Though there was plenty of room in the last bus — known as “the drunks’ special”—I stood on the moving disk between the two sections, which turned slightly on the curves. The floor of the long, tunnel-like vehicle rose, fell, and tilted this way and that; an empty beer bottle kept rolling under one of the seats and then out again. The two arms gripping the overhead wires not only conveyed the needed current but seemed also to save the bus and its passengers from sinking into the earth; following their example, I clutched the hanging straps above me with both hands.
It was a short ride; at that late hour, the bus went no farther than the cemetery. By then, I was the only passenger. I didn’t get out until asked to, and then I took elaborate leave of the driver, becoming more verbose from step to step. “Good night, Mr. Chinaman,” said the driver, and started round the circle on his way back to the city.
My housing development was still a long way off; for me, it couldn’t be far enough. For a moment, the bus wires against the open sky veered off in the direction of a suburb in Japan. Shining in the lamplight, the gilt letters on the cemetery gate were an illegible script, or all the scripts in the world combined.
Something drew me westward, across the meadows to the canal. But at the moment that didn’t seem to be my place. I stayed on the main road, which is bordered on the left by the cemetery wall, and as I walked I looked at the distant embankment — on my side of it the Canal Tavern, dark except for a single light in the upper story. The building, another symbol, looked to me like a lock-house.
For a time I was alone on the road and imagined that Loner — like Loser, Hurler, and Spite — was a name. After a while, a man with hobnailed boots came along in the opposite direction and said in a malignant tone: “I know who you are, but you don’t know who I am.” As far as the end of the cemetery wall, I ran. The crematory amid the pines was lit up like some “sight” in the Old City. A yellow glove hung from a branch near the sidewalk. Above the road, the bus wires seemed to be woven into a steel net that wouldn’t move before dawn.
The short stretch where the road rises — the Salzach, which has now been diverted eastward, used to flow here — gave me a chance to breathe deeply and I savored it. Though the former river terrace was not very high, the plain it led to — where the village of Gneis is situated — was definitely a plateau, and here the air was perceptibly colder. There was still snow in the fields, and where the earth showed through, it revealed a pattern resembling bird tracks. The mistletoe balls in the trees had white caps on. Icicles cut through the April foliage and reflected the night light with the clarity of glass. Birds chirped from tree to tree, as though eager to know whether their friends had lived through the storm.
I bent down and washed my eyes and temples in wet snow. I wished it would start snowing again. My lips and forehead thirsted for snow, as though I hadn’t had my full share of winter yet.
In the suburb of Gneis, there was little light except for the streetlamps. An old old woman was standing at the window of a dark ground-floor room. The curtains were open and her face was close to the pane, but half concealed by her misted breath on the glass; no one would now have stood up to the look in her eyes.
Near the center of the village, the outlines of two children were painted on the roadway. The boy, who was a head taller, held his arm protectively around the girl. Both carried schoolbags. The sister was characterized by a pigtail, the brother by the prominence of his occiput. Under the layer of snow, the pair recurred several times in almost, but not quite, identical versions. The snow around them had melted, and the luminous paint glistened, though blackened from head to foot with tire marks.
I stood for a long time in the street, deep in contemplation of the schematic figures. Contemplation? In any event, there was nothing contemplative about the look I gave the driver of the oncoming car (who braked just in time), because he quickly closed the window he had already half opened and drove off without a word. Maybe he had only wanted to ask for directions — would the woman beside him otherwise have said: “Forget it, can’t you see he’s a stranger here himself?” And I called out after the car: “I’m only fit company for enemies now. Only my enemy is my friend.” Since this enemy no longer existed, all that remained was an aimless “Wipe him out!” (But at the same time I thought: Lucky none of my pupils’ parents was in that car.) Only then did I notice how many plays had been going on inside me, plays upon plays only a few hours before — and now not a single play was left. Or rather: I had run out of lines.
In the wooded section before the Colony, a mist arose. Only a few jutting branches could be made out clearly; trunks and treetops had almost disappeared. I dove into the mist as into a familiar element, one that suited me. The amount of space seemed infinite, and all for me. Suddenly on a tree trunk my shadow came to meet me.
I was almost disappointed when houses came into view; the gray of night was plenty of light for me. But in Oak Tree Colony I was — important to get this straight at such an hour — at home. The asphalt under my feet was home ground; this was in every sense my territory. Hadn’t I once wanted to shout at a noisy group of foreigners in the Old City: “Quiet — this is Austria!”? My country: an enamel sign in a provincial railroad station showed a pointing hand, with the words: “To the well.” My country, indeed. A man’s own country meant refuge, he could defend himself.
“But would you also defend this country of yours?” “Perhaps not the parliament building” would be my answer to such a question, “but this barn and that vintner’s hut, definitely.” For I can say of myself: “I am sick with my country.”
Now in the dense mist of the plain there was nothing but the Colony; no mountains, no sky; the desolation was almost complete. Some of the new houses were still unoccupied, and here and there the streets still smelled of fresh paint. The curtains of the foreign workers’ houses were of various dark colors, and even on the fully laden clotheslines there was seldom anything white to be seen. A barn glowed with inner light, shadows of animal bodies and human heads moved about and intermingled, as though a mare or a cow were being delivered. By the football field, a landfill far out on the heath, the dark tavern was being guarded by a dog named Nadir du Mistral with glass eyes and ears that resembled horns. A short, fierce, peacock-like screech issued from the Home for Retarded Children; a fluorescent light flickered; the windows were open at the top and the blinds hung down at a slant. A car had just driven into the garage; the top was covered with snow mixed with greenery; the driver, his hands on the wheel, was listening to the news on the radio; the only light in the villa that went with the garage was in the aquarium, where ornamental fish slowly swam back and forth.
I sat down by the canal, on a bench next to the phone booth, facing the apartment house where I lived. From time to time, the wind whistled through a solitary spruce by the water. I shut my eyes. Behind me, the Alm, almost silent over the rest of its course, roared like rapids — at this point, it drops steeply. Had I slept? When I opened my eyes, there was the half-moon with the face of a decrepit old man; a spruce branch was waving like a bird’s plume in front of it. In the moment of my awakening, the whole tree darkened and became my shadow.