What in the morning had been adulterated by the stench of tomcats now resolved itself into the fragrance of the apples spread out on the shelf. It must have been late afternoon, for the open door of the west room no longer admitted sunshine, but only a deep-yellow glow, in which the hibiscus plant cast on the wall a cloudy shape and within it a few clearly delineated stem shadows. “Late afternoon” reminds me that my son once said it was depressing to keep reading in stories: “At dusk”—it would be better, he thought, to say: “In the late afternoon.” “They arrived in the late afternoon.”
I stood up and looked around; I had never seen a more beautiful room. I bent over the hibiscus blossom. A daddy longlegs was groping its way over the wall, and I addressed it roughly as follows: “Oh. So that’s it. Aha. Hmm. Very well. Good. Why not?”
I took a long shower. Under the warm water, my body gradually grew out of itself. Stationary leg and free-moving leg took form. I took deep swallows of the liquid that would have choked me a few hours before.
In the kitchen, I ate a whole package of zwieback and recalled a saying I had often heard as a child: “Dizziness takes the appetite away.” I had been dizzy for days and now I was hungry. I ate an apple and knew at the first bite that I would go on eating.
Seated at my desk, I put my manuscript, “Thresholds of the Roman Villa,” into an envelope, addressed it, and affixed stamps. Only a short while before, I would have looked on without lifting a finger as every page of it burned or flew out the window. I read a letter from the school principal, who had once been my teacher and later became my friend. In it, he said I was expected back after Easter vacation, that the students had been asking for me, that the undersigned missed me — and not just in his official capacity. A postscript followed: “Please don’t forget that you’re a teacher. Even if your manner isn’t right, you are nevertheless an effective teacher, precisely because you are not entirely of the profession. What enables you to teach is your slight embarrassment, coupled with your total immersion in your subject. There are more than enough competent teachers. But students get the feel of a subject only from those who are at times visibly embarrassed at being teachers, from stutterers and thread-losers. Only such a one remains fixed in the student’s memory as ‘my teacher.’ Quin age. Let us then be up and doing!”
The reader of the letter sat down and wept; not over the praise, but over the salutation, “Dear Andreas,” for it seemed to me that for years no one had called me by my first name.
Still seated, I opened the window. The west wind grazed my neck and temples. In inhaling, I was taken with a violent coughing fit; all those days, I hadn’t once breathed deeply. A horse snorted beside me; that horse was me, as if my nostrils had suddenly grown.
The word “vision” has gone out of fashion. But a vision is just what I had then. I saw the ship of my life, caught in pack ice and already half under water, suddenly rise to the surface and go dancing away. Though the water might be no more than a rivulet and my ship a scrap of paper, perplexity was instantly transformed into a cheerfulness which was anything but caprice and which for the first time could be relied on.
At the same time, though, I realized that the murderous stone I had thrown a few days past marked the beginning of my own death. Since then, there had been something deadly in me, something that could be played down — as I was doing now — but not eradicated. I was no longer in a state of suspense — and my present lightheadedness had grief as its companion. To play down meant power. “Power” meant: “I have time.”
I sat down at my desk, picked up a pencil, and wrote in the flyleaf of Virgil’s Georgics: “Not an unfortunate accident, but destiny. Take accident as destiny. Not mine, but everyone’s. Destiny as man’s lot. Not his human lot, but his share. Distinguish two sorts of human destiny: lot and share. Man’s lot: as everyone knows, to die. His share? All I know is that if I haven’t had my share, I shall die without having fulfilled my destiny. My share is up to me; to obtain it, that is, I must challenge it. From disaster to destiny. Through destiny to self-awareness. I am determined and self-determined. Surrender? Yes, but not to any judge. No, I will not ‘surrender,’ I will seek out a witness. What for? To ask for advice. Who will be my witness? And time and again ‘the threshold’; lest you pass it by, slow down to a child’s pace. No, don’t slow down; restrain yourself. — Sunflower in the mist. — The epithet for hibiscus in Virgiclass="underline" slender.”
A pyramid of wood for the Easter bonfire, heaped up at the point where the road passes into the meadow, was illumined by the last light of day. I went from window to window, this way and that, through the whole apartment. Now and then, on the slopes, a trial cannon shot rang out. A freshly washed bus was waiting at the terminus; with its two long, thick arms, it looked like a great stag. For a moment, the portholes of a plane taking off became transparent, revealing the bright blue sky behind them; for a long while, flocks of black crows followed its sooty trail, just as gulls follow the wake of a ship. Below, a child popped paper bags while walking in the street — his version of an Easter salute; while a teenager ran back and forth in an orchard, snapping a whip, which at every crack sent little clouds of smoke rising between the treetops.
This time, a different couple were sitting on the bridge railing: an elderly man in a double-breasted suit with a pocket handkerchief, tie, and white shirt, holding a younger woman close, murmuring and whispering as he rubbed his head against hers, and occasionally prodding her with his forehead; if they should fall into the canal, I thought, the water would hiss as if something red-hot had been dropped in.
Otherwise, the streets were deserted. But, undoubtedly, crowds were pouring into the churches for the Feast of the Resurrection. The mountains looked blue; then gray; then black. The rows of light at the airfield suggested a fiery cross, traversed by a constantly renewed arrow. The border station on the horizon gleamed like a factory decked out for a holiday.
Love welled up in me for this city in the plain. Its cityness. Substance of joy. The earth awakened within me, with a white Mayan city on the chalk cliffs of Yuca-tán, and with Heraclitus, warming himself by his stove and calling out to visitors: “Come in. Here, too, there are gods.” I wanted to throw myself on the ground, but not alone. At that moment, a single word sufficed: “Here!”
At length, the cathedral bells rang out in the distance. There the ritual of transubstantiation was being enacted: bread into “body,” wine into “blood.” The bell sounded twice, both times very briefly. It was as though a heart that had stopped beating began to beat again. A horse raised its head and showed its great eye with its light-colored, bristling lashes. The beaks of the gulls were at their sharpest and most hooked.
Little by little, the bells began to ring throughout the city area. I distinguished the bells of Elsbethen, of Aigen, of Persch, of Gnigl, of Sankt Andra, of Maria Plain, of Bergheim, of Freilassing (across the border), of Bayrischgmain, of Grossgmain (back on this side), of Liefering, of Wals, of Gois, of Taxham, of Grödig, of Anif, of Morzg, of Gneis; the bells of the Meadow Church, of the Moos Church, of the Old People’s Home Church, of the Dormitory Church, of the Poorhouse Church.
During the night, there was a violent knocking on the water pipes. The hibiscus blossom rolled up and fell off its stem, with a very soft sound. A warm wind blew through the wide-open room. There was a smell of wood smoke. Even before the first bus arrived, I heard a twanging in the wires like a catapult in action, followed by a crash, as between two hockey sticks. Up until then, it had been so quiet that the waterfalls in the mountains could be heard. Later on, a strange melody sounded from end to end of the plain. In my half-sleep — which was more like a special kind of waking — separate sounds answered one another and thus became music. A train whistle was followed by the rumble of a steel grating under rolling wheels. The rumbling was taken up by a barking dog. The dog’s barking took on the tone of the wind in the trees, which in turn blended into the enveloping sound of a short rainfall. Actually, it was not so much a melody as a leitmotif prolonged indefinitely. Every new sound took it up and intensified it. Every object that emitted a sound swelled, as it were, in my imagination and vibrated, converted into a musical instrument. Plucked instruments, percussion and wind instruments rang out, interspersed with an infrequent but precisely timed violin tone, as though from a mountain lake freezing over. The sound of the rain was rhythmed by a vibraphone-like ringing far below the road, rising from the round openings of the manhole cover. I had once taken the children to see a film in which terrestrial and extraterrestrial beings conversed by means of such a persistently repeated motif. Had extraterrestrial beings landed now, and was this sound their signal? No, this was an earthly sound, an earthly creature lay dreaming, and his breathing through a single orifice fed the earthly orchestra. Dreaming? I had never felt so wide-awake. A more delightful wake-up music was unthinkable.