I read the news from beginning to end; it was a special kind of pleasure to be a contemporary. In the man at my side I then recognized, for the first time in a bar in the bay, a neighbor, the one who on Sunday afternoons, with a face as confused as the one with which he was drinking his beer here, had the habit of burping into a battery of megaphonesâto test them, as he now explained, for the fair. I treated him to a glass, as he did me. Then we remained silent, and whenever the proprietor in his taproom let one of the refrigerator compartments snap shut, my neighbor jumped, and I read from his lips,
“Quel fruit!”
(What a noise!)
In the course of the year in the Bar des Voyageurs, some of the video
games had been replaced by the original pinball machines, which banged ceaselessly with free turns, and likewise a table soccer game, at which a few young people stared as if this were something that had vanished forever and they were its rediscoverers.
The battle-ready characters in the come-on images of the remaining video games kept pumping themselves up, their movements more like those of a sleeping flock of sheep, and when no one set them in motion against each other, the notion occurred to me that of all people the players at these machines would someday become the new readers of books, soon. And were the heads of the table-soccer figures all that different, after all, from the broad-lipped, full-cheeked roundheads of the early Middle Ages, to whom, as for instance to the kings in my garden, I went to be able to draw deeper breaths? And what did I see before me as I drew my deepest breath? Writing, or readiness for the written word.
The proprietor, with always the same presence of mind, had something of the air of a hostel father, and sometimes it was one of his customers who bought the bread for the itinerant workers' supper, placed the tables on the chairs, swept up the debris from the bar, and the day before the day before yesterday one of the usual steady customers unexpectedly turned up as the help, well-mannered and with authority. How old had the patron become in this year? And how about me? I contemplated the pattern of spots on the back of my hand; they had the form of the Big Dipper.
Behind the glass façade the day was unchangingly dark and clear, and I stayed until the first couple of sparrows appeared in the sleeping tree; they were gathering there, however, long before they were ready to go to sleep. Their wings, constantly whirring up and down the tree, provided brightness on this dark day. The smooth trunk of the plane tree, in its dew-dampness, still looked iced. And behind it the heads of the commuters in the trains up on the railway embankment repeated those of the sparrows: “If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes,” my thoughts continued, “you would never want to be anything else again. Stay that way! If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes, fragmentarily illuminated, in buses, trains, métros, in planes above the clouds, and these pictures would be the new Georges de La Tours.” And in the plane trees on the plaza there were still multicolored
lights from Christmas Eve, among which the sparrows were the other Christmas illumination, or simply a more living component.
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utside there was a smell of fish from the morning market; shreds of jute with Chinese and splinters of crates with Spanish lettering swirling into the air, and sparrow footprints on the asphalt, already slightly blurred, had the formation of the fighter wing that at the same time actually thundered over the plaza, dark as a storm cloud, heading home to the base on the plateau. But it was still the case that I gained deeper insights from the birds' traces down below on the earth than from anything in the heavens.
And I thought further: “But isn't believing in human silhouettes, at a certain remove, which must be preserved, my fundamental mistake? Wouldn't it have been essential for me to get closer, but how? To cross the threshold between silhouettes andâwell, what? The figures just now in the bar: if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate life stories, from their first fear of death to their first murder and their mother's letters to them during the war. I have not asked, not once in this entire year.”
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aving set out for Porchefontaine, I first took the footpath between the railway line and the suburban houses, heading west. A woman was running along in a zigzag, shouting again and again, “Where's my paper? Who's seen my
Parisien libéré?
What'll I do? I have nothing to read. What'll I do?”âfollowed by two police officers, a rare sight in the bay, who asked whether anyone had perhaps seen an old man, “in pajamas, without glasses,” while at the same time they peered farther down into the railway cut; also followed by a woman in a fur coat who said as loudly as calmly, “I've lost my husband”; and finally followed by an unknown person who took aim at meâdid he shoot?âat any rate he made the noise with his mouth, and I continued on.
The palm at the crest of the path represented the bay's western cape. I paused in front of it, and at first only the kinked fronds of the palm moved, slightly, calmly, as if tuning up, and then suddenly all the fronds
swung into motion, skyward, earthward, one-hundred-handed, pounded the keys of the present-day air, and following their example, I spread my fingers, let the intervals blow through me, and thought, nonetheless: “In my appreciation for music I have never got beyond the blues.”
From the cape I turned to look back, with my entire body, at the no-man's -bay once more (meanwhile renamed thus), while on a side street another person also turned to look back, but while walking, once and then once again, and more in sorrow than in high spirits. The route through the broad hollow to the hill horizons on the other side led as if through one vast runway, while the veil of mist hovering over it made it seem as if something were being hatched there; as if, without factories, office buildings, research institutes, something were going at constant, silent full blast there. I saw, on this different sort of world map, finely drawn, the first, the New World. Or: the forest bay as a book, open before my eyes, clear, voluminous, colorful, airy. And this was not, as I had once thought, to be achieved through slowness, but through carefulness, or deliberateness, whether slow or fast.
But what to do with it then? Had I done anything with it? In the backyards of the bay, the clotheslines were hung with nothing but the usual tiny dust ragâof a widow? of a widower?âand the lit-up bus there in the background, at full speed, was a gym, in apparent motion from the children running along its horizontal bars, and as always I felt sad when after the last yard no other came. To leave the place seemed to me each time like a leaving-in-the-lurch. In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.
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t has been a long time since I went out to Porchefontaine.
Our year's-end celebration there had been discussed on the telephone by the proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles (The Ladders) and me. How long ago it is that I saw the man over there beyond the foothills and myself as those two cottage dwellers on the Japanese scroll in the Kyoto Museum, each of them on his own side, to the left and right at the foot of a knoll, in an infinite, otherwise unpopulated mountainous landscape with heavy snow falling silently, as they sit at their work
behind the windows of their hermits' huts, with the most serene expressions, in the knowledge that what they are both doing fits together, and that they will shortly visit each other again.
Farther up the path, the picture became more lively, without any need for snow. I was developing an appetite, not only for my friends, but just as much for my petty prophet. And that almost painful appetite in my breast was called longing.
And I also had in mind what one of the guests in the Bar des Voyageurs had just remarked: “There are no borders.” As special as my region was, the one through which I was now passing differed from it in no respect, at least during this hour's journey. All day, dark and clear, as it remained, the houses in the next suburbs stood just as well anchored on their hill foundations, or growing out of them, and the overlapping regions exuded a strength unlike that of any skyscraper metropolis; and when I considered it now, I had never been anywhere, with the exception of the boarding school, where I had not eventually been happy to be.
By the boarded-up arcade of the long-distance railroad embankment, the walled-up former weapons depot used by the Germans, a young couple was lingering, distraught with desire, and on the decorative dice mounted on edge on top of a garden wall the dots had been repainted, as had been the billiard queue along with the black and white balls on the flank of a drinking trough. Not only the gaps between the houses, but also the spaces under the steps leading up to the houses, which in many places were as if barricaded, had been cleared out in the course of the year, and many a house, with its outbuildings and crushed-rock paths, the courtyards expanded into plazas, formed an entire village.
And then cats leaped from windowsills, the whistles of express trains echoed from the hills, people stood in telephone booths with their backs to the sidewalk, driving-school cars went by, on a
terrain vague
a circle of pale grass served as a reminder of the recently departed little circus (to which children now, to paraphrase Rilke, went to smell the lion), in a pediment above a sundial stood in Greek letters the inscription “God is forever measuring the world.” And a procession of workers came toward me, with flags, on the last day of their protest march to the president's palace in Paris, to prevent the closing of their Land Rover factory far off in Brittany.
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nd then? The one moment of sunlight that day: like another epistle. And then the forest again. It occurred to me that it was Monday, the quietest day, on which things in nature, mistreated during the weekend, revived. Branches and sections of trunks lay across the path, snapped off by the morning's ice. Here was the range of hills between the two inhabited spits, and the wind was growing stormy. I plunged off to the side through stalks of wild currants, a single one of whose tiny fruit balls in summer had the taste of an essence, and thus came upon, put on its track by a raven with something round and yellow in its beak, the tree, long since sensed, with the wild apples (but edible only in dried form, like dehydrated pears).
Striking how often in the course of the year I have got my hat and hair tangled in the thicket of the forests, almost hung up on a branch, and I thought again of Absalom, enemy of a father who stayed out of sight, and in his war against this father inescapably caught by the hair by the forest and then beaten to death by his pursuers.
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p above on the crest was a large clearing. I was dizzy and sat down there on an oak trunk. The day remained dark and clear, and whenever I closed my eyes, there was a flaring of retained images, as only in winter.
From the forests all around came a mighty roaring, to which I surrendered myself. Just as there was the expression “ravages of war,” now for the stirring gray-on-gray all around there was the expression “ravages of peace.” From the ground up, all colors contributed to it, and the garlands of clematis, with their appearance of gray roses, looked brighter than the white of the birches and darker than the black of the alders. “My son,” I thought, “or someone else, will one day recite the epic of this thirty-times-thirty-fold winter gray, how it has overlapped and will continue to have its accumulated effect, backward and forward into the cosmos.”
And I thought further there in the clearing, in my style of jumbled thinking: “I still have much walking to do. Going on foot, precisely in
this automobile-dependent civilization, is more adventurous nowadays than ever. Walking, easy knowing. Too close to the human race, I feel horror. I have love of the world. It is within me. Except that I cannot keep love of the world at the heart of the story. For that I had to go to the margins. The silhouettes: I feel the weakness in them, the lack of presence. And yet a fieriness emanates from all of you, scattered as you are. The world is full of dark colors from commonalities among people unknown to one another. Perhaps the outsider is in fact best equipped to see you as all together. Long ago, during my time in court: justice came not so much from the presiding judge as from the associate judge. And since I have been here in the suburbs, I have come to see myself as such an associate judge. As a reader. To read a book of a new-blown world. Once more I should like to feel the gray wind of Yugoslavia rounding the bend. Where do I belong? At home at the edge of the field. And here I am closest to that. And yet here I walk past walls different from those in my homeland. The time has come for different words. But which ones? When something has disappeared, it means that something different is now to be found. My friends and I, we are not in any sense victors, but also not doomed to extinction. But perhaps I am lost to nature. And a terror has taken root in me, deep and ineradicable. And Ana and I: such a waste. The two of us together time and again became the black planet. And yet in my life I wanted to bring something home every day. Bring home where? To those entrusted to me. What have I given up in the course of time? The legal profession. And rightly so. My homeland. And rightly so. But not right that I gave up my family. When alone I appear to myself again and again as a villain. How often I wish I could shoo myself out of my own head, as a mother might shoo her dozen children out of the noisy house. And then again, at the thought of being alone, upon contemplating in the evening a rustling plane tree along a highway exit, I should like to spend my whole life this way. How unburdened all those men in bars used to seem to me, long since without housemates. And how does that song of the singer's go?
Who knows, who knows.
And how did I wake up this morning? With a hair in my mouth that was not mine. Dream and work!âthat was on those factory workers' banners I just saw. Do not exhaust the possibilities of the day; put it all into the book; that is where it belongs. And where
are the readers? Mysterious brood! Passersby, hieroglyphic mankind. No new time? Did I write that? This year? Oh, man of little faith. Those who have not undergone metamorphosis have done themselves in. New World: like walking on a street in new-fallen snow, where no one has been but a little bird.”