My contemporary novel of societyâthrough which wafted the ever-present epic of the undefined people encountered on the street and in public transportationâcame to naught. I did not even begin it (although the real apothecary of Erdberg, who in those days sat next to me at table for an evening, still sends me material year after year from far away and hints that if we were together he would have a lot to tell me for my book). The more closely I scrutinized my plan, the less the people with whom I had daily dealings seemed suitable as heroes or even as characters in a book. And if they did fit into a book, then only one that had long since been written, for instance Doderer's
Strudlhofstiege.
But even in this saga, in those days already situated far back in the past, I did not find my Viennese and Austrian acquaintances anywhere as participants. When I sat in my room out in Sievering at the end of the 1960s and closed my eyes to the beautiful view and thought about them one at a time, they all, even the oldest among them, lacked that “depth of the years,” even in their fragmentariness, that would have qualified them to be developed by Doderer.
Whether as a thirty-year-old then or now, a quarter of a century later,
I was not really interested in finding a past that would lend depth to the people in question for my book. But some sort of background, even if it were lit up just for a second as if by lightning, was what I needed for them, for each of them, to let me get launched on telling stories around them, and finally even about all of them at once, if possible.
Nowhere did I see such a background, no matter how often I went over my acquaintances, one after the other. Although most of them, except for my outsider and criminal acquaintances, constituted members of one and the same society, in my mind they did not fit together anywhere. That had nothing to do with my assessment of them or society. They were simply out of the question, no matter how I respected or hated them, for inclusion in a book. Not even the solitaries, the outlaws and strangers, with whom I often had a more intimate association than with the others, appeared to me against the background of a book, or the background remained dull and lifeless. For my imagination, for the book, it had to be alive, bright or dark, short, incompleteâas short and incomplete as possible.
I knew too much about my people in those days. Since I was someone to whom people confessed things, I knew the most secret lives of many. Of course, the heroes of my book were supposed to have a second, secret life. My image of it was completely different, however. So why not attribute it to those unknowns who, as fellow passengers, as people in line with me, as passersby, were supposed to populate the book from beginning to end? No; for then the passersby would lose their fantastic contours in my eyes, too. In those days I was coming to know so many in my country's society from close up that eventually all sorts of people hurrying through the streets appeared to me, when they spoke their first word, if not before, as those I had known by heart for a long time. There, wearing a Tyrolese hunting cap, went the police commissioner, or someone just like him. There, crowded together on the back seat, were all those I had defended that year. There, leaving the perfume shop, was a woman who could be the secret mistress of the professor of Roman law. On the outskirts, in Rodaun, in Mauer, in Weidling, in Hiitteldorf, in Heiligenstadt, in Schwechat, I encountered in strangers the waiters, teachers, judges, pimps, and women with whom I had been on first-name terms for what seemed like forever, and to whom I had just said goodbye in the inner districts. That silhouette over there on the commuter
train was my landlord. When the exotic-looking person on the bus opened his mouth, he turned out to be my neighbor, the one with a boat in his backyard, with the wife who took a fatal tumble on the stairs, with the child whose heart stopped beating during a tonsillectomy.
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nly once during that time did a stranger pierce me through and through and yet remain unfamiliar, without dissolving into the double of a type I knew from society. It happened on a streetcar, not an ordinary one but one that went out into the country, the so-called local to Baden. One day, for almost an hour, a woman I did not know sat diagonally across from me, all the way from the Opera House to a central market somewhere outside the city. Beauty is something I have very seldom seen in people, and then always this way: a person was initially not beautiful but became so, over time or all of a sudden. The woman in the local was beautiful immediately, and remained so until she got off; nothing could touch her. When I say, “The beautiful woman was warm and friendly,” it sounds to me like “The grass was green” or “The snow was white,” and yet it is the only thing I can say about her (although I recall various features). She made me see what mattered, in my life, in the book.
It was summertime, many empty seats on the streetcar, a lot of light, especially out there in the meadows, beyond the city limits. A child, not a small one, was sitting beside the beautiful woman, then on her lap. I did not manage, and this was fortunate for me, to see the woman as a mother, as the wife of some man, of a doctor, an architect, a soccer star. She defied all categorization. She could not be a hairdresser, a businesswoman, a television anchor, a speleologist, a poet, a model, a motorcyclist, a second Marilyn Monroe or a second Cleopatra, a queen or a singer.
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nd during all this time I played soccer on Saturday afternoons with, among others, a cabinet minister of about my age, who once confided in me, in the cafeteria of our suburban stadium, that since childhood he had been waiting for his father, who had disappeared in the mountains, to come home. And a surgeon, with whom I went hiking in
the Vienna Woods on quite a few weekends, half circling the city, once described to me how during operations he often felt the urge to plunge both hands into the patient's liver, for example (he had very large hands).
And frequently I also sat in a certain outdoor café alone, the last one there, and the proprietor, after the waiters and kitchen help had long since left, would come and join me, expounding on the variations in Austrian dialect, intoning the nuances in pronunciation from valley to valley, with barely perceptible sound shifts, like a series of magic incantations; or he would trot out hunting adventures he had as a specialist in sick animals, none of which he had ever left alive, and when he had followed their sweat trail for days, clambering over cirques and dodging avalanches: “There you are, finally!” and “Always a clean shot!” Often almost the whole night would pass while we talked under the linden tree, which kept the rain off the two of us, except for occasional drizzle. Or I stood in half-darkness in the closed ward by the rails of the bed to which the notary's wife was strapped, while she implored me to report her situation to her husband (who had committed her to the mental hospital).
And the man who sat down next to me in all my regular bars, dressed in the light-colored suit of a man-about-town, was a monk, and every time he was coming from giving religious instruction to pupils each of whose ears he would have liked to box. And the man in a too small gray smock who waved to me from a distance while loading packages in the yard of a local post office on the outskirts of townâI realized it only out on the streetâhad been the headwaiter at the Bristol Hotel just the week before. And when I rang the bell of the artist couple's apartment because I had left something behind, I heard from behind the door cries of passion, which the most insistent ringing could not interruptâand just a moment ago, in my presence, and all evening in fact, they had been spitting their mutual hatred in each other's faces. And the traveler to India told me that in the place where he went every year, to get away from society here, he rubbed shoulders with the world's elite, whereupon his equally gentle girlfriend told me he went away only because he had his brother's death on his conscience, and as she spoke these words she slipped her bare foot between my legs under the table.
I knew the place where the former Olympic bronze medalist in the
slalom, long since homeless, slept in an underground parking garage, knew that the deputy mayor went fishing only because of his depression, spent several nights with my construction-worker brother in the barracks in Simmering where his crew of itinerant ironworkers from Carinthia was staying, was one of the few allowed to attend the funeral of the murdered gambling kingpin, a book publisher on the side, at which his SS friend, a presidential advisor at the time, delivered a graveside eulogy during which he repeatedly broke down, and his wife then had the St. Stephen's concert choir sing the Mozart Requiem, practiced specially for the occasion.
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y
comédie humaine
from the Austria of that period, modeled loosely on Balzac and Doderer and the Civil Code, remained a figment of my imagination.
Although at times I saw all the characters sharply delineated in my mind's eye, there were still several rather strange reasons why the story did not allow itself to be written, at least not by me. Perhaps the strangest: on the one hand I intended to capture all of society, including the terrorist (today a housewife once more) urging her cause on me in a staccato whisper as we huddled in a broom closet at the chancellery; including the Yugoslav guest worker, his skin reddened from his work in a laundry, in his free time painting signs for pubs on the eastern outskirts of Vienna, a man who despised the Albanians because they “didn't have any butts in their britches,” father of a half-Albariian child, off in distant Pristina with its mother.
On the other hand not a single person in this society seemed to fit with anyone else, no matter how I closed my eyes and racked my brains, not even within the established groups, academic and social classes, associations, clubs, and cliques.
Each of these people appeared to me in my imagination alone, without a link to a second or third party of whatever sort.
Not that I had in mind a connectedness, even the most fleeting unity, for this society; its members merely refused to let themselves to be pictured in one and the same story. And the others out there simply appeared as doubles.
Another problem was that on the one hand the individuals whom I was considering as preliminary sketches for my own inventions did not cease to baffle me the more they revealed themselves, and on the other hand not one of them seemed inspired by anythingâa cause, a mission. (In my conception, “The Society of the Inspired” had been the book's subtitle, after “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”) After they unveiled their secrets I actually found not a few of them good and decent, and could even admire and respect quite a number of them, and not only a doctor for being on call at night or a politician for switching his allegiance from one segment of society to another or a bus driver on snowy mountain roads. The only problem: not one of them revealed anything that sparked my imagination.
And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.
Neither the former nor the latter were anything for my book. Among all these many people, none provided the appropriate starting point, or even the most delicately traced first initial; this only my ancestors offered, the dead and the disappeared.
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t the time I came to believe that people in a story could not have anything to do with the living, no matter whom.
When I explained this one time to the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, he replied that I should have started nonetheless. A false start was often more productive than the right one. And besides, nowadays there were nothing but false starts for books. How could I be sure that with the first sentence of my present project I hadn't turned my key in a door that led nowhere? And wasn't it possible that I had been deterred from writing my novel of society merely by the prospect that it would have to be one of those obscenely fat books that both of us despised on sight?
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ven when writing was not yet my profession, as in those days when I was still an attorney, it already guided my life, less the
how
than the
where.
As the years went by and I realized that the country and people of Austria were antithetical to the book of my dreams, I went away to be among the most distant foreigners.
I never attended the School of Foreign Service. When I was with the United Nations, whether first in New York or later as an observer in Israel and Mongolia, where I was working for UNESCO, even if I was called an attaché or a vice-consul or something else, I was either an office worker or the right-hand man to one and the same clever diplomat I knew from my days in Vienna.
Almost every day in New York I would bump into our future federal president, who confused me with someone else, and always with the comment that I spoke remarkably unaccented German for a Slav. The woman from Catalonia said later that I had written my article attacking him just to get revenge; she herself, who at the time knew him from the East River, sometimes held him up to me as an example, with his way of never revealing his thoughts, also his bearing, his dress, his refusal to touch anything for which others, inferiors, servants, could be called upon, his way of never showing any feelings, either joy or sorrow.