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But didn't my finds relate to a time long past, weren't they the last remnants, leftovers, shards of something irretrievably lost, which no artifice could put together again, and which took on a radiance only in the imagination of a childish finder? Was it not the same with these elementary particles as with the dripstones which in their grotto, in the flickering candlelight, give promise of a treasure, but, once broken off and exposed to the daylight, are nothing more in the hands of the thief than grayish stone potatoes worth less than any plastic glass? No. Because these finds could not be carried away; these were not things you could stuff into your pockets, but rather their prototypes, which impressed themselves upon their discoverer's inner self by letting him know where, unlike the dripstones, they could flower and bear fruit, telling him that they could be
removed to any country whatever, most enduringly to the land of storytelling. Yes, if, in the Karst, nature and the works of men were archaic, they were so in the sense, not of “Once upon a time,” but of a beginning. Just as I've never thought “medieval” when looking at a stone roof-gutter but, as never in the presence of a modern building in either country: “Now!” (heavenly thought), so at the sight of a dolina I never thought of the prehistoric moment when the earth suddenly settled, but time and again saw something future rising from the empty bowl, swath by swath, a primal form that merely had to be held fast. Nowhere, up until now, have I found a country which with all its divers components (not excluding a few tractors, factories, and supermarkets) struck me, like the Karst, as a possible model for the future.
One day I got lostâas I often did on purpose, impelled by curiosity, thirst for knowledgeâon a pathless steppe interspersed with thickets and loose rock. Before long, I had no idea where I was; there were no detailed maps (apart from secret military ones) of this frontier region. As usual once you take a few steps across country, the wind brought no sign of life from any of the hundred villages, no barking of dogs or children's screams (which carry the farthest). For hours I struggled on, obstinately, zigzagging around dolina after dolina, which lay fallow, their red-earth bottoms strewn with pale boulders, between which here and there great trees shot up, their tops level with my feet. Here I could speak of wilderness and here I learned that this whole waterless country was an immense desert, merely pretending, by putting forth vegetation, to be fertile, a land in whose gentle breeze many an inexperienced
traveler had doubtless died of thirst, possibly hearing to the last the soft sound of flowering ash trees, whileâsupreme ironyâa clear mountain stream may have been flowing not far away. For a long time I had heard no sound of a bird (actually, even on the fringe of the villages, one seldom heard a peep); I hadn't even seen a lizard or a snake. After struggling through a dense thicket, I found myself hopelessly lost in the waning afternoon, at the edge of an immense dolina, as big as a football stadium, barred at the top by a tall, dense palisade of virgin timber, which I noticed only at the moment when I had forced my way through to it. The dolina seemed uncommonly deep, partly because of the walled terrace ledges that divided the evenly gentle slopes; on every level a different green, varying with the crop grown on it, the most intense green shining from the uncultivated empty ring of ground at the bottom, more magical than the floodlit grass of an Olympic stadium. Of all the dolinas I had seen thus far, only one or two were in use. Here, to my amazement, I was confronted by a whole population. On every one of the terraces from top to bottom, there were small fields or gardens, all with several people working on them. They worked with consummate slowness, there was charm even in the way they bent over or squatted with legs spread. From the whole wide circle arose, softly and evenly, what has remained in my ears as the pervasive sound of the Karst: the sound of hoeing. On the vineyard terrace I saw only standing persons, half hidden by a roof of foliage, tying vine shoots to strikingly crooked posts or spraying them, while in the tiny olive field only hands were visible. On every level I saw at least one tree, on every level a different variety, among
them, though it seemed almost inconceivable so far from any running water, such meadow trees as elders and willows (of which I once heard an inhabitant of the Alps say, “They're no trees, just junk; now take a spruce or an oak,
that's
a tree”). I distinguished so many different greens that I could have given each a different name; all of them together, dear Pindar, would have added up to a new Olympian Ode. The last light seemed to gather in the dolina as in a lens, which sharply outlined and magnified the details. This enabled me to notice that no wall was like any other; one consisted of two tiers of stones, the next had a layer of earth between the two, while what looked like a boulder at the edge of the bottom circle was a conical hut, built of stone blocks growing smaller toward the top, with a keystone in the shape of an animal's skull and a roof gutter, from which a long pipe led down to a rain barrel; the hole in the ground was no accident, it was the entrance to the “casita” and had a lintel the length of an eagle's wing with a sundial scratched into it.
Now a stooped figure is coming out, a boy with a book in his hand; he straightens up to become a man, and I am again immersed in the wood smell and summer warmth of my father's shed; I've gone directly to the fields from school, and I'm sitting there at the table with my homework, barefoot; in one corner I see a napkin-covered basket with bacon and bread in it and a jug of cider; in the other the dead nettle plant from which, though there isn't a breath of air in the room, cloud after cloud of pollen puffs trace on the floor the pattern of sunlight formed by the cracks and knotholes in the boards. I hear the voices of my parents as they work toward each other from the two ends of the field
(monosyllabic greeting, followed by an exchange of wordsâFather cursing, Mother laughing at himâall leading up to their afternoon snack together in the field); I play solitaire, listen to the rumbling of the thunder, stretch out on the bench, dream, am awakened by the droning of a hornet as a whole squadron of bombers comes shooting out of the mist, eat an apple, the skin of which shows the bright image of the leaf that shaded it, and on the stem the shriveled blossom, go outside, straighten up in my turn into a grownup, a man, take a deep breath, and recognize the hut as the center of the world, where the storyteller sits in a cave no larger than a wayside shrine and tells his story.
So friendly was the room into which I now looked down, and such power rose up from it that even the Big Bang, so it seemed to me, would be powerless to harm this dolina; both blast and radiation would pass over it. And looking ahead, I saw the people at work in that fertile bowl at my feet as the remnant of mankind after the catastrophe, starting to farm again. Yes, this place tucked away in the dead desert struck me as a self-sufficient farm where the earth still fed its inhabitants. And no thing in the world had been lost; true, abundance was a thing of the past, but there was at least one viable exemplar of every basic substance and of every basic form. And since every necessity was both on hand and a rarity, it showed the beauty of the beginning. And precious was not only what was at hand but also everything that could be seen, the grain in the fields as well as the shadow on the stoneâand in this imagining I was reinforced by the people of the Karst, for, living in want and menaced by the void since time immemorial, had they not a hundred names for a
corncob, an ear of wheat, a bunch of grapes, and just as many for every one of their few birds, all sounding like nicknames (though neither “throttler” nor “mockingbird,” neither “wolf's milk” nor “kitchen bell”
4
was among them), as though the many names were intended to fence the thing in and preserve it. The image of this plantation sunk into the Karst earth, protected from any enemy incursion, secure from atom bombs, under the open sky, as a goal to strive for is still with me, nor have I forgotten the tootling of the transistor in the stone hutâits prize song. Image? Chimera? Fata morgana? No, image, because it is still in force.
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Although my time in the Karst was entirely made up of walking, stopping, and going on, I never had my usual guilty conscience about being a good-for-nothing idler. My sense of freedom every time I arrived somewhere was not the consequence of a release. I had no feeling of detachment; on the contrary, I knew that I had at last become
attached.
Didn't I secretly say to myself immediately after crossing the threshold of the plateau: “Now
we
are here!”; didn't I see my solitary self in the plural? Just as my father's daily chores, plugging a hole, unwinding a rope, chopping kindling, were for a time rituals designed to make my mother get well, so I imagined that by investigating the Karst I was serving a cause, and not only a good cause but a great and glorious one. Many motives were at work together: to prove myself in my own way worthy of my forebears and to save what they stood for; the desire to
be the discipleâhis only one, no doubtâmy teacher so longed for; an irresistible feint in my duelâa strange obsessionâwith my enemy; to earn the love of the most lovable of women precisely by going into the desert and enduring all manner of hardshipsâbut transcending all this there was something that I call the desire or appetite for an orgy. What sort of orgy? I have always believed in dreams, so I shall answer with the story of a dream. In a glass cage, intercity bus and funicular in one, the same passengers kept meeting time and time again for a group trip to the Empire of the Karst. Not a single word was spoken. The crossing was marked by a shimmering, towering Indian mountain, which any child could have climbed, under the bluest of skies. This was the last stopping place. Our group was now complete. From here on, nothing could be seen of the country; there was only the vehicle, moving as quietly as if it were standing still, and with it the passengers all at a distance from one another, no two together. True, this one and that one were known to me from the street; the man at the ticket window, “my shoemaker,” a shopgirl; ordinarily we greeted one another, but once we boarded this vehicle, none of us gave any sign of recognition. Instead of exchanging glances, we sat motionless, united in expectation. The more often we set out on this trip, always from a busy station accessible to all, the more festive became the light in the cage. Rapture awaited us at the end of our journey, in the heart of the Empire, the greatest joy a human being could know; the bliss of being gathered into nothingness. Of course it never happened, we never even came near it. On the last journey, however, one of my traveling companions smiled at me, so giving himself to be
recognized and at the same time recognizing me. An orgy of recognition: instead of rapture and confluence, shock and oneness, with the verb corresponding to “orgy” translated as “to yearn steadfastly,” and the place name
Orgas
as “Land of Demeter” or “Meadow” or “Fruitland.”
In reality, the Karst is a land of want and the crossing is not marked by a strange Indian mountain. It's long after the border before you notice, to your surprise, that you are climbing and that something has changed. First the wind, then the flowing brooks are gone, there's not even a trickle of water; dark pines have replaced light-colored deciduous trees; conversely, the brown clay and gray-black stone, so long the companions of your journey, have abruptly given way to a massive chalk-white, covered by only the scantest of sod; stubbly pasture has taken the place of succulent meadows. Though the plain down below is still near, the towns and rivers still clearly visibleâyou can even see an airfield with a steeply rising jet plane and a drill ground with hopping soldiersâthe plateau is as quiet as if you were far out on the open sea. At first you had sparrows flying ahead of you; now it's butterflies. It's so still that you hear the sound when a butterfly chasing a falling leaf grazes the ground with its wings. You hear last year's dry pinecones crackling, one high overhead, the next at eye level, and so on, a graduated sequence, a constant chirping until sunset, while from this year's fresh pinecones the resin drips steadilyâdark spots in the dust of the path, getting larger and larger.
Stick to the path; even so, you won't meet anyone; the dark men escorting you to the left and right, fanning out now and then into the pale savanna, are juniper
bushes. Hours, days, years later, you will be standing at the foot of a white-flowering wild cherry tree, with a honeybee in one blossom, a bumblebee in another, in the third a fly, in the fourth a beetle, in the sixth a butterfly. What glitters like a water hole on the path up ahead is a silvery snakeskin. You pass long rows of woodpiles, which on closer scrutiny prove to be camouflaged ammunition dumps; you pass round heaps of stones, which turn out to be the entrances to underground storehouses; if you touch them with your foot, the rock is cardboard. At every step, grasshoppers will squirt up at you from the middle strip of grass. A dead black-and-yellow salamander moves almost imperceptibly along the wagon rut. When you bend over, you discover that it's being carried by a procession of dung beetles. After all these tiny creatures, the first animal of any size, a white-faced fox, a dormouse wrapped around a branch, will look to you like a brother. That breeze in the solitary tree over thereâa moment later you feel it on your face. Your resting place is a cave; to explore it you won't need a lamp, because daylight shines in from the far end and through a few holes in the roof. Water will drip on your overheated forehead, and in a niche there are quail's eggs, not bullets but stone balls, rounder and lighter in color than in any mountain stream. As you go your way, you shake them in your hand, and their smell, quite unlike the stinking heaps of bat's dung, will bring the widely ramified clay chambers of the Karst caves into your room as long as you live.