears.
Nobody would know us there, and we would be all the more available to each other. The woman from Catalonia wanted to be separated from Paris by one more range of hills than the previous time, my son wanted to go to a “school in the woods,” and my final choice of a place satisfied even my stern ancestors: on a day early in the spring of the following year, instead of falling upon me again as a swarm of flies, they peeped out at me somewhere among the hills in the form of pussywillows overhanging the path, and amiably reached out to shake my hand as I passed.
That was the day on which, after a fall and winter spent searching, I had found the house, but was still in doubt, not because of the houseâI had immediately felt at home in it, along with its hollow, as the only right placeâbut because of its more immediate surroundings. It put me off that houses of the sort that attracted me were so much in the minority. Only en masse, one next to the other, street after street, did these fieldstone structures, in their slight geometric variations, retain a powerfully fairy-tale-like, very immediate character. Here, however, where they were few and far between, they seemed like leftovers from a bygone time, set apart from the mostly stuccoed, yet grotesquely different blocks from the periods between and after the world wars, many with names legible from a considerable distance (although I immediately scraped the name off my house, in the meantime I have come to be fond of some of them after all, for instance “My Sufficiency,” “My Cottage in Canada,” “Sweet Refuge,” “Family Ties,” “My Horizon,” “Our Sundays,” “My
Parachute,” and recently I dreamed of a house in the bay with the name “My Births”).
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nd once during the decade a crow's feather landed on the Absence Path; the older men in the bar called Fountain without Wine smelled snow one wintry evening, but it did not come; my petty prophet, who had meanwhile moved to yet another restaurant, scared off his guests with a tin cutout of a Moor by the front door, which blew over in the slightest wind; the Three Stations Bar was gutted by fire; a military airplane crashed right nearby in the forest before it could land at Villacoublayâbeforehand its huge shadow over the house; I boxed the ears of my almost grown-up son after I had picked him up at the police station, where he had been taken for shoplifting; I threw a burning branch over the fence of a neighbor, the noisiest of all; during the Gulf War no trains passed through the tunnel to Paris for so long that the suburb seemed cut off from the city, as if at the end of time; my son left immediately for Vienna after his last examination at the Lycée Rabelais, halfway into the forest of Meudon; my sister died; the frozen-over Nameless Pond pinged from my skipping pebbles by myself; the woman from Catalonia left me for the second time; having reached the top of the transmitter here, the highest vantage point around Paris, for which I had special permission, I confirmed for myself that my suburb actually did cut into the wooded hills in the form of a bay, more remote than a village on a fjord or a research station in the Arctic; and this morning, in the construction fill of the Absence Path, I came upon the fragment of an inscription with the very words I recall from a tombstone, meanwhile disappeared from the graveyard, back home in Rinkolach: “Returned to His Fluid Ancestral Home.”
That was more or less the story of my metamorphosis. When I reflect upon what I have experienced in my existence up to now, it was neither the war during my childhood nor our flight from Russian-occupied Germany home to Austria, nor my youth-long imprisonment in the boarding school, nor, after many feverish attempts, that first quiet line that made me certain I was now on the right path, nor being with my wife or my child, but only that metamorphosis.
Why does it seem to me that this is the only thing I have ever experienced? I do not know, just as after writing this down I do not know any more about it than before. At any rate, the other happenings came about like something that had been foreseen, while the metamorphosis seized hold of meâlike an accident? an assault?âno, as a completely unknown force it seized hold of what was deepest inside me, which only in that way became distinguishable, like something in the dark lit up by lightning. There was no deeper inside than that.
And what else? Nothing else. Even the word “metamorphosis” came only long, long afterward. But then why am I convinced that it is the only major thing worth telling about that happened to me in my fifty-six years of life, on five continents, on two moons, on the highest peaks on Mars and in the hottest springs on Venus, and why does everything else, no matter how inspiring or devastating, strike me as incidental?
How wretchedly cut off from the world I found myself time and again, how blissfully at one with it, and yet only yesterday I thought: “I have never deserved to be hurled to the ground except back in my metamorphosis period!”
At intervals I continued to view myself as the only one with such a story, for otherwise wouldn't it have been told long since, and have become a classic? Or had I, on the contrary, had innumerable forerunners, and was I perhaps merely the first who had not perished in the process?
But didn't my story therefore cry out all the more urgently to be told? Or, again on the contrary, had all those who had had this experience survived and yet found nothing to tell? Or were they afraid to try?
Hadn't I, too, felt a great deal of resistance to continuing the narrative, as if it were somehow improper? And is it not true that I got into this only against my will?
What I do know: that metamorphosis, or expulsion, or merely a new orientation, has been used up. It seems to me that I have lost or frittered away all of its benefits: patience, mental acuity, magnanimity, boldness, empathy, receptivity, tolerance, ability to disarm, to forget. Or have I just muddled along halfheartedly? Failed from the beginning to make the right start?
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his morning I saw the first hazelnuts of the year here on the edge of the woods in the bay. The little ovals in their pale green neck ruffs reminded me of the same hazelnuts from my metamorphosis period, as one of its visual images, and I thought: “That was a time of freshness! Now is not a time of freshness anymore, and not only for me. But who knows?
What does a foreigner know?”
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n to the story of my friends! Let them surprise you.
The Story of the Singer
T
he singer was about my age, and wanted to go on singing as an old man, like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.
And yet there had already been quite a few moments in his life when he would have been ready to die on the spot. This happened to him once after a night without sleep in a one-engine plane over the source of the Mississippi, in a morning blizzard, when, thinking of all those before him who had perished in this manner, almost customary for singers, he wanted to give the plane an additional jolt, as it tossed about in the darkness, so as to hasten the crash and be scattered in all directions, with the snowstorm outside so thick that even in the long-drawn-out flashes of lightning, prolonged further by the whirling snow, one could not make out whether the flakes were falling down or up. Instead, he promptly composed a song, his ballad, which had to be screamed almost from start to finish, with the title “Why Are You Not Serious?”
Another time he had been similarly willing to die in blissful exhaustion after a concert, not even a very large one, in the school auditorium of a midsized city in Switzerland, where (after that unfortunate period when people kept throwing themselves at him, he played at an even greater distance from them, often even with his back to them) for the
encore he unexpectedly mingled with the audience, hoping a knife would be thrust into his heart, sensed that one person or another in the crowd might be the one, recognizable by his tense absentmindedness in the midst of all the elation, and even challenged him by stopping just far enough from the would-be assassin to give him room for the windup, and proffering his chest, as if that were part of his song; even at the exit, not a private one but the general one, he looked around, unprotected, in the lingering crowd for the “disturbed yet purposeful face” one could count on in such situations: “And in Switzerland my stalker was a woman every time”; and such a woman actually did pull a knife on himâexcept that the singer, prepared for this as he was, including dying, in that same breath, not at all bereft of will as he had thought, knocked it out of her hand. (The song occasioned by this incident began with “I'll die at the hand of a woman.”)
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similar openness to death also took hold of him on that January day during his solitary trip through Scotland, as he was making his way on foot through the hilly fields above Inverness.
He had been working all fall on an album, was exhausted, yet also in a good frame of mindâless or differently irritable than usualâbut still had enough breath, as was generally the case after an effort that excluded everything else, for a further undertaking, which promised for once, in contrast to his trademark worksâballads, angry tirades, sung narrativesâa pure song, in fact “The Last Song.”
For now, however, he was simply glad to be out of the studios and the big cities. Precisely because of his (powerful, not loud) music, which he wanted to authorize to be played only in places where it belonged, he was elsewhere extremely sensitive to noise, and he found it soothing to be away from the clacking and scratching of high heels on the streets of Paris and London and, after a short visit to his mother in Brighton, to have escaped to this Scottish rubber-boot landscape. Even the women, the young ones, came toward him here in rubber boots, and not just in the fields, and from their footsteps there was a sighing behind him, and accordingly he, too, went about in rubber boots.
It was a mild winter day, then warm as he mounted the slope, and
he, in Scotland for the first time, at least out in the country, thought at the sight of the grovelike rhododendron bushes along the path, blowing in a southerly way and greening in the rainy wind, that it was always this way here. At the crest of the hill he spread his arms, turning his palms upward. The ridge was broad, almost part of the highlands already, and he still had to swing himself over several granite walls, chest-high because he was so small, until, in the narrowest sheep pasture, he stood facing the stone circle of the Celtic burial ground.
He did not approach it immediately, even avoided focusing on it at first, just gazed around for a long time. A couple of oaks, the only ones in these bare surroundings, groaned, and in the northern distance, beyond the arm of the sea, or firth, by Inverness, snowcapped mountains shone clear. In all the pastures roundabout were sheep, but in one, just as crowded and of about the same light color, was a herd of swine, munching away, on muddier ground; and instead of the usual dog among the sheep, there were several hares, distributed evenly among the herds.
The singer took off his woolen cap, stepped up to the one stele that stood twice as tall as the others, outside the circle, and leaned his head on it. Against his forehead he felt not so much the stone as the lichen, spreading, rust-colored, and scratchy. The predominant sensation became the beating of his heart, noticeable at the spot where he was touching the rock, filling his entire body, pulsing, pounding, as if passing into the interior of the column, and at this moment it would have suited the singer if the tall stone had given way and crushed him. He even shook it, without success. But this time no line of a song came to him instead, or only a word for one, “present,” or a fragment, “On the road ⦠practice the present.”
When he opened his eyes, two sheep with raven-black faces were staring up at him from the grass. He squatted down at a distance from the circular cairn and shared his provisions with them, bought in the railroad station of Inverness; the apple he ate himself. Thus removed from the burial place, he became witness to one of those tenths of a second from so-called prehistoric times when the main stone, set up by the Celts or someone, became perfectly perpendicular, as it had remained standing through the millennia to that moment. It grew quiet on the knoll, including the bleating and grunting.
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till expectant of death, the singer, much later, set out to return to the valley, again cutting across fields, without paths or even wild-animal tracks. He crossed in a zigzag, from one field to the other, every thickly wooded gorge, where one false step in the slipperiness could have made him disappear, never to be seen again, on the bottom, under the unbroken canopy of leaves over the bog. And on the other hand he took each step carefully, and if he had fallen he would have kept his balance and would, broad as he was, have rolled over and over like a ball and landed softly on his feet.
He moved through the often thorny thicket in such a way that he did not receive so much as a scratch, and in his folk-dancer-like agility he would not even have been prey for one of the descendants of the pumas once released into the Scottish hills and surviving in these almost inaccessible gullies. The singer made his way along his path with the help of only his two legs, for he needed both hands to strike the Jew's harp, the only instrument besides a harmonica that he had taken along on this hike.
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own in Inverness he fetched his backpack from the locker and took a room in the hotel that formed a part of the monumental granite railroad complex and had a suitably fine lobby with a grand staircase and chandelier.
No one recognized him, and no one would recognize him. That was his decision.
When after a shower he stepped out onto the square in front of the hotel, it was already long since dark, and it was raining, heavily and at the same time inaudibly. Having ducked into a rear courtyard to listen, the singer said to himself that he had never heard such a quiet rain as this Scottish one. All the louder the cackling of the sparrows, which were fighting head to head for a sleeping perch up on the ledge of the main church, or were chattering with each other before going to sleep. Like the plane tree here by the suburban railroad station, in Inverness the ledge was far and wide their only place for the night. There as here
the sidewalk underneath was encrusted with their thick white droppings.
In a pub he leaned against the bar like the others and drank a beer, glancing occasionally at the bull's-eye when a dart landed in it. As everywhere, the singer could not be distinguished from the local people, except that he might be from farther out in the country. When he heard “Mr. Tambourine Man” coming from the jukebox at waist height, he thought that the songs of thirty years ago had painstakingly worked things out, while in the meantime they all sounded so glib, his as well? The beat he tapped on his thigh with his fingers did not fit the song.
He consumed his evening meal deliberately, with a bottle of wine over which he sat for hours, almost alone in the dining room at the window of the best restaurant in Inverness, as the new justice of the peace? architect? soccer coach?, directly before his eyes the river Ness, which seemed disproportionately wide for this rather small town. Besides, the river was rising and seemed to be galloping toward its nearby mouth at the North Sea. The water was of a blackness that did not come merely from the darkness outside, and also merely as the color of moor water would not have had such density and brilliance. The rushing from the January rains had to contribute to the effect. To accompany the mighty current, which he felt at the same time in his arms, the singer beat out the steady refrain “Winterâwater, winterâwater, winterâwater.” Then he reminded himself that he was on an island, though not a very small one, and that for him, a person from the continent (with an English mother), an “island river” was a child-wondrous concept, especially one that raged this way.
The waiters, of whom there were several, had meanwhile not budged from his side. Instead of with a credit card he paid in cash, a thick packet of which, damp at the edges, he had loose in his pocket; the clip that went with it was dangling from his ear. He did not want anyone to be able to trace his whereabouts.
On the wooden bridge outside, of a length suitable for a metropolis, staring at the peat-black turbulent water, the singer recalled how once before, after a sort of concert on a cruise ship with a group of rich Americans in a Turkish bay, fairly far out, he had jumped overboard at
night in his clothing and shoes and had swum toward land through all the lively motorboat traffic, looking neither to right nor to left, coming up for air with eyes closed, over and over again, in defiance of death.
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n the opposite bank of the Ness the suburbs began immediately. In one spot the sky had cleared, with a star so bright it had a ring around it like the moon: Sirius. Below, in one of the huddled suburban houses, a window was open to the mild air. An old woman in a housecoat was leaning out as if for a long time, and out of the silence she and the singer greeted one another.
Up the hill, along the Caledonian Canal that ran along halfway up, he stepped into a suburban pub, still open, though probably not for long; inside it looked like someone's living room, with a fire burning in the fireplace, on whose mantelpiece stood a collection of books with the
Pickwick Papers,
one of the books he had in his tower house,
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and
The Bobbsey Twins in Echo Valley.
He sat down with a glass of whiskey in a wing chair and gazed at the only other guests, a very young couple who kept sticking their tongues down each other's throats, undeterred by the coughing and choking this caused. Having finished with that, they promptly moved apart, as if their game were over. The girl leaned back in the shadows, and the boy turned to the singer and asked him, out of the blue, in a perfectly calm, also polite voice, whether he was one of the lumberjacks. In response to his nod, the young man told him that he was a Gypsy, had come here as a child from Poland, and was in the process of training as a forester near Inverness. But in Scotland there were hardly any forests left, whereas after the Ice Age the entire land had been covered by the great Caledonian Forest, first bright with birches, then darkened by the Scottish firs, then mixed with oaks. Probably he would be the first Gypsy forester.
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p by the canal, the door to an automobile repair shop was still open, and the singer, who liked to look into such places, saw in the brightly lit bays a few young fellows at work, with a song coming from the radio of a car being repaired, accompanied by the clang of tools.
He listened attentively, clenching his fists in agitation, and only when he was back in the darkness again did he realize that the song was his.
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hrough his sleep whistled the trains down below in the station, and he dreamed the usual dream about his children, scattered across the countries and the continents, who, entrusted to him, had under his very eyes torn themselves away from him and disappeared for good. This time, after a few swimming strokes, they sank in clear water, knee-deep, and remained impossible to find there.
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he next morning there was a rainstorm, and although it was part of the singer's routine to expose himself to something unpleasant, to withstand something each day, he did not set out on foot as planned toward the snow-covered mountains in the north, but took a bus of the Highland Terrier Line, with Dornoch as his destination. In such a storm, unlike in high wind, there were no sounds to be heard while walking. And besides, it was coming from the west and not from the north, where he would have had it blowing beautifully in his face. From Dornoch he would tramp westward.