How instructive, how full of visual impressions, such waiting could be; “willing waiter”âthat could have been another name for me at one time. On the railroad embankment above our heads trains were passing, for a while almost without interruption, the express trains so fast that one saw only streaks of light flashing by (accompanied by a shuddering in the restaurant from the ground up), while in the commuter trains they were passing, windows and heads remained distinct; altogether a racket that, after my time in the noise oven, spoke to my heart. At the same time, the owl's hooting from up in the woods, which could be heard intermittently, traced the outlines of all the bays in the world. And on the kitchen radio Arab music was playing, a man and a woman in turn, each snatching the last note from the other's mouth, as it were.
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hen we paused to watch the news on television.
In a war zone, hanging gardens that covered an entire slope, nothing but purple wisteria, in the form of a frozen waterfall, were blown upâwhat a splintering.
Altogether, there were strange wars going on now: those of the hikers against the bikers; those of the smokers against the drinkers (“the good drinker is proverbial,” the proprietor and prophet remarked, “but good smoker?”); those of letter writers against telephone callers. In another part of the world, in a muddy arena in front of a hundred thousand spectators, a larger-than-life pig and an equally enormous so-called pig fighter were rushing at each other in a life-and-death struggle, with monstrous squealing, trumpeting, snorting, and gasping, in which one could not distinguish what belonged to which. An old priest, from the looks of him the abdicated Pope, climbed into a pulpit for his last sermon, and spoke: “I shall say nothing, so that all may be made new!” whereupon his young successor called out from below, “I am afraid!” A war criminal who had slit the throats of innumerable people had to, while he factually reported this, repeatedly swallow hard. And finally, on the foreign television news program, there was a picture in which nothing was happening but a slow, steady snowing in the Pyrenees or the Alps.
And then the waiters summoned to help out for the evening arrived and were dressed by the proprietor; among them, being held by the hand by his little son, the Russian bus driver and widower, who, looking at the mushrooms on the table, announced that they were nothing compared to those in Russia.
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ight came on. As usual here in the suburbs, the bustle outside, just a moment ago that of part of a metropolis, instantly subsided and even seemed almost completely at a halt. At approximately the same time all the bars went dark, and of the shops only the North African grocery store remained open, the illuminated standing scale out on the sidewalk the indication of its being open. A wind from the steppes was blowing. Between trains there were suddenly large intervals, and the buses even became as infrequent as overland buses on their way to a
remoteness very far away yet similar to the one here. Up on the railroad embankment, now just a sort of stop, half in darkness, a young man was burning a letter. The couple of pedestrians, seen through the windowpanes, then also turned out to have been pretty much the last. The sparrows, along with the one dove, in the local sleeping tree were rocking silently in the forks of the branches, or rather being rocked by the night wind.
And what happened then? I waited at the ladder bar, at my feet the child Vladimir, who was rolling a spool of thread back and forth across the room. “The children were running beneath the wind”? No: where the children were running was a different wind. In the upper section of the window, above the line of the wooded hills, the huntsman Orion appeared, the blinking of his shoulder and belt stars seeming all the more menacing through the wisps of clouds that hid it for moments at a time. Beyond the horizon a mighty ringing of bells sounded, which was then a squadron of night fighters booming forth from there.
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ittle by little my friends came through the door, one at a time, at short intervals, from all directions of the compass, and none, so far as I could see and hear, first got out of a vehicle.
They came along so quietly, also inconspicuously, that the child hardly took notice of them, and at any rate was not frightened by them; and I was reminded of my grandfather's comrades and how they, likewise seemingly on tiptoe, one knee in the air, a finger to their mouth, freshly bathed, in their best clothes, with playful expressions, had stepped over our threshold in Rinkolach for their regular Sunday afternoon card game. At the same time my friends' step was firm. Only Valentin, my son, came running, for the first time in a very long while, toward me.
And I? Felt at the sight of each of them as if I were being butted from below, at the knees, as if by a goat, from sheer joy. And all of them, I saw, had hangnails on their fingers from fumbling around in their pockets in foreign lands. And each had spent at least one night during the year lying in a mortal sweat. And each had celebrated his birthday alone in the course of the year. And now we celebrated the birthdays together.
The standard word of greeting among us: “And?”
But the singer was still missing. And perhaps I was a drowning man, without knowing it? All of us? Yet it remained true: a catastrophe, when it set in, first made me stiff with fear, then avid for adventure.
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hat we ate I have already partly given away, and of the rest I shall give away only this: it went with and enhanced it.
And then true: when the moment for storytelling arrived, the friends told of their year things entirely different from what I have told here. Common to them was that in one way or the other I had the notion that all these stories bore some resemblance to turning hay or turning and relayering, again and again, apples in a farm cellar. Each of them, even the stonemason in his festive doubletâhis year is written on another pageâmentioned his own situation merely in passing, and yet in this intimation the listeners found the world.
The only one who then delved all the way in was the Russian refugee child Vladimir, wide awake as no adult could be. He bellowed like a primeval forest, said his, “And now!” and then, sitting on the floor Indian-style, he shouted, shrieked, joyously hurled his version of the story of the year into the faces of those assembled, amid pounding and a spray of saliva, not comprehensible word for word, but the only one with meter, from a time even before hexameter, a chanting that rose through the air, whereupon, after his concluding shout at just the right moment and his immediately falling asleep, we sat there not only amused but also in slight uneasiness, and his father, by now seated with us at the table, remarked that at home Vladimir sounded altogether different!
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o the accompaniment of all the stories, there stood outside in the ladder hinterland, by the opposite sidewalk, in the illuminated circle of the streetlights, in Porchefontaine (a section of Versailles), more luxuriously and generously than in my bay, a delivery truck in front of the mason's house that belonged to it, with shovel and broom in a pile of sand still in the back, as the emblem of the trade.
As the last daytime object, the fruitery's scale disappeared from the street; an almost painful moment when, both trays swaying, the pointer
trembling, it was carried back into the shop, a bright menhir. In the single remaining lighted window, barely above street level, someone was sitting, older than all of us, with the curtains drawn back at an angle, like a tent opening, and writing and writing. Almost empty and then empty down to their polesâpole-emptinessâthe buses to the royal palace drove by. A nocturnal jogger sped by with such strength in her shoulders that in the middle of the street she left a path of her own. At the one set table in the garden, next to a leafless tree, the white cloth billowed, whorled like a pyramid, in the wake of the express trains up above (if any, only these were still running).
On the embankment there the Mongols of Ulan Bator were walking. Among the strollers on the Stradun in Dubrovnik, this evening every one had the same turning point. From their lairs among the birch roots poked the sniffing snouts of the muskrats of the Nameless Pond, by which a lone fisherwoman was sitting, waiting for the magic catch. And in the house beyond the eastern foothills, all sorts of beds were set up, peacefully floodlit, and was it snowing now? no, these were flakes from the chimneys. And each of these scenes was as close as the branches of the December cherry blossoms in the vases before us, to be touched through the rungs of the ladders.
“My dream entered into the fairy tale and became land.” Who said that? I thought it, and in the same breath it was spoken by the chef and petty prophet, long since at the table with the rest of us.
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e was then the last to come out with his story, and not merely that of this one year of nineteen hundred ninety-eight.
I have noticed several times already that precisely the cursers, complainers, and cynics, as soon as they forget themselves and fall to telling stories, are the most profound, warm, and all-inclusive storytellers; I have never felt more tranquil inside than when I have been listening to such a Thersites, metamorphosed into an epic narrator.
The proprietor of the Auberge aux Echelles of Porchefontaine (formerly Fontaine Ste.-Marie, formerly the Upper Nile) began by laughing, and he was laughing at someone, himself in fact, with that wild anger he usually directed against others. As if energized, he then fell into his humming, but this time instead of the “Ode to Joy” it was the saddest
melody I know, called on my Jaunfeld “World-Weary,” a waltz more for dragging around than for dancing, or a dance of the dying, of a woeful, indeed deathly boring slowness. While humming, he yawned in accompaniment, according to all the rules of the dramatic art, and reminded me of that dying man who almost to his last gasp had not left off yawning. It was as if he needed the singer for help in striking up his own song, as indeed the prophets of old, they say, needed a musician before they could open their mouthsâonly then was the hand of Yahweh held over them.
The prologue to his story went as follows: “With God's summons to me, my eternal summer came to an end. Why did I not remain with my sheep in the desert of the steppe? Why did I listen to the voice from the burning bush? Or: why did I not simply continue to listen to the voice in the bush and do nothing but continue to repeat it? But as it was, I heard a command in that voice:
Take action!
and followed it, and set out into history, never-ending, and all of my kind were thus: false prophets. As the lover of history I was the eternalizer of hell. But how to deny history? Does it not matter in what country you raise your head to the heavens? Yes, in my despondency I clung to everything, even to my fatherland. And that merely pushed me deeper still into despondency. In my history time I was the crooked flame, not the straight. And yet all the time I had a photograph of myself in my memory, as a newborn, full of bright joy. But in the actual photo, when I saw it, the person with joy was the one who held me swaddled in her arms: my mother. Why did I not remain where I was from my earliest days, in the desert? The larger the desert around me, the richer the wellsprings of fairy tales within me. When I had the desert sparrows in focus, I was at my peak. The burning bush, that was them.”
Here began the merging of the petty prophet into his storytelling, the first word today, more than a week later, in the new year, still echoing within me: “Afterward”; followed then, hours laterâin the meantime the last passerby had long since disappeared from the wind-tattered main street, a three-legged dog, wandering homeâby these essentially unconnected sentences: “If you are once driven from your promised land, you will return there only by insistently remaining elsewhere. One who is not in the world is impatient. Odysseus was patient. Gilgamesh knew distant parts. I have ceased to spit fish into the desert.
Enough of the prophet. I encounter such people now only in certain suicides. And yet I have seen it: during this century another has passed, is still with us, will continue to make itself felt, for instance in the airy dustiness of the suburbs, here and elsewhere. To move things into their place will also be the New World. At the moment numbers are the last refuge. And thus I see the circle of the world renewing itself in counting. From the two histories at odds, a third will emerge. And how will it go? For instance: When I was still slow. Or: When empty shoe-polish containers were still a treasure. Or: In this year I have not swum in a single river. Or: Once at midday a bird was hopping in the tree like a garment hung on it. Worms capable of metamorphosis represent a huge step in nature, and only then do things get lighter and have more air. Thus it is like a fairy tale when one watches the creatures. And fairy tale means: to have penetrated most deeply into the world. He who fetches the blue from the sky makes it richer up in the sky. I have dreamt: The creator went unnoticed, and the creation took heart. I have dreamt: A savior of mankind would be the great forgetter. I have dreamt: I was a handball player looking for fellow players. I have dreamt: By the way in which someone ate he created a work. I understand all the doers, amok-runners, warriors. But the only vision I know is reconciliation. Why is there no peace? Why is there no peace? The great are those who make peace exciting, not war. Homer today would sing the epic of the souvlaki eaters on the train from Corinth to Athens. And this morning I thought: Incomprehensible that one is not immortal. And on another morning: How certain I am, even in the world's worst times, that everything is different. And on yet another morning: Even if human history should come to an end soon, even in terror, something will have taken place in that history, from the beginning, and will have continued steadily, so glorious, so childlike, so gripping, so interconnected that it could happen only once; as human history in the universe could not possibly be better and more beautiful. God does not see me because I do not let myself be seen by him. Hair-root wind, from-the-ground wind, Habakkuk wind: it is still there, it still exists. The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope.”