The Day
T
he day on which my friends were supposed to arrive in the bay fell between Christmas and the new year. That was considered the darkest time. But as far as I was concerned, since childhood I had had during that time the dreams of which I was convinced that they did not apply to me personally but were owed by me to the world.
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he night before, I went to bed earlier than usual, and then during the night saw on a wall in medieval Siena a picture, about which disagreement existed as to whether it was by Giotto or not. It portrayed a procession of people, shot through by the rays of a sun, which, the dream said, was the “essence of sun.” Finally the disagreement was resolved as follows: the picture had indeed been painted by Giotto, though not in the town of Siena but outside in a suburb.
I dreamt this during the night before the day before yesterday, and today I am still convinced that the painting is hanging hidden somewhere in Tuscany or elsewhere, and that the circumstances are as they were communicated in the dream.
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I
got up while it was still pitch dark, and absolutely silent: it was new moon, with, far from the sky over the metropolis, stars shining all the more brightly, soon covered by clouds, so that finally the only light shining into the house came from the transmitter high on the eastern range of hills, the one installation in the bay that was constantly in operation and to which I once said involuntarily, while walking home on a summer night, “Our tower!” as if it belonged solely to the population here, and I in turn to this.
There were days when I completely forgot about the sky: this was supposed not to be such a day. I immediately set out for the forest, to which, after the lane, it was only a short side street. No one else was out and about; still a good while until the first commuter train. It was below freezing. But the nocturnal darkness, both that between the houses and the even denser, more substantial darkness under the trees, warmed me, as it had long ago during the early mornings of Advent on the way to the worship service called
Rorate
(“thaw out!”) in our village church âone of the few periods in the year when even in boarding school I did not mind going to church. But what then fell from the sky was, instead of dew, a fine rain that hardly wet me.
With my entry into the forest, the forest gave my head its measure. I climbed up to the top of the Seine hills on the familiar Absence Road, which I called this because its fill consists of construction debris, rubble from foundations, brick walls, bathroom tiles, thresholds, doorframes, a discarded street sign, even a piece of a ceramic house number and a crushed milk can, as if from a farm, sticking up from the bed of the path wherever one looked, forming humps, curbs, and inclined planes, a sunken ship, as it were, along whose keel, facing up, I had often picked my way in the course of the year, zigzagging and leaping, in order to keep myself impressionable, to quote old Goethe.
The morning of the day before yesterday I let this path become nameless again, and after that likewise the High Path up on the edge of the plateau, which in sweeping curves followed its spine, and on which one can circle the entire forest bay, as if on cliff paths close to a precipice; free of names, from below ground for the moment the creation rose up.
I made a little detour from the forest to the office complexes of Haut-Velizy, one mirrored in the next, as glaringly lit up as empty, except for the night watchmen, whole divisions of them spread over the entire
plateau, each by himself with his dog in his booth in front at the barred entrance. My Sunday evening walks during the year had been primarily for their benefit, and thus at least one, when he turned his head away from his tiny television monitor to look at me, his thermos bottle in his hand, raised a finger in greeting. And there was also something new: on the terrace of an abandoned office building, the company having gone bankrupt, weeds had sprung up.
Back in the forest, heading downhill on the Green Path (because of its grassy surface), instantly restored to namelessness, I smelled smoke, and then deep in the woods came, in an almost inaccessible preserve, through which I had fought and shimmied my way on many a morning (if ever a path for learning impressionability, then such a one), upon a fire, lighting up only the area around a hut, in whose middle it was, in a loose circle of fireproof poles, which led up, cylinder-shaped, to the smoke hole in the thatched roof; on one side the casbah was open, protected by the dense thicket; a layer of leaves on the ground; no human being.
But I met one, as it was gradually getting light, down in the clearing with the hollow occupied by the Nameless Pond (even it did not have its name anymore), by the spring behind it. Sometime after the lava flow from Mont St.-Valérien, this spring had become warm, which I did not notice until I was walking past one night, slipped, and ended up with my hand in its rather meager flow. It was far warmer than from even the warmest rain, and it smelled, in nose proximity, of sulfur. Later, right at its source, recognizable by a clear-clear pulsing, I dug myself a sort of tub and sometimes gargled there, or soaked my bruised, more than sore, numb feet: relief.
Early on the day before yesterday, however, I found my spring spot in the swamp beyond the bomb-crater body of water occupied by the person in whom, back in the spring of the year, on Lizard Way (this designation also canceled), I had seen the stonemason from the twelfth century. He was sitting there, up to his knees in the sulfurous water, and greeted meâhere in the bay it had always, up until now, been I who greeted firstâwhat a nodding of the head!, and shifted to one side. There was room enough for two; he had built an earthen bench, lined with stones, around the spring, in the suggestion of a half-moon. The stonemason seemed more like a gardener, in the bareness of winter.
When I untied my shoes, I noticed that they came from different pairs: my mistake in the still-nocturnal house. With my feet warmed, I took off my hat in spite of the rain, and thought, gazing over the muddy surface to the edge of the pond, that it was no distance at all from the mud long ago behind my grandfather's farm in the village of Rinkolach to this mud here now. And then, picturing my almost three seasons of writing by the root hill of the tipped-over birch, at the same time a hiding place for muskrats, I swore to myself that for me no path would lead away from this place into a so-called public arena. And at the same time I was seized with pain at the thought that I would never again sit there by the water to write, where, with my work in hand, I had been able to be with the daily world as never before. And then I saw that my year's seat, the burned-out half tree trunk, last hauled out of the ice by me, had once more been rolled into the pond, certainly not by children playing. And then in the distance ravens flapped low over the forest floor, like black horses galloping soundlessly through the trunks of the trees.
The bomb-crater pond trembled, and trembled, and trembled, the different winter-morning gray grayed, and grayed, and grayed, the stonemason kept silent, and kept silent, and kept silent, and then he said: “I wanted to go south, and I ended up here. I am not the only one scattered to the winds. When I was young, we worked as a brotherhood, under the direction of my father, whose mark in granite was also that of our group. First we were stone breakers, then stonemasons, or both at once. For splitting we had hardly more tools than a hammer. First look, then strike! What counted at the beginning were eyes and ears. With the latter we listened to see whether the stone sounded as it shouldâeven a small off-note inside, and it was no good; with the former we saw in what direction the stone was to be cut, whether lengthwise or crosswise, or, as a third possibility, and just as important for building, in the direction of the interstices, to obtain the keystones, as support; as anchor; as resting place; and as a bridgehead for additions. In the meantime we wander alone from project to project, or have disappeared in war, and at any rate we stonemasons no longer chisel our signs anywhere, and where does the scar on your shin come from?”â“I burned myself there as a child,” I replied, and invited the runner to join me for dinner with my friends in Porchefontaine.
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W
hen I then stepped out of the forest, already in daylight, I noticed that it was still silent as night in the bay, even down below on the bypass, and then came upon glare ice, even before I saw it, stretching far into the distance, a rigid gleam, so different from that of rain, covering and raising the asphalt, and even the pebbles in the lane, as I slithered home. Was it this way throughout the country? Would my friends be delayed by it? Then the bugles of the railway linemen, short and no-nonsense, but still lingering in the air for a long time afterward.
As I circled the house a few times in the yard, where even in the grass the ice crackled, I made two discoveries: on the one tree that I had believed all year to be without fruit, unexpectedly a pear, dwarf-sized, to be sure, and wizened, but unfrozen, and the one biteâthat was all it yieldedâof a sweetness that stayed with me all day; and about the other, the ash, its foot concealed by a hedge, the fact that it, which I had always thought grew on a neighbor's property, grew on mine; belonged to me! It had followed me from the former cow pasture at home in Rinkolach (where I wanted to go right after the book, to sniff the air of my birthplace).
And I promptly propped a ladder against the particularly straight, smooth ash trunk, glassy from transparent ice all around, trimmed the branches so that they resembled the heavy rip cords of a parachute, and declared the tree a monument to that unknown American soldier who, after an emergency jump, got tangled in a thicket on the Jaunfeld Plain and was beaten to death by the crowd that gatheredâperhaps also one of my relatives among them?âusing all those tools that today are to be seen almost exclusively in local history museums, where they exude venerability.
And in the process I made yet a third discovery: on the evergreen shrubs all around the ash there were garlands of leaves, as if from crystal chandeliers, made of ice, frozen solid after the rain landed on the leaves, which had broken off as a result, so that only their ice forms hung in the air, attached to the woody branches by ice stems, true-to-nature copies, just like the lanceolate forms pointing away from them, in whose delicate glassy bodies the snapped-off leaves were precisely copied, the midrib and all the side ribs, but in reverse, and thus all the way up the bush, green and glassy leafage in one, except that in the latter the sky shone through at the top. “That
can't be!” I thought at the sight, which again meant that it seemed to me as real as anything could possibly ever be. “This empathic spelling-out means more to me than anything else.” And: “For us today how much more there was to tell about our days than about our years. And all the more difficult to find clear lines to follow.”
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nd what else happened the day before yesterday? The postman, who, probably like other postmen in the world, during this year of more war than peace, had stopped whistling while delivering the mail, gave me a letter from the woman from Catalonia, postmarked Girona, rather than the Spanish alternative, Gerona, the residence of her father, meanwhile become the first president of the new state of Catalunya. She wrote: “As you always wanted of me, after all: I have had enough of your reluctance, like that of an unmarried man, and curse it. To experience fragmentarily and dream comprehensively will not work with me. Why can I find no support in you? And why do I still believe, in spite of everything, that no better support can be found than in a vacillating, yearning person? As for the rest, I am finally free of parents, and besides I have now slept here so long in my girlhood bed that I am a young girl again, though differently than before.” Ah, those Catalan curses, those Catalan oracles, those Catalan fairy tales.
And the day's news from the Castilian town of Benavente in the province of Zamora: on the flat steppe outside the town gates lay a corpse, smashed by a fall as if from a great height, presumably an illegal immigrant, fallen out of an airplane before its landing in Santiago de Compostela, having previously already frozen to death in his hiding place. And above the church of Cristo de la Vega, in the meadows, in an otherwise bright blue sky, a cloud had hung all day, motionless, the meadows in its rigid shadow, while round about the entire
meseta
lay in winter sunlight.
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fter that I was in a mood to stay outside in the yard for a while. I raked the almost leafless grass, merely to see it green up and to see the earth beneath it blackenâwhat a colorâaccompanied by a robin, not for my sake, but for that of the earthworms writhing under the
fractured ice; observed next to the house foundation the “bay
en miniature
” that I had constructed from a piece of moss, with the moss representing the forests, the crushed rock protruding into it representing the houses in the settlement; swept the steps to the house and the paved part of the yard with a broom made of those wonderfully flexible tamarisk twigs, found in or borrowed from the railwaymen's hanging gardens (what needed to be swept there?); loosened the crushed rock path, in the process of which a button from the uniform of the general or gendarme, one of my predecessors in the house, found its way into my hand and I smelled the hundred-thousand-year-old oyster bed from the underground of the bay; washed a cellar window, out of which probably no one had ever looked, as well as the brick threshold the painter had once fired for me with the inscription from the Gospel according to John: “The son shall remain in the house for eternity,” and thought once more how only physical labor really got my blood to circulate, and in addition made my hair soft and smoothed my skin, and how nevertheless of all my activities it was only through my writing that I had ever been able to feel something like a connection with the world.