And then the years during which he worked alongside his father as a carpenter, outdoors, feeling uneasy only on the day of the topping-out,
not because his father would get drunk again, but because his father would not be as jolly from the drinking as all the others.
And then another such cold morning before he set out for the university, across the border to Vienna, when his parents planned to dress him ceremoniously in the cutaway of the godfather who had died in the war, which they had been keeping in a trunk up on the wooden gallery for just such an occasion, black with fine gray stripes and heavily padded shoulders, and this often tried-on garment, which previously had always been still too big and heavy for him, when it was unfolded this time suddenly hung there in tatters, shredded by moths.
Then came the many years until the moment, when, on the great plain down below by the limestone base of the karst, in Aquileia, which had been so close all the time and had once been very familiar, and not only from school excursions, behind the basilica that stood all by itself back in the grasslands between the mouths of the Isonzo and the Tagliamento, at his feet the former Roman harbor filled with the frogs' gentle evening croaking, he found himself completely drawn into that antiquity of which he had previously been conscious only in bits and pieces, actually only a single piece, from a homey, swamp-black corduroy road, a section of alder, particularly swamp-resistant (according to Vitruvius)âthe one moment when those couple of logs half buried in the path, which every time had announced something to him rather than reminded him of something, now became one with the once-mighty city of Aquileia, the metropolis of the ancient world, which at that moment did not seem at all vanished to him; it was now, it had arrived, it was his world, his future field of work: “Classical antiquity and I are one.”
And then waking up early today in Japan's oldest city, where not even the temples struck him as ancient, for the wood, even on façades thousands of years old, had, as everywhere in this country, been replaced during this century. And looking down through the knotholes in one of the temple galleries, he saw, lying on the ground, the pine needles mingled with chicken feathers and corn kernels from the courtyard at home in San Pelagio or Sempolaj.
And from one of the pagoda towers, story after story, an unbroken chirping of sparrows, of whom only now and then a little flurry became visible, gray on the likewise gray roof. The doves tripping along in the gravel like first drops of rain. At the sight of the nostrils of a Buddhist
holy figure, a desire to see a forest filled with apes the next day, for instance in the mountains around Kyoto.
On the way to the station in Nara, my friend encountered a Japanese woman with freckles, at which he thought, “I have a woman!” A sidewalk sweeper crossed the entire broad street to sweep up a single grain of dust on the other side. Behind a bamboo fence the first Japanese dog growled at him. Many of the passersby were carrying on silent conversations with themselves, which, to judge from their hand gestures, consisted chiefly of mental arithmetic. And, as everywhere, children balancing on the curb. On the evening train to Kyoto, talk going across the compartment, as if from starting blocks.
During his walk on the bridge over the already familiar Kamo River, the night wind billowed the sleeves of the mendicant friar there, his face invisible under the rim of his hat. From the open entryways of the buildings, especially the restaurants, wafted the smell of freshly washed floors. On all the city bridges traffic similar to that in Hong Kong or elsewhere, but under them, among the pebbles on the banks, here and there a frail elderly person, and the thought: “When I am that age, I, too, will go under the bridges.”
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he no-man's-land he had photographed that day had been marked by the concrete foundations of a long since dismantled barracks, emergency shelter after an earthquake, lying there a single stick of wood that was on fire, sending up a tall column of smoke, repeatedly decapitated by the wind. And then, at an afternoon No play, in which the actors kept speeding up their monologues so much that his heart began to race, he had seen another mask that showed him a self-portrait: that of a man caught up, according to legend, “in a one-second dream encompassing his entire life and at the same time aware that, on the contrary, this entire life itself is such a dream”âthe expression on the mask one of tremendous astonishment. And outside the city again, on the edge of the wilderness, a Buddha lurking behind the jungle foliage appeared to him as the image of his parents involved in their almost silent work at the bottom of their cultivated doline, where even he, the son, had for decades been surprised and also startled by the faces of the two of them, behind sunflowers, pole beans, cornstalks. And at the end, at the stage
of going under the bridge?, it seemed to him as though on this day his many voices had come together into oneâif only a rather feeble one.
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es, the time was coming for his building. Except that on the journey he had little by little lost all his tools. And not for the first time in Japan my friend thought, “I'm not even born yet!” It was certainly the first time that he then thought, “I haven't been anywhere yet!”
The Story of the Priest
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n an autumn evening in the current year, he, who otherwise dreamt consistently only on the nights of hoarfrost between Christmas and the festival of the Three Kings, had had a dream that stayed with him, in which he was not a priest but a nobody, a creature, his naked self. He stood there in harsh artificial light before the altar of his parish church, and unexpectedly there came from the sacristy a villager who had recently died, after a miserable death struggle lasting several days. He was larger than life and ordered him to his knees to receive the host. In the dream he had not knelt since his childhood, let alone received the “body of the Lord,” and for those very reasons the moment became special to him. In addition, the voice of the deceased, who, in priestly garments, had become the administrator of the sacrament, was commanding in a way that he had never heard in a terrestrial being. What this voice told him in the dream it immediately confirmed for all time: no way led around this food; to consume it was absolute necessity; without it you are lost! And although upon hearing this voice for the first time in much too long he felt a shudder of awe go through him, it was not just a bad dream; he did not wake up, but slept on, at first trembling and quaking, then peacefully, and finally blissfully.
That night he got up even earlier than usual, also because he had to
work on his sermon for Sunday. From his desk he had a view of the back of the rectory and an orchard, which then, as was usual on the Jaunfeld, merged into meadows and fields without more ado. After morning Mass and his morning classes at the school in B., he planned to pick apples that afternoon and take them down to the cellar, without help, all by himself. And what else today? Lunch with the much younger priest of the parish on the other side of the Drau, in an inn halfway between them; another visit to a dying parishioner; an evening Mass for one who had passed away in Rinkolach.
If he looked in another direction, he could see the unmade bed in his bedroom, which would remain thus until late at night. It was cold in the two rooms, the only ones that were still lived in; no housekeeper to light the stove; and he himself did so only when company came, and even then often not.
In his sermon he wanted to challenge the Pope, in all seriousness, and that soon warmed him. For not long ago the man in the Vatican, in connection with a war in which enemy soldiers had raped and impregnated women, had called upon the women in question to love these children and bring them into the world and raise them in this spirit. What upset the priest was less the assumption that the women would carry to term these embryos conceived in violence than the command to love them. Could something like love be imposed from without, and furthermore from on high, publicly? To praise love, as the apostle Paul had done once and for all in his epistle to the Corinthians, was one thing; but to declare it a law and proclaim it as such, wasn't that entirely different? Certainly he could well imagine that one of these women gradually, or more likely suddenly, might be seized (“surprised”? “afflicted”?) by a sort of love for such a fruit of her womb. But first of all, wasn't that her own business, yes, her secret, and no one on the outside, not even the deputy of God on earth, could presume to approach a human being with a commandment to love. Or at most in private, as priest and pastor, like him, and then not in the form of a commandment but perhaps as a mere possibility, a little pointer.
He, the priest, was angry at his Pope for speaking of something like love in prescriptive terms, and he wanted to express that openly in his sermon (although precisely thereby his outrage would be perceived as
part of a game). Wasn't the love of a violated woman for this alien seed more the stuff of a story, a novella, than of a sermon from the pulpit? To be told only long, long after the event? Or perhaps not even in eternity? Something to keep unspoken, a matter only for the mother herself? And might not such love, in the cases in question, have long since gone silently and fervently to work, only to be desecrated by the papal edict? But was such a love even capable of being desecrated, by no matter what interference?
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he greatest outburst of anger he had witnessed up to now in his life had come from a priest. It had happened during religion class, in the school in his native village, and the perpetrator had been that priest who was the epitome of gentleness, and not only in the eyes of the children. Instead of singing a psalm as usual, to put himself and the class in the right mood for the reading and narrating from the Bible, he posted himself in front of the class, at first without a word, his briefcase closed and his face disconcertingly red, and it became redder and redder as he broke into shouts so loud that they shocked even these farm children, accustomed to quite a bit from home. Every single one of them cringed, and was overcome with fear and horror, which grew from moment to moment, for the entire hour; for that was how long the priest screamed at the assembled children, without pausing for breath. At first they could make out only individual phrases here and there, like “Judgment Day,” “brood of vipers,” “end of the world,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth,” “spew forth!” and only near the end, when he began to tell a story, though still full of wrath, raging and yelling, did it become clear what this was all about: the previous day, upon entering the deserted church, he had caught one of the village children in front of the altar, thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue at Christ on the Cross. But it was not a simple childish prank; the longer the priest raved, the more the listeners came to see it as the worst offense possible, which could lead only to eternal damnation. Although he indicated that he had recognized the blasphemer, and he was seated there among the others, he did not name him and even avoided looking at anyone in particular. Even though the last word he spoke in this hour was “Vengeance!”
repeated several times, he stressed that the avenger would be someone else. And they all felt implicated; each one slunk away, sure that he was guilty of sticking out his tongue at the Lord from the shadows, and maybe even spitting at Him; even he, who later became a priest himself, and in those days was already the “child of Siebenbrunn,” the one with natural piety, had at the very least been an accessory to the crime, and from now on it was all over for him with what had been in his eyes the “greatest fun,” the Mass?
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ot only a believer but also a little propagator of the faith, or one who animatedly told anyone who would listen about his faith, that was what he had been as the child of Siebenbrunn.
The church, at some distance from the village, at the foot of a hill from which, as the place's name indicated, in bygone times seven springs had actually burst forth, next to the farm of his father, who was also the sexton, from the beginning represented for him an extension and special part of the family holdings; very early on he was entrusted with the key to it: over the centuries erosion had piled up earth around the little sanctuary, more and more cutting down the size of the door; the threshold had been raised, and as a result the keyhole was low enough for him to reach. But for a long time he kept his distance from everything inside the church, and touched nothing. It was his father alone who rang the bells, laid out the priest's robes for Mass, changed the flowers, lit the candles. The boy did not even feel drawn to be an acolyte, and whenever he substituted for someone, finding himself unexpectedly too close to the altar, especially the gilded tabernacle, in whose hollow interior he could actually sense the Holy of Holies, he would feel like an interloper; and he became terribly clumsy, pouring wine on the priest's fingers, spilling incense on the altar steps, and during the entire Mass was scooping up the pellets there before the eyes of the congregation.
The child of Siebenbrunn felt at home only way in the back of his church, whether during Mass, in the course of which he regularly experienced an altered state, by the “Kyrie eleison!,” if not sooner, or when contemplating the old paintings, also the frescoes and wood carvings. Before he even learned to spell, he took the situations they portrayed as
fact: that was how it had been, that was the only story worth telling, and even if he later found that it was not documented in the specific wording of the Bible, he continued to read the pictures from his church as piously as the Bible. It was thus a certainty that when Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan, an actual dove spread its light-radiating wings in the clouds overhead, that upon Jesus' entry into Jerusalem a youth waved to him from the top of a tree with a palm frond, that when the Blessed Virgin breathes her last, her soul will escape from the lower part of her body in the form of a tiny child, who will in the same moment have already taken his place on the lap of the Almighty up above in the firmament.
And the child of Siebenbrunn told these stories to others for years and years, including to those who passed through that desolate place by chance. He invited the other person, the adult, into his church, so to speak, positioned him in front of the pictures, and recited and intoned their stories from the background, in a voice that emerged from an uninterrupted conversation with himself, which simply happened to become audible from time to time. He believed without reservation and serenely in these picturesâthere could be no greater serenityâand lived in a continual state of joy, perceptible also to outsiders. Nothing could shake the faith of the child of Siebenbrunn; it was innate. With its first mirroring in the pictures of faith, life “was manifested,” as it said at the beginning of the First Epistle of St. John, a saying he later adopted as his motto. With him, at any rate, a loss of images remained impossible.
Or perhaps not? That “life was manifested”: did it not apply to “the Word” rather than to images? Had he, the priest, kept joy alive for himself? “Not really” (he now thought, in the middle of morning Mass, at the admonition “Lift up your hearts!”), “or at least not always.”
Did the child of Siebenbrunn still exist? Where was he? And what had become of him? No, nothing could become of him other than what he already was in the beginning! But then how did it happen that nowadays, if he returned to the area of his childhood at all, he tended to avoid his Siebenbrunn and instead sought out the church in the neighboring village, which was almost devoid of pictures, a church that had Job as its patron saint?
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ot once had the child imagined in those early days that the priesthood would be anything for him, although that gentle and hopping-mad local priest had had an eye on him in this respect for a very long time, and then even treated him openly as one of the chosen, for instance because in catechism class he had answered the question as to where the Blessed Virgin had carried her son after the Immaculate Conception, not as the other children did with “in her belly,” but with “under her heart.”
Only a kind of yearning, unspecific, also undimmed by any troublesome hopes, was there. No question but that he would become a farmer right after finishing school, since his parents had both died young and his sister could not run the farm alone. Thus he lived for a decade, and then also fell in love with a girl, in fact from the village of Job, and the two wanted to marry. That he was always slightly absentminded did not trouble the young woman; she liked him that way.
What finally brought him to the priesthood was a lecture by an agrarian engineer for the young men of the area, given at the local community center and sponsored by the Agriculture Bureau. The title: “A Vocation for Farming.” First of all, it dawned on him that he lacked all the characteristics of a future farmer: unlike the others around him, he did not feel at all attracted to the fragrance of livestock; nor did his heart swell at the thought of ripening crops; nor did working outdoors make him happy or even proud; instead, he went about his work as if it were a sideline, like any day laborer, and his thoughts were usually somewhere else entirely.
Once he recognized his lack of vocation, he was seized with a burning restlessness. Instead of to his priest, he turned to the agrarian engineer, whom he looked up in the city of K., to tell him about his fatal lack of interest in farm work. To this day he thought it must have been simply the way he told the story, imploringly, that made the technical expert ask out of the blue whether he had ever considered becoming a priest.
The moment had come. At last he knew what he had to do. Yet he would have kept on farming if it had not also happened that his fiancee understood him instantlyâ“with glowing eyes!,” as he told usâand even encouraged his plan, and that his sister around that same time met a man with whom she would run the farm.
In the beginning he, already an adult, attended a boys' seminary, where he sat in the back and off to one side at a single desk, avoided by the adolescents and mocked as a “manure farmer” (although as a rule these children's parents were farmers, too), and then he transferred to a special school for those called late to the priesthood. There he noticed that all the men, from the most varied walks of life, had at least one thing in common: like most ordinary priests, they had experienced while still children something like a summons or a vocation; except that they, unlike the others, had not felt that it applied to them, and had instead followed a course previously laid out for them. And to find their way to the priesthood they had all needed a second impetus, much later, well beyond their childhood. Things became clear to them and the picture came into focus only the second time around. They had had to rely on that second manifestation of life, which thenceforth remained immutable for them in a way that hardly anything did for the other priestsâweren't they, the latecomers, the ones most likely to stay with it for the rest of their lives?