On me, too, word circles had the effect of fairy
tales, for though the terrible, the repellent, and the evil were amply represented in them, they were only a component which took its place in the whole and, in the dictionary at least, could never win out. My teacher found fault with the stories I had been writing at the time, saying that I had a weakness for the macabre, that I was positively addicted to the gloomy and gruesome; the law of writing, by contrast, was to create, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, the brightest of brightnesses; even a last breath, he said, must be transformed into the breath of life. And now, immersed in the dictionary's “rain of blood,” “rat turds,” “spittle of disgust,” “the fecal sausages of the earthworm,” “shoes moldering in a corner,” a beast named “understone” (a viper), a place called “land of moles” (the grave), I felt free from my addiction to the gruesome or even to the tragic and found in the contemplation of names a pattern in the world, a plan, which transformed country people and a village house into world people and a big-city house. Every word circle a world circle! The crux of the matter was that every circle emanated from a single foreign word. When people felt unable to communicate an experience, weren't they always wailing: “Oh, if there were only a word for it!” And in moments of recognition, weren't they much less likely to say “Yes, that's it!” than “Yes, that's the word!”
But wasn't I taking the side of a foreign language against my own? Wasn't I attributing this one-word magic exclusively to Slovene, at the expense of my native German? No, it was both languages together, the single words on the left and the circumlocutions on the right whichâsign after signâcurved, inflected, measured, circumscribed, constructed space. How fortunate
was the existence of different languages, how meaningful was the allegedly so destructive Babylonian confusion! Wasn't the Tower of Babel actually built, though in secret, and didn't it, after all, reach up into the heavens?
Day after day, I opened the book of wisdom more excitedly. Is there any word for the adventures I was experiencing? What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape? There is a word, a German word, and that word is
Kindschaft!
3
I clap my hands in amazement!
Â
Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word for the bright spot in a cloudy sky, a word for the way an ox runs back and forth on a hot day when he's stung by a horsefly, for flame suddenly bursting from a stove, for the juice of stewed pears, for the star on a bull's forehead, for a man on all fours extracting himself from the snow, for a woman stocking up on summer clothes, for the sloshing of liquid in a half-empty bucket, for the trickling of seeds out of seedpods, for the skipping of a flat stone over the surface of a pond, for icicles hanging from a tree, for the raw spot in a boiled potato, for a puddle in clayey ground. Yes, that's the word!
But was my plan still valid? Wasn't the word for “the sound of two alternating flails” obsolete, since the
corresponding implements had for years been hanging inactive in the museums? Wasn't “the sound of a falling body” the meaning that survived? Didn't the term which in the past century designated only “emigration” lose its innocence when the events of the last war changed its meaning to forced “resettlement”? Didn't the old book suffer from the absence of resistance fighters, of partisans, for whom the “partisan,” that obsolete, halberd-like weapon, was hardly a substitute? And even back at the time when the dictionary was compiled, were there not a striking number of designations for places where something
had
been but was no longerâfor fallow land “where barley formerly grew,” for the place “where the barn used to be,” the stone surface “where bushes used to grow”? And even at that time, were footnotes not appended to certain particularly inventive designations, to the effect that they were no longer in use? And hadn't the scholars included in their book any number of words which even their source, the oldest inhabitant in the most remote valley, had stopped using except in word games? So, instead of saying that words had fairy-tale magic, wouldn't it be wiser to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?
Yet, at the same time, they
were
fairy tales; for in answer to every word that questioned me, even if I had never seen the thing it stood for and even if it had long departed this world, the thing invariably gave rise to an image, or more precisely, a radiance.
Â
One afternoon on the plateau I came across the last word my brother had ticked. As in many other cases,
the date and place were supplied: “At the front.” In the early stages of the war he always carried the book with him; it was only at the end that he left it home, along with his jacket, “as a baptismal present.” The rest of the dictionary, more than half of it, showed no further pencil marks and seemed never to have been opened; there were no prewar blades of grass or wartime flies pressed between the pages.
There I sat, contemplating the one word, leafing back to the others: was this a map of the areas of the earth or only of their memoryâor perhaps even their obituary? Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in
my
time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to
emphasize
something? Why, at the age of twenty, did I feel tired at the mere thought that some interlocutor might open his mouth? Why did speechâeven my ownâoften banish me to a muffled middle-class living room (where the windows might be “deaf” rather than “blind”)? Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare
mot juste
that made me feel that I had a soul?
In the village, on my way to this spot, I always passed a house, one wall of which merged seamlessly with a boulder. Similarly, when I now looked up from the old words, I saw the upper edge of the book merging directly with the air. The book formed a ramp guiding my gaze to the foot of the southern chain of mountains (one Slovene name for which, in literal translation, was “underwing”). There I saw a bare declivity, somewhat veiled by distance, which, however, because of the spruce at the edge of my little plateau, seemed only a stone's throw away. The slope, overgrown with grass, was hatched to the very top with a dense pattern of
disused cow paths. These looked something like stairways, which occupied the whole breadth of the slope and crisscrossed to form nets. The large horizontal pattern was broken by a smaller one of vertical grooves, in which the clay-yellow water of the afternoon rain was now flowing. Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes they slipped from level to level, thus gouging out channels for the rainwater. One beast jumped up on the one ahead and was dragged a bit of the way on its back. One raised its tail and urinated so violently that I almost thought I heard it, followed by a plopping of dung. And then I actually saw the steaming of urine on the paths. So slow was the procession that it called to mind the crossing of a great mountain range, the baggage train of a migration that had been going on since the beginning of time. And precisely the emptinessâthe empty network, the deserted crisscrossing paths, the empty, slightly irregular serpentinesâreinforced my impression of animal clumsiness. Here, in contrast to the terraces of a mine or gravel pit, there were no helmeted men with machines moving busily up and down the slope, but an aimless mass almost marking time, with lowered heads, on all fours or slithering on their hind parts, a caravan of carriers and slaves, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere, for which the slope was not even a stopping place,
except in the event of a broken leg or an emergency slaughtering.
Â
I thought again of my teacher. As a historian, he took a special interest in peoples who had vanished from the face of the earth. He began his course almost ritually with an example taken from his study of the Maya (because of which the students had given him a related nickname). As a student he had explored the Yucatan for years: “As a geographer,” he said, “I grew tan, and as a historian, paleâas pale as I am now.” The Maya, he said, had never succeeded in building a state, because their peninsula “lacks a great river. Think of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or of the Nile.” Nor had they known the wheel or the pulley or the windlass; the only form of Mayan wheel ever found had been part of a small toy. But what most impeded their political development was their inability to construct a supporting arch; they knew only “pseudo-arches,” incapable of sustaining the roof of a room, let alone a hall. Their one element of cohesion had been religion. Instead of the wheel, they had had the roller, and with it they built roads, used only for processions to their sanctuaries in the jungle. But every peasant's hut was also regarded as a temple. All life was governed by the heavenly bodies, which were looked upon as sacred, because instructions for daily life could be read from them. The steles dedicated to the sun indicated the time to sow; the hieroglyphics engraved in the stone served as a clock. In these ancient inscriptions, ancestors were also honored; the popular religion demanded that every family should know its origin; the first man, the ancestor common to all, had been made of corn.
The decline of the Maya began when public religion gave way to private worship. “You see,” the teacher went on, “the families were rather unsociable, each kept to itself; the only bond between them had been public worship. But then they began to build chapels of their own, each for itself, at a distance from the others; forgotten was the idea that the house as such was hallowed. The bond was broken. It was then that the hieroglyphics on the steles came to an abrupt end. In the year 900 of our era,” said the teacher, “the last inscription was chiseled into a pillar not far from the grassy area which the Spaniards were to call the âSavanna of Freedom.' Imagine the sparks in the flint, which was what most of the steles were made of.” The end of this people is most strikingly symbolized by the stairs on one of the pyramids: step after step richly decorated with sacred reliefs and glyphs, the sign for the morning star, the sign for the tree that gives the villagers shade, the signs for sun and day, which taken together signify “time”âbut on the topmost step only “a few muddled, scratchy chisel marks.”
That stairway appeared to me in the empty sloping pasture. Much larger than the mound in our orchard at home, it actually had the shape of a pyramid and seemed with its hundred-odd steps, tapering toward the top, to reach the sky. I saw the words my brother had ticked climb the slope and then break off. Every line on the slope was an overturned hieroglyphic pillar, lying face down in the mud. The clayey brooks, welling up from scars in the earth, washed syllable after syllable away, until the whole place smoked like a field of ruins where not even the usual cherry trees had been spared. Seized with a need to mourn, I stood up, still holding
my brother's book. Nothing more was moving on the empty steps, not even a blade of grass; even the water stood still; and hadn't being alive always meant simply being able to breathe with the flowing water, the waving grass, a rising branch? But what I wanted to mourn was not just a solitary death, it was something more: an annihilation. To annihilate means to do away not only with a particular human being but also with what gives the world its cohesion. To eliminate someone like my brotherâwho, unlike the great mass of those who speak and write, had the gift of bringing words and through them things to life, who never ceased to exercise that gift and to point out examples as he was doing now to meâwas to kill language itself, the living tradition, the tradition of peace; it was the most unforgivable of crimes, the most barbarous of world wars.
But I was unable to mourn as I had wished. Instead, the phrase that had been the peasants' watchword in their earliest uprisingâ“Our old right!”âkept spinning around in my head. Yes, from time immemorial we had raised a claim that should not have been allowed to lapse. And it
had
lapsed, because we ceased to raise it. And why did we always demand our right of someone else, some of an emperor, others of a God? Why didn't we take it for ourselves, essential as it was for our self preservation, letting no one else intervene? There at last was a game in which we wouldn't have had to measure ourselves against anyone, a lonely game, a wild gameâFather, the great game!
Back from the empty cow paths to put my thoughts in order, back to the book. I had been sitting and standing barefoot, and barefoot I strode back and forth outside the barn. The last word my brother had ticked
had a double meaning. Translated, it meant both “to fortify oneself” and “to sing psalms.” (Immersing myself in these words was the exact opposite of my usual immersion in so-called breathtaking stories; time and again the words made me raise my head and my eyes.) I stopped and raised my head. By way of a ford marked by a tree, I was carried back to the bluish cavern of my seminary desk. Its back wall was the grooved mountain slope. A sun shone on it, low in the sky as shortly before setting and made brighter by the unlit spruce in front of it. The steps were thick bars of shadow leading to the summit, on which lay a thoroughly earthly glow. The light pinpointed the smallest shapes on the slopeâa clump of grass, a half-overgrown hoof print, a molehill, a line of birds along a rivulet, a wild hare nearbyâand connected them with one another by distinct interstices. I went on reading, my eyes at once in the book and on the mountain. My staring became a watching, as when in a strange crowd one knows that a familiar face or two must be present. Here in the sun, the resounding litany of the faithful which had begun in the dark church was resumed in a silent litany of words, with their many meanings. To breathe deeply was to yearn was to tense the strongest muscle. Violent anger was sobbing. Fireflies were June was a variety of cherry. The mower was a sandpiper was the belt of Orion. The grasshopper was the bridge of a violin was the inner partition of a nut was the upper part of a whip ⦠A change of one letter transformed the word for a slight breeze into the word for a powerful flow, and another into a tempest, which was also the name for flying sand ⦠At last, silent invocations took on human form, and I saw the absent ones appear on the
steps, silhouetted by the word-light: my mother as “the woman who had ceased to be a handmaiden”; my father as “the man who never ceased to be a servant”; my sister as “the madwoman,” which, with a slight sound shift, became “the blessed”; my girlfriend as “the quiet one”; my teacher as “bitter sweetheart”; the village idiot as “he who stirs up wind while walking”; my enemy in the form of “a bruised heel”; and ahead of them all my brother “the pious,” a word which also designated “the serene.” And I?âI recognized myself, reader and onlooker in one, as the third party on whom everything hinged, without whom there could be no game, and who thus found in himself the salient features of the other players: my father's white, servant's feet and the torn corners of my brother's eyes.