Now he had his rubber boots on, and also a mason's jacket and cap, and joined the silent workman in hammering away, one of them outside, the other inside, and the mason was then fired up by his employer's encouraging shouts, growing louder and louder as the original structure became visible and began to shine through (hadn't it originally been his, the mason's idea?).
And later, wearing the same outfit, my friend back home in his orchard picked clean the one apple tree that had not yet been harvested, until the last glimmer of day, when, from the foot of the ladder, a man in a necktie inquired where he might find the priest here, saying the Eternal Light in the church was not working; he was a traveling candle salesman, and also sold electric ones (now preferred by acolytes as better for their lungs). “The priest is on a round-the-world journey,” my friend replied, coughing from the phlegm caused by the candle soot, which would get worse during the winter, and laughed at the salesman's departing back, neither maliciously nor kindly, just determined to remain uninvolved, decisively unmoved, as the child of Siebenbrunn had been taught by his father the sexton.
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ashed and changed and then out again! already in darkness to Rinkolach, the village at the end of beaten paths, the village through which no street leads onward.
The affiliated church there was open, except for the commemoration
of its consecration, held on a Sunday in summer, only for the few Masses for the dead. On this particular evening it was for a small farmer or occasional farmhand, without any family, who had died a long time ago, from the windows of whose former cottage turkeys now looked out, being raised by the neighbors who had ordered and paid for the Mass for him. Aside from the almost obligatory stranger who had somehow wandered in and sat off to one side, these were also the only people waiting for the priest in the dim church, praying, in Slovenian, the long All Souls' Litany, actually more a sort of invocation, close to singing, and finally, very gradually and very delicately modulating into singing. At first, after entering through the open door, he had merely stood in the background, and they did not notice him until he joined in the last apostrophe, addressed not to the saints but to the Holy Trinity, at a terrifying volume, and also in another key.
The church of Rinkolach (Rinkole in Slavic), on its patch of meadow in the middle of the village, looked from the outside to be about the size of a hall; the inside, of the dimensions of a living room, though for a large family, did not provide enough space in the middle for a so-called “people's altar,” and thus he said Mass at a distance from the people, raised above them on the stepped platform, usually with the nave at his back, from which, to be sure, the dove of the Holy Ghost embroidered on his vestments kept an eye on the congregation.
For each sacramental act, performed alone, without an acolyte, he stretched his arms wide, summoning all his strength, as if he were doing work that required muscular effort. At the same time he moved along briskly, without prolonging any gesture; even the pauses during which he collected himself or simply waited showed him in a sort of activity. Just as he spread his arms like a weight lifter, he also snapped open the book for the reading of the apostle's epistle, leafed back to the Gospel, jabbed, with his thick finger, at the written text, hammered, gripping the altar slab with both hands, his forehead audibly against it, fell, with a crash, to one knee, pounded himself so hard on the chest that it echoed, unlocked the tabernacle with a powerful twist of the hand, fished out the chalice with his fist, thrust it toward the congregationâ“eat!”âand sawed the air as he delivered the benediction.
Once he had even disappeared in the middle, running to that narrow
passageway behind the altar where the wooden structure of the altar, without the gilding, rough, in its unexpectedly mysterious form, could just as well be an old, abandoned flour mill, a part of the flour chute; he remained, as during a Mass in Russia, absent from the action out in front, which merely increased the suspense, and returned only after quite some time, again at a run, for the continuation.
Outside the momentary gobbling of a turkey, the drone of a night plane, the seemingly even more distant screeching of truck brakes.
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t was perhaps the last mild evening of the year, and therefore he sat for a while afterward with the neighbors of the deceased on their farmyard bench, long enough for an entire tribe to line up on.
With their backs against the wall of the house, half in darkness, half in the glow of the barn light a little farther off, they sat in silence, facing the barely discernible pattern of the ventilation slits in the barnâin the form of solar raysâhearing the rustling and crackling in the invisible famous branching linden tree (and the hundred-year-old cherry tree) in the middle of Rinkolach, and sat and sat, again as in an earlier time, with which, my friend now thought, something could still be undertaken, something could be done; and not at all sure that with artificial lighting of the dead-end street a “long-cherished wish” of the villagers would be fulfilled, as the community newsletter regularly stated.
How he loved the night wind, the black on black. No star was in the sky. No child was crouching under the bench. A riddle from the old days: “What's lying under the bench, and when you grab it, it squeals?”â“A chain.” All across the plain ladders were standing in orchards. In the last train from K. the heads of the sleeping passengers were leaning against the windows, and the locomotive's whistle echoed far into Yugoslavia. A palm tree rustled in the sun on the outskirts of Jericho. In a new German translation of the Bible he would put “confidence” in place of “hope.” The woman next to him brushed the dandruff off his coat collar with a hand that was neither cold nor warm, more mineral-like, like flintstone.
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nd again, without any movement, he felt, in the first hour of night, the approaching morning, this time, however, as something ice-cold that reached into his armpits and then alarmed him mightily. At the same time, he felt “longing” coming back, his favorite word. No, it was a hunger, in the middle of his heart, and it was not coming back, but had been there forever. And then he caught himself also thinking, “No, I did not give up todayânot yet!”
What? Did he need a third manifestation?
The Story of My Son
T
o be asked about my son, by anyone at all, has always put me in a bad mood, out of a clear blue sky; it has immediately destroyed the harmony between me and the other person. It was even worse when I was expected to tell stories about him. “Tell us!”: the very form of this invitation rubbed me the wrong way, and all the more so in conjunction with my own child. At least one way out was to say terrible things about him, to revile him from afar, and in general to invent atrocity stories about him (which also could be counted on to elicit an entirely different kind of sympathy than when I morosely stuck to the truth).
Even very early on, whenever I told a third person something about him in his presence, he himself would break in, as if his father were guilty of betraying him. In his absence I still suffer the effects of this, such that when I am forced to speak of him I vividly picture his disapproval. But the law of silence that pertains to my son's life, including trivial details (these in particular), originates for the most part with me. Already long ago, even without the child's punishing stare, I was usually conscious when talking about him that this was actually a form of gossip, and inappropriate.
I also strenuously avoid asking other parents about their offspring,
and when I happen to do so after all, out of politeness or heedlessness, or heedless politeness?, I feel hostile in advance toward any answer they may give, and then I am sometimes surprised at how enthusiastically they come out with the answer, even in the case of bad news, as if certain fathers and mothers found themselves in their verbal element only when speaking of their childrenâwhy else would their conversational tone be transformed into triumphal blasts?
My resistance to telling anyone about my son seems therefore not to follow a universal law. Isn't it actually crazy that I already resent it when a person asking me about my son presumes to use his first name?: “So, how is Valentin these days?”
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t is something else again when it comes to telling about my next of kin or ward when no one is asking me about him. Then I occasionally succeed in being perfectly relaxed about it, speaking in a voice seemingly made up of several voices together, so that my son, I am certain, would not only approve but would also feel validated. This kind of storytelling I have inside me. Only it comes out decidedly too infrequently, because it is either the wrong listener or more likely the wrong moment (is there even such a thing as the “wrong listener”?).
And telling stories in writing is something else again. There, without a specific audience, without my voice's getting in the way, not forced to wait for the right momentâthat is within my control when I write, which unlike any other activity gives me an awareness of having time âmy telling stories comes to me in a way that oral storytelling comes only by pure luck, often invalidated the very next day. Only in written form is my storytelling suited to my nature, on the right path, at home, no matter whom it deals with, even my son.
This has meanwhile become a conviction, reinforced by the observation that all my life, whenever I opened my mouth to tell a story, even if I was bursting with it, I hardly ever found a hearing, but instead alienated others and spoiled their fun. Where was the humor I kept trying to slip in edgewise? Only through my writing and being read was a change brought about.
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his year, when my son was traveling in Southeastern Europe, almost always alone, I did not worry about him, for the first time. Nothing could happen to him, and for moments at a time this very thought made me uneasy again.
Yet wasn't it true that in the preceding years, at precisely those times when I knew him to be in danger, my otherwise constant worry about him had ceased, replaced by a pleasurable sense of acceptance? And since the dangers, always major ones, had multiplied of late, hadn't that very fact rendered me immune to my age-old worry about my closest kin? But: was he really still my closest kin? And: who was I without my age-old worry?
For example, that time when Valentin was trying to hitch a ride on the outskirts of town and his leg was almost torn off by the kick starter of a motorcycle that grazed him as it whizzed by, and he would have bled to death then and there if help had not arrived immediately, as I left the hospital where my son was lying with shattered bones and went home in the middle of the night, I felt receptive as never before to this particular hour of the night, to the region altogether, and grateful; the way things were now was right; I had shed a part of myself, a part that was past its usefulness. Only an adult could be as light of heart and unshakable as I was thenâor unmoved? At any rate, that hour, and the others that followed, almost fatal to my son, gave me a standard by which to measure.
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t is not entirely accurate to say that Valentin undertook his journey to track down his father's youth. One stimulus, among several others, was a story I had invented out of the whole cloth, a first-person narrative (a form that always suggests itself when the bulk of the task facing me consists of inventing and playing out the possibilities), the only one of my books he read, actually at the suggestion of, no, under orders from his girlfriend, although otherwise he knows the classics, as well as my contemporaries, from Filip Kobal to Kazuo Ishiguro, also Peter Turrini and Max Goldt, and now at twenty-two, out of fear of soon having nothing more to discover, is a great reader, the only one among thousands, but wasn't I the same in my day? And besides, time and again he has knowingly deviated from the route of my story and has
picked up the story again only at intervals, as a sort of travel guide, more testing it than using it (“many mistakes, but apparently intentional ones”).
And the money for his trip was almost entirely his own, from working as a disc jockey in various young people's nightclubs and from selling his first pictures; a contribution came from my sister's estate, which, because it consisted of almost nothing, struck him all the more powerfully as an omen. My son sometimes makes so much of his frugality that I have come to view it as one of his main characteristics, like his punctuality, which does not stem from a sort of obsequiousness but rather manifests itself as that of a tyrant, whose time one wastes at one's peril; woe unto him who, regardless of the fact that he may be much older and even more powerful, comes even a quarter of an hour late to a meeting with my son, let alone without an excuse.
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aving arrived in Ljubljana on a frosty January day by train, by way of Graz and Maribor, Valentin continued on by bus to Nova Gorica. At first Yugoslavia was merely a country he had to pass through on his way to his site for a walking tour, Greece. It meant as little to him beforehand as his ancestors. Although receptive to and gifted at foreign languages, new ones as well as old, he gave everything Slavic a wide berth, except the literature, as if its very sounds were an imposition; the music, whether folk songs or the works of nineteenth-century Russian composers, even repelled him; he felt as if his blood were being sucked out by those “parallel fifths, which are taboo, and not without reason, in melody” (whereas I at his age had shivered through entire nights in my pitch-black student room on the Kahlenberg with Mussorgsky).
Nevertheless he could do nothing now, as at other times, but keep his eyes and ears open. In contrast to his father, who in something new often notices an incidental or grotesque feature, or nothing at all, he immediately notices the salient characteristics, and quite casually. I have often wondered whether he, who has this eye for whatever is essential to a phenomenon, and yet, it seems to me, is never astonished at anything, is really cut out to be the researcher he wants to become someday. In many respects he is superior to meâbut what is his passion? his dream?
Thus he had now set out, almost too well prepared, I thought, on
this yearlong journey, had anticipated every unusual situation and had taken something along for it. But was that really true? Didn't his main baggage consist of a present from the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, Valentin's benefactor from the time he was a child, an ancient Greek biography of Pythagoras, in which the philosopher's guideline for life had less to do with tools and measuring instruments than with untrammeled observation of phenomena and committing them to memory?: thus Pythagoras had had his disciples get out of bed each morning only after they had repeated to themselves the previous day's lessons, and then those from the day before; this retrieval of the day before yesterday, without aids, purely from memory, was, according to his biographer Iamblichos, perhaps the essence of the Pythagorean doctrine.
And thus my son, on closer inspection, had his few toolsâhis army knife, drawing pencils, a geologist's hammerâmore as a sort of ballast, to keep “both feet on the ground.” Committing the phenomena to memory was not something he set out purposefully to do; rather he brushed by them, his thoughts elsewhere: “If you expect an object to leave a lasting impression,” he told me once, “you mustn't under any circumstance stare at it; you should look through it, though attentively, and only then will the impression be reliable and lasting, and its gestalt will give rise to discoveries more readily from an afterglow than from the thing itself!” (His other approach was to turn away intermittently from his object, intentionally immerse himself in something else, so that, when he turned back toward it, he could “catch it as it was!”)
Valentin produced that day-before-yesterday experience often on the same day by falling asleep right after an event, for moments that took the place of an entire night, and, after the first waking up and recalling, falling asleep a second time: now, after the passage of barely an hour, he saw the object in the light and form of the day before yesterday. Wasn't that sufficient as a dream?
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trip by bus on a winter's day, through an unfamiliar country, was particularly suited for this kind of brief, two-time slumber. And thus the “day-before-yesterday effect” assured that even before he reached Postojna, the prehistoric dugout from the moor of Ljubljana that he had just seen in the museum there had engraved itself upon his memory
for the rest of his life, its length, weight, peat-blackness, fissured surfaces.
On the bus he had breathed a peephole in the ice flowers on the window, through which he looked out in his own fashion, barely moving his head. They entered an area almost without human traces, deserted and more than deserted, leading into an expanse with invisible boundaries, in spite of the cold already green as in spring, as if made for fruit growing, except that no roads led there, and even the few cart tracks immediately came to an end: this had to be one of those areas that at unpredictable intervals, hardly related to precipitation, was flooded, the result of subterranean water pressure, which made it shoot up like jets from holes in the ground, forming large lakes from one day to the next, which could then be crossed only by boat.
Yet my son took in not the image of the strange landscape but a subject for scientific research: nature as “landscape” did not count for him. He was not interested in looking at things, or at any rate he hardly lingered over that. He immediately, as a matter of course, shifted his focus to the particulars, allowed these to impress themselves on him, distinguished them from one another, and looked for what they had in common.
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The first thing he had always looked for, beyond the phenomenon, was its underlying principle. And having detected this, as a rule instinctively, in the twinkling of an eye, he was able, as he then once wrote me from his travels, to achieve “an entirely different view.” Except that he did this in passing, kept it to himself, explained nothing (at most uttered, more to himself, his one-syllable “Look!”), and only when he was asked came out with his conclusions, inferences, his always convincing theories, which, translated literally, were of course “observations.” Thus in his account of that bus trip he merely mentioned in passing, along with Traveling Band on the radio and the way his nostrils froze during the short rest stop in Vrhnika, the gray that altered from one type of tree to the nextâthousands of shades of gray, passing, blinking, flashing by his peephole, and only later, in the spring, during a longer stay on Lake Ohrid, did he set about writing down his “Observations on the Variations in Winter Gray.”
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hen the so-called Threshold of Postojna, a threshold also in a historical sense for all the migrations of peoples through the ages, from east to west, actually more flight than migrations, and more a narrow pass or battlefield than a threshold.
For Valentin, however, this was a mere threshold in the rock, a geological formation. For him there was no such thing as history, and in politics he was a self-proclaimed idiot. He did not even know that the Yugoslavia he was using as his corridor had earlier been Communist, had even earlier been overrun by the Germans, had even earlier been a kingdom, and even earlier ⦠If chastised, he would at most have responded that such “earliers” were everywhere, extending back into prehistoric times, and that would be all well and good if everyone did not arbitrarily derive from his particular “earlier” all ofâwhat was it called?âhistory, and then, from that, exclusive rights to the present. “I learned in school that two thousand years ago this was the Roman province of Illyria, and today in Ljubljana I saw in a window the book title
Are We in Reality Not Slavs but Illyrians?
To me what is real should be first and foremost what exists now.”