This morning in Patras, on the stone steps, in the upper town, he had witnessed a man trying to lure his escaped parrot back into its cage from a tree. The bird's master did this by calling up patiently to the escapee, for hours on end, in a very tender voice, while the bird talked back to him, and he had the cage on his head, its door open, and on the tip of the cage, the sharp spike there, he had stuck an apple, which he turned now and then, or also tossed away into the air, while out of the tree only sparrows flew constantly.
In between the man put down the empty cage, withdrew, and waited in silence. The escaped bird did not budge. More and more neighbors approached, cautiously, and softly offered advice. And then, as the midday ferry was already blowing its whistle down in the harbor, my son
came over and gave the apple on the spike a gentle push, so that the stem, instead of sideways as previously, now pointed straight up toward the
pappagallo
in the tree. And in that moment the parrot dropped, as if in free fall, jungle-yellow.
And now Valentin is making his way slowly toward the bay here, for the reunion we are all going to celebrate.
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y friend the priest on the Jaunfeld Plain had been constantly on the move all year, but hardly outside of his parish, except for the visit, occasioned by his sermon defying the Pope, to the bishop in K., who, without a word's being spoken between them about the whole matter, agreed with him that the caption under a photograph of the two of them in the next church bulletin should read that the child of Siebenbrunn had merely come into town, as farmers often had in earlier times, “to look at the clock again.”
It was chiefly on account of the dying that he could not get away, even though he did long to now and then. There were no more of them than usual this year, but the need seemed to have grown, among the old as well as among the young, for someone like him, since no one else did it anymore, to stop by, every day if possible, with his disdainful gaze, and lay on his hands. Then they wanted him to stay, even if he just gazed out at the landscape, with his back to them, or read the paper. He was in agreement with the Protestants in at least one respect, namely that faith alone was decisive, and was close to disapproving of so-called good works; these, and here he was of one mind with “his” writer, the apostle Paul, should be refrained from, “lest any man should boast.”
Except for those who lay dying, all year long hardly a soul in his parish of many villages asked for him, and only very rarely did his appearing cause eyes to light up anywhere; the majority even turned away, not hostilely, only sullenly: “Oh, him again.”
At the end of October he telephoned me, as promised, because on the Jaunfeld, in the village of Rinkolach, and on the house of my ancestors there, the first snow was falling, “flakes feathered like arrows,” falling in town, on the contrary, horizontally, looking in the headlights of the dense stream of rush-hour traffic like towropes; besides, my brother had discovered his singing voice, the last one in the family to do so, and was
singing in the church choir, with such a beautiful voice that Urban, as happened every time when he succeeded at somethingâand he succeeded at almost everythingâbroke out in lamentations at his own life-weariness.
In dark November, lacking sun also because of the mist off the dammed-up Drau in the west, the priest dreamed a repetition of the event that had preoccupied him since that night in the Lower Austrian seminary for those called late to the priesthood: again he found himself, as in reality there, lying in the bed of someone else, who was fast asleep, as he had just been, and he? How in the world had he ended up in this other bed, next to a huge strange body that left him no room? Where was his own bed? How would he be punished? Expulsion from the institution? A mark of Cain on his forehead, for life?
Then at the beginning of December came such a heavy frost that the bed of the brooks flowing through the Jaunfeld toward the Drau, from the Petzen and the Karawanken Mountains, froze over from the bottom, up over the pebbles, enlarged into ice balls, whereupon the water on top, forced upward, spilled far over the banks. And for the first time in decades the villagers became skaters again, out until late on full-moon nights, as if things had never been any different in the interval; and blocks of ice weighing tons were cut, as if for the icehouses of a different turn of the century.
Advent had long since arrived, and there were still a few refugees in the rectory, from the German civil or cousins' war, refugees from the north and west for a change, instead of from the south or east as usual, Bavarians and Hessians from larger cities, driven out by the Saxons or Frisians or Saarlanders, then seized here by a kind of paralysis, incapable of going home, although since the summer peace had returned to their areas; perhaps they also harbored thoughts of remaining forever in this rather empty land of pines and wayside shrines.
For a while these few traumatized individuals were lodged in one of the abandoned schoolhouses of the area, speechless, their eyes lowered, and just last night, before his departure today, he had said Mass for them there. While at the Kyrie eleison, the sentences from Scripture, the Hallelujah, his heart as always was suffused with warmth, and, he told himself, as he did every day, he could get along without any celebration except, for all eternity, that of the Eucharist, of thanksgiving, of Communion,
with the transformation of bread and wine into the divine body and the divine blood, still he gazed at the refugees' absent or confused faces with such scorn, increasing as the moments passedâ“Could you stop boring the whole world with your misery!”âthat the final blessing with which he sent them forth was hardly out of his mouth when all of them burst into laughter, at first still awkwardly here and there, then unanimously relieved.
And this morning he sat by the window of his office and waited for daybreakâwhile yearning for the winter's night to last a good while longer (as the weeks of Advent meant more to him than Christmas itself; for its celebration this time the priest from the next parish would take his place). He, without domestic help, had ironed his shirts, rinsed out his coffee cup, had even, long before sunrise, gone skidding over the most terrible roads around the Rinkenberg to give his vehicle the patina of a forester's car, for my sake, and the day before had instructed all the dying to hold off until the new year and his return, and was now sitting, as he otherwise seldom did, quietly, in his traveling clothes, the heavy tome he had just been reading balanced on his shoulder.
Down below on the icy path, likewise as if for the first time since all the wars and events of the century, a glazier with his rack of panes on his back, which caused a glittering all around in the first rays of the sun. But his main attention was focused on the holes, the ventilation pattern in the wall of the tumbledown barn across the way, shaped like a circle of sunflowers, in the middle an opening in the shape of an acorn, like that of the ace in a deck of cards. Pavel had already been waiting a long time for something to waft into his face from these pitch-black grids, like that third calling. And what if this one revoked the two previous ones?
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ith my other distant friends I shared during the year here in my bay fewer such moments, perhaps because they all ended up too far away, and furthermore in places of which I hardly had an image (or too definite a one), perhaps because they were either too young or less old than my son Valentin and Father Pavel, perhaps also because I received no word of them, as was the case with my singer.
Nevertheless, even without a complete train of images, I continued to
see the wandering through the world of each individual friendâI had only to point my thoughts in his directionâin a sharply delineated light: this was like looking through the telescope in my house at the moon, the full moon, which each time made me feel as if I were not only seeing the glaring white surface but were also gazing into the depths of the smallest crater, at the bottom of the basin there with its boulders and their shadows.
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hus almost the only thing I knew about the architect and carpenter was that he, more in the latter role, had been on the move until now, into the winter, from one mountain village to the next in southern Japan, and was offering to work for farmers, repairing their wooden structures. As a rule he did not even ask, but without ado worked his way in from the outer edge of the property, from a lean-to in the meadow, a turnstile, a rack for drying straw, the lattice door of a root cellar. Just the sight of these Japanese villages, huddled together with their curved, bronze-dark roofs overlapping, as if dedicated to the heavens, made tears sometimes come to his eyes. Not to jump onto the train of images like so many architects today, but to add his own to the organically developed image!
If he was not remunerated every time, he was at least tolerated, especially since he promptly went to work in a way that brooked no contradiction. He did, to be sure, stay out of the way, yet did not behave like a stranger, but as if he were at home, on the karst or in Friuli, except that now, abroad, he finished every one of his projects. And after his return he would adhere to this pattern on his own building site. “It's time to build”âthis was one of the few messages I received from him.
The tools for his repair work, work which had the aura of inconspicuousness, he fabricated himself, or the Japanese farmers occasionally helped him out with tools that had long since been deposited in corners, behind the machinery: there were still carpenter's pencils around, for marking boards, no different from everywhere in Europe, the special short-handled hatchets, the long, flexible string, and to go with it the old carpenter's cans with a red liquid through which the string was drawn and then snapped against a tree trunk to mark the cutting line, a smacking sound on the wood probably heard everywhere in the world.
Occasionally he also came through large cities like Osaka, and noticed that there all the physical or “dirty” work was usually done clandestinely, by strangers like him, only with darker skin; the screens in front of new buildings under construction allowed one to see in even less than those elsewhere, and it was also as if the workers there had explicit instructions to remain out of sight: a rarity when in the midst of the construction noise a human figure could be seen in a gap in the screen, and then with his back to the street, a rear view, and promptly swinging hand over hand back into the wings.
For a few hours, during a night in a hotel by the station, somewhat like one in England, made of brick, except that it was in Tokyo, after he had looked out at the maze of tracks in the railroad yard until the last commuter trains pulled in, from which station officials with long poles with hooks on the end fished out more and more drowsy drunks, in suit and tie, with briefcasesâa constant staggering back and forth over all the platforms, combined with being shoved along, push after pushâthe carpenter in wintry Japan went insane. In him, this patient man, it was more the eruption of an impatience he had been holding in for a lifetime, or the sudden cessation of those different experts' voices in him; it jolted him out of his sleep, whereupon he paced up and down until daybreak, repeatedly and with all his might pounding his head with both fists; the last time this had happened to him he had been a child. And he would have continued in this fashion if, with a small billowing of curtains, the Mongolian woman, the bride of Hokkaido, had not appeared to save him, putting him to bed and silently taking him between her legs.
And the following morning, alone again, Guido set out toward me in the bay, with a stopover in Alaska, where he wanted to study the characteristic wooden shelters known as
cachés,
which were built on stilts against bears and had always interested him; and on the telephone he promised to build a window seat in my study, with a writing surface above it.
Since the flight from Narita to Anchorage did not leave until late in the evening, by way of farewell on his last day in Japan the architect took for the second time the commuter train to the Eastern Sea of Kamakura, to try, weak as he still was from his night of madness, trembling in every limb, to gain new tranquillity before the house-sized Buddha
there. And afterward he had time for the beach on the Pacific, where at sunset yet another (or the same?) group of girls in dark blue school uniforms yet again threw very long-stemmed roses into the waves, like lances, at intervals, into dusk, in which the colors of the flowers drifting out to sea, especially the red, became things unto themselves.
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erhaps I succeeded least in traveling along later on with my woman friend: “Because you (thus that master of explanation, my petty prophet of Porchefontaine) lost, with the disappearance of the woman from Catalonia, your wife, any image at all of a woman.”
But as I now think back to those months, to Helena's moment by the sea-flooded stone sarcophagi in the Turkish bay, I see that somewhat differently. I felt as though I was there when she, weary of the eternally wine-dark sea and of the ship's helm, merely simulating a gathering of people with its jerky movements, in between turned back toward Dalmatia, heartily laughed at there by her two children, who, as always, were no longer and not yet expecting her, and in the following autumn set out again, this time to Egypt.