Then she was the national youth champion in sports, in track, especially hurdlesâthey had that for women, too, thereâin the broad jump, in swimming, in volleyball, and the movements of each continued to vibrate inside her for a long time afterward. It was not only the torn ligaments, the pins in her bones, the stitches that made her give up competitive sports. The only thing she continued to practice was parachute jumping. Yet she did not view that as a sport, and she also kept it as secret as possible; when she described her jumps, she seemed to disbelieve herself, and only when one believed her in spite of that and responded was her enthusiasm kindled.
It was an athlete, after all, who then married her when she was a beauty queen, one of the stars of the Yugoslav national basketball team, a dark, handsome Croatian workingman's son, who had become rich from sports, always alert even when not on the court, as if ready to go after the ball, and yet, “but not because of his height,” shy and with laconic good manners, always greeting people first or letting them go ahead in hotel hallways and entrances; he and she, the daughter of a shabby inn in Maribor (that was where her room under the eaves was), made a dream couple. She described how people underwent a metamorphosis in every place they entered, even if they did not recognize him and her as so-and-so. In the most dreary people's meeting hall on a Sunday evening, with the cold December rain and wind outside, with the waiters baring their teeth at the darkness and waitresses showing at most the white heels of their stockings in their clogs, from the moment she appeared she caused great sighs, beaming smiles, straightened backs, welcomes, people taking their seats. Suddenly invisible lights were switched on or lit, also a fireplace fire, and that in Yugoslavia, and then musicians stepped forward, who had been waiting specifically for her in a back room. People clustered around the couple with great emotion, solicitous
and childish; at last they could show their best, their true side. Who were “they”?â“The peoples.”
Later the two of them set out together for Arabia, where he worked as an engineer building a pumping station along an oil pipeline and after a few years committed suicide, or, as she said, “went of his own accord.” She told the story that way so that the listener, instead of asking why and how, would merely nod.
Â
Â
S
he returned to Yugoslavia, to the city of her birth, for a time managed her parents' inn, engrossed anew in the citywide roof-tile images, and the processions of ridgepole tiles heading toward the Orient. Either she was seen only in the taproom, now in heel-revealing clogs herself, and with grim, dark eyebrows, intentionally penciled in this way, or far away on the wintry back roads, recognizable by her rapid pace, almost like the jerky movement of a speed walker (an athletic discipline), shoulders back and rolling.
Then she became, the first woman in Slovenia to do so, a forester, no,
godzar,
whom, almost as famous as the former Miss Yugoslavia, no one connected with the latter, superior to the men because of her sharp eyes and ears, especially in the forest dusk and night; then married again, a local “co-worker,” both of them in uniform and studded with decorations from the Communist Party; then she returned alone, “single,” without work, to her room under the eaves, where she made herself, as she said, “beautiful again,” simply by looking and reading, and began to draft maps of imaginary countries, on a very small scale, painstakingly precise, with every watering place, cave, pier, cliff, following the example of the map in her copy of
Treasure Island,
which had remained more deeply engraved on her memory than the entire story; drafted, measured, outlined, entered; otherwise did nothing besides her work in the taproom except, on her morning walks along the edges of the fields, dig out
hren
(i.e., “horseradish”) to be used as a seasoning for the “cold-cut platter” in her restaurant, long, always amazingly white-white roots, until one day we met on the bridge over the river and each of us reminded the other of someone else, she me of no one in particular and I she perhaps of everyone but her first husband. With our shared story consigned to the past, my friend married for the third time, after an interval long
enough, she wrote me, for her to feel “pure again,” and she moved to join her husband in the “city where the cathedral is an imperial palace” (Split) and gave birth to her children (two).
Not only did she take on nothing from her new status in life and continue her solitary trips as well as her Treasure Island studies; her children even seemed to be born without her, slipping from her body without labor pains into the world, and this, it seemed to me, was how she dealt with them later, more than merely unconcernedly, I thought, roughly, irresponsiblyâbut who knows?
It was similarly disquieting that in the intervals when she assumed the role of a housewife she became one with a single-mindedness that left no breathing room for anything else. She would be constantly cookingâand overcookingâwashing laundryâwashing out the color âwashing the dishes with such forceful motions that they broke, and she went around, even on the street, along the pier, in felt slippers, every inch the slattern or the caricature of a concierge, with the two ends of her headcloth sticking up like rabbit ears. But might she not be on her way to a parachute jump in this getup? Yes, who was she?
And then again it sounded believable when she said, “The supermarkets and shopping centers are my native turf.” And once she also let fall, as if it were to be taken for granted, that she, who hardly had to worry about money, participated in a housewives' circle like those in American suburbs, in which the women took turns inviting each other to their homes, and combined a convivial afternoon, with no men around, with the selling to each other of plastic kitchen utensils, like peddlers, except that it was in their own houses, she! and in “our Yugoslavia”!
Â
Â
S
he had come to Turkey this time in response to a classified advertisement, either delivering or smuggling to someone in Izmir a Ford Mustang, the luxury car with the galloping wild horse as its insignia.
After this she continued to head east, almost exclusively on foot, not only from bay to bay but just as much through the interior of the country, where on a single plain there were often numerous little brooks and riversâmarked by a succession of high natural fences consisting of reedsâoften in the middle of nowhere, each like a living thing, flowing side by side toward the sea, slowly, and easy to cross (for her).
To stroll across such deltas, to wade, to swim, to dive, with a new watercourse every couple of stages, without bridges or boardwalksâof all the varieties of being underway she found this the airiest and most lofty, “my golden proportion.” These plains were similar to those of the Isonzo, Tagliamento, and Piave rivers in northern Italy, which streamed toward the Adriatic in parallel, each one as the other's neighbor, only the plains here were far more remote, and smaller, and the watercourses, often nameless, were closer together and simply more ancient-seeming, and that not only because of the older history of the region.
It could happen that she did not cross such a brook immediately, but continued in it and with itâshe was equipped for that, or sometimes notâto where it flowed into the nearby bay, where the ocean was often so still that there was a clear boundary between the two types of waves, those of the brook and those of the sea, their encounter with and merging into each other as gentle as imaginable, or that even the individual waves came from the fresh water streaming out into the salty deep, or at least the individual ones that made themselves heard.
For her it was something special to feel this borderline, slightly rocking, against the backs of her knees, at her hips, or on her thighs, one water in front of her, the other behind. (And although she subsequently referred to herself only in the singular, I think she was not always alone, “not absolutely alone.”)
In such spots she also regularly found, underwater, something resembling a treasure, which, however, soon lost this aspect once outside its particular zone.
She was even more powerfully attracted by such river-mouth areas, the miniature ones, than by the ocean.
Â
Â
I
n the meantime, along the paths, in the Turkish villages, she transported her few things on a cart she had “borrowed” somewhere, and thus gave herself the appearance of a pilgrim to Jerusalem.
Then, too, sometimes, when it was already spring, not in order to disguise herself but for protection against the sun and the dust on the road, she went along with a jacket over her head, pulled down over her eyes and mouth, looking thin and so black-clothed that she appeared more peasantlike than any native woman. In the light shining through
the material, filtered by it, the most harsh and naked landscapes were softened as if by an eclipse of the sun, a different sort from the kind we associate with certain battles during the Crusades: a calming one that sharpens one's powers of observation, and she wondered why no one wore sunglasses made of this different kind of transparent material instead of glass.
If she attracted attention at all, it was only because of her bare legs, which, from her knee breeches down, were scratched and rough, even revealing the beginnings of varicose veins, “appropriate,” in her words, “for a Slavic woman.”
Then one morning she was jolting along, her heels almost in the dust, on a mule; trotted by toward evening on a horse; was sitting the following day behind the windows of a bus that were shaking like a kaleidoscope, which also made the countryside look kaleidoscope-like; turned up by the sea a few days later in a thickly wooded, seemingly uninhabited bay, high on the hump of a camel, looking from the other end of the bay like the advance guard of the scattered “Orient Circus” that had lost its way, appearing from close up, with her sooty cheeks, like a guerrilla or simply a charcoal burner's wifeâhigher up in the forest a charcoal pile really is smokingâwho now settles down with all her earthly possessions on a dock in the reeds, by a carefully carved-out channel, little by little joined by similar figures loaded down with bundles, who, like her, seem to emerge from the underbrush, several children in tow, all of them now waiting, in silence, for the weekly motor launch that will carry the group on to Fethiye or Marmaris, where they will change to the bus to Istanbul or to the steamer to Antiochia, Alexandria, Heliopolis, Leptis Magna, while the camel, now riderless, already far away, circles the bay at a leisurely pace, and a child who stayed behind on the shore fills with stones the shell casing found by my woman friend on her way there but then left lying on the beach.
Â
Â
A
lthough she did not keep notes or make sketches or take pictures on her trip, sending her husband and children only picture-postcard greetings and sending me, in loose imitation of Heraclitus, only fragments like “The village of Kokova shouts its poverty out over the sea,”
it seemed to her as though all her movements, back and forth across the country, were being recorded.
With her peculiar style of being on the road, always and intensely focused on the subject at hand, prepared to let herself be surprised and to surprise others, she pictured herself making tracks not only through these regions but simultaneously on a particular map of the world. There each of her present steps seemed at the same moment to be placed as a marker, like the markings of an explorer, and ineradicable, which gave her a good conscience in addition to the pleasure she could experience alone with herself this way: as if her crisscrossing were now a form of work, for the common good if any work ever was.
In addition, as she saw it, not a single step in the course of her journey could be such that it contravened that transfer onto the “trail map” as she pictured it. One false step or thoughtless action, and the entire marker script that she had paced out would be eradicated; her work, her oeuvre, would have been in vain.
From such consciousness she then derived something like an ad hoc ethical imperative: “Conduct yourself on your journey in such a way that you see nothing you do as a violation of your leaving traces.”
Â
Â
B
ut then why did she still expect that the next time she came around a bend she would finally have before her eyes that which she found sorely absent from such a way of life, scandalously lacking? Why did she search, and search, and search?
And from time to time she thought that what she would encounter around the bend would be the ax murderer intended just for her, and her presumed leaving of traces was merely a sickness, part and parcel of that irresponsibility that led her to tell herself that what she was doing should not be judged and punished like the actions of others, simply because she was the one doing it?
And with the outer-space-blue Turkish sky above her, she saw herself as far from where duty told her she should be, indeed as torn away from it, never to return. No matter how faithfully she continued to follow her personal rule, which, again paraphrasing the stutterer Heraclitus from Ephesusâa place already irretrievably left behindâwent as follows: “Go
well!” and which she had mastered and now modeled for the world around her as otherwise only the woman apothecary of Erdberg (from my unwritten novel) could: in such moments she was behaving, in the eyes of the agency responsible for her, like a vagabond, as a disgraceful neglecter of her main concern.