In the sense in which people use the term “intake personnel,” during such nights of storytelling I experienced those who were standing around as a sort of “uptake personnel,” whether one of them happened to be talking, listening, or listening to something else. Now a sort of game was in progress, one without rival players and sides, the opposite of all the games that I, at least, had witnessed over the years, which were accompanied by both hotheadedness and coldness, of which in the end only the coldness remained, most rigidly in the so-called game of kings, chess.
What we are playing here comes closest to a team's warm-up before a matchâexcept that the match itself is already there. In the brief interval, a transformation has occurred in those remaining behind together, stranded or not, even if the next day on the street one will look right through the other.
It may be that I will never see humanity this way again. Yet it existed in those nights there. It exists. I do not need any image as a continuation; it has been told to me.
Or was that just my imagination? Did I fail to consider that one of the people standing there no sooner got back to his room over the garage than he beat up the woman he lived with, perhaps that very woman sitting over to one side, his mother, who was just waiting for him to
come home; that the second took a detour through the woods, where, on one of the banks of the pond, he injected himself with dope, that the third, I myself, with each such night was drifting farther from those who were his real kin?
Yes. And nevertheless it is not something imagined, but rather a fantasy. Fantasy is not something imagined. And when it came, I realized how much I had needed it, all this time, all day. Observation, absorption, abstraction: my daily bread. So didn't we need a continuation after all, recapitulation?
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t would have destroyed my equanimity if one of my acquaintances had joined this obscure company. Yet he would see me there as I would wish to impress myself on him, as a pure participant, far from hubs of activity of any sort, beyond immediate relevance, having stepped out of all my roles, no longer a lawyer, or a writer, also no longer a father, but also no shade of the dead, and also not isolated but accessible and present. Which, if an old familiar face unexpectedly showed up there, I would have to become conscious of, and that would put an end to it.
Yet it would not be this way if, on such a night, in such a bar, my wife appeared before me, the woman from Catalonia, who vanished long ago.
Did she really vanish? Two days ago, in my study, on the second of February, Candlemas, the festival of the threshold of light, didn't I see out of the corner of my eye something black flit by outside the window, whereupon I dreamed that night about the steps of the woman from Catalonia on the bridge over the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez?
Of the people I know, only she would have eyes for this kind of a nobodyâalthough in fact it was she, during our years together, who propelled me from one role to another, from one undertaking to another. And if she showed up here, I would continue to play the person I am, all the more believably, just for her. I would have presented myself to her as a person different from the one with whom she was familiar, if only she had let me. “Let me!” was my constant refrain with her. But she did not let me. If she had let me, she would have been my benefactor.
Now the woman from Catalonia, full of amazement, would let me. She would see me with open eyes: the abruptness gone, and in its place my original equanimity, familiar to her otherwise only from my books, and in which she had soon lost confidence because my life belied it. And at the same time she would see something even worse lifted from me, which likewise had not been part of me from the beginning but only after my years in boarding school: my tendency to drift away from the person I was with, often precisely in brilliant company, and to disappear into myself to the point of no longer being present. I let myself wander into nowhereland, and especially with those closest to me. And yet that vanishing caused me great suffering. How often I had struck myself on the brow and wanted to scratch blood from my scalp, saw my breastplate in two with a two-handed saw.
Yet now I would be standing there without armor. For a certain period of time the night of storytelling would have burst open the dungeon. If the woman from Catalonia approached me now, I would see her immediately as a whole. With a flourish I would give her my hand, and although this gesture always repelled her, especially between a man and a woman, she would not object. I would have matches ready for her cigarette; she always grubbed around endlessly in her deep cloth bag for them. And then I would begin spontaneously to speak of the forest of plane trees in her hometown of Girona, of the winter day long ago when, on the way to the forest, on her command I had closed my eyes and thenâ“You can look now!”âthe shimmering filling my entire field of vision had blinded me, from the gray of the plane trees' trunks standing there shoulder to shoulder, almost without gaps and air in between, and the crowns, likewise gray, intertwined up above. Never had I seen a forest like that. Since all around me there was nothing but the bone-gray glimmering, it seemed as if the plane forest had swallowed up the entire place. It was like when you are carried in your sleep out of your room without realizing itâfrom childhood, especially from the time my family was fleeing, I remember this happening more than onceâand you wake up in a nowhereland, for instance facing a terror-gray surface, which only today in retrospect do I recognize as the dawn sky above one of the borders we had to cross, while the shifting gray below is a load of gravel in the back of the truck in which we are fleeing.
“How dizzy I was that time in your forest!” I would tell the woman from Catalonia in such a night of storytelling. And likewise I would then explain to her calmly that at times she was not the right person for me, either because during our time together, whenever I needed something to remain empty, she would fill it up: the house, an evening, a day off, the summer, the yard, our trips, our son, even my room, my table, whose leaves she pulled out to make it bigger, my window, on which, when I wanted to look out at the grass, day after day new notes greeted me, me myself.
“It was not only for me that you weren't good,” I would be able to tell her to her face again. “You aren't good for anyone.” Or: “The right man for you doesn't exist; there will never be someone who suits you, not even death, at most a god. But which one? Just as you not only filled the house with objects but also kept shoving them around, you have constantly been on the move from place to place yourself. Never will you find your place anywhere, with anyone, certainly not alone with yourself. And even with your god you will feel hemmed in sooner or later.”
On such a night the woman from Catalonia would actually listen to me, unlike earlier. At the very most she would say, in a quiet tone like mine, “You sound like your pal, the petty prophet of Porchefontaine.” And all the while the men next to us in the bar would have been trying not to hear us, making occasional remarks like “Smells like snow,” “When I was in the service in Indochina,” “Red gets you riled up; that's why butchers are so riled up,” or “Before the war there were still charcoal kilns up there in the woods.”
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ut at a time like that, when I appeared as I am, and with patience to boot, the woman from Catalonia would never ever show up unexpectedly. She is not capable of taking anyone by surprise. Surprises were something she expected exclusively of the other person, if possible daily. If I managed to pull one off now and then, she was quite overwhelmed. I can recall a sideways glance of unusual gentleness, such as you sometimes receive from a child who has been given a present. But she herself never took me by surprise, as if that were beneath her dignity and were also not appropriate for her.
And besides, nothing would bring her back to this region, and certainly not at night. The very word “suburb” was repugnant to her. She equated it with
banlieue,
and had the conventional adjectives at her fingertipsâ“dreary,” “characterless,” “gray”âlike a travel writer who goads his readers to seek out exotic places, as far away as possible, with a title like “Forget the Banlieue!”
She, who came from a town in the provinces, had always dreamed of getting away, and in the end found herself in a similar region, with the same poky houses and streets that were deserted at night, while the proximity of the metropolis just over the hills, its glow lighting up the eastern sky, tore at her heart rather than soothing it. With time she came to see some virtues in this particular suburb, made fun of the teeny-tiny middle- and working-class houses as amiably as she made fun of GaudÃ's edifices in Barcelona. She got to know merchants and tradespeople with whom I hardly ever exchanged more than a hello; in the special silence of the wooded hills she had her own spots, which she alone visited and which were off-limits to me. Yet life on a grand scale could take place only in the hub, on the other side of the mountains, as she called the barely hundred-thirty-meter-high ridge. The suburban world here remained for herâto use the expression of the singer's, who, a child of this area, composed one of his angry songs about itâ“rotten.”
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o one would come. I would remain alone with a couple of strangers at a bar in the most remote recess of the bay. And stories are told, for instance: it snows; or: something is going on. I am receptive, and the others, I sense, likewise. And up there in the woods sparks would fly from a nocturnal horseback rider, and that mythical beast, which I expect to turn up any day now in the forest, almost devoid of wild animals and yet so overgrown, has pricked up its ears at least once already for its first appearance.
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ut every time this nocturnal storytelling has no effect. Because it takes place so remotely, among marginal people, and only there, only there now? “But that can't be,” I think, “it has to have some effect.”
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year ago, when the priest from my native village visited me in this obscure corner while on his way to Chartresâabout which he did not want anything saidâ“I'm here with you, not on my way to somewhere else!”âhe spoke of how solitaries belonged together in the diaspora, which nowadays was the place where, for people like us, things were most likely to go on, one person here, another there, which I denied: I expected nothing from a community of the scattered people, the chosen, from secret circles with secret writings and initiation rites, but rather ⦠and here, as so often before, I had no idea what I wanted to say next.
The priest, standing there, legs apart as at home, winked at me as if he did not believe me, and as though we both knew better. I now felt even more left to my own devices than before. He had come unannounced, as though my house, three countries away, belonged to his parish, and in the back of his car, which was splattered with mud from top to bottom as only the forest ranger's was here, he had a plaster cast of the Romanesque kings from our village church, which the two of us then hauled to the farthest corner of the yard, where the three knee-high torsos now present their thick-lipped smiles.
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community of the scattered was something I believed in only during a period of transition.
And just as little am I guided by an earlier idea, the product not only of a lack but also of something visible: that of a people. I have never believed in a national people, equally little in a religious people, a linguistic people, and never in The People with the definite article. But neither can I believe anymore in a people of minorities, of people waiting, of readers, of sufferers and victims.
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here was only one period in my life when I had the notion of preserving all the changing, indefinable peoples in whom I believed in some more durable form, and even then that could be only something writtenânot legal filesâonly a book.
That was at the time when I was a lawyer, barely thirty, and was not yet writing. I was renting a room in a house up in the hills of Sievering, in the north end of Vienna, and I was working with an older colleague in his firm out past Baden, outside the capital, along the Southern Railway. For several years my existence alternated almost daily between completely anonymous travel by bus, trolley car, and train, and contact, which grew more and more intimate from appointment to appointment, with society, the highest levels as well as the lowest, not only that of the city of Vienna but that of all of Austria. In both realms, as an anonymous observer and as an actor in the plot, I became completely engrossed. Yet I was not leading a double life, but rather a twofold one, each part in harmony with the other.
That finally amazed me so greatly that for a time I visualized a human comedy, loosely modeled on Balzac, a narrative of society moving constantly back and forth between names and the nameless, but even freer than Balzac, I imagined, more open, less obsessed with death, since I, like him, believed not so much in a specific people as in this one or that one, even if only in walking or driving by. In my head the book already had a title. It was called “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”