I’m a teacher of ancient languages in Lehen, a quarter northwest of Salzburg, on the left bank of the Salzach. Lehen is the city’s most densely populated district and is regarded as a working-class neighborhood. In the middle, there’s a football field, the home ground of the team that used to be called Austria but now, like all Austrian football clubs, bears the name of the corporation that pays the players. As the crow flies, it’s not very far to Lehen from the Oak Tree Colony here in the south. But the peat bog lies in between and there’s no direct road across it, only the lengthwise Moos Road (the plan for a so-called southern tangent has been set aside for the time being). Consequently, since I haven’t had a car for some time, I’m obliged, on my way to school, to take the bus into Salzburg and change to another bus. On the way home, though, I often walk through the Moos, cutting across the meadows at random until I come to the Alm Canal. From there, the towpath takes me straight to my house.
I haven’t been teaching lately. Have I been dismissed or given a vacation or granted sick leave, or temporarily suspended? All I know is that there’s no official term for my present status. Everything is up in the air, I say to myself. A few days ago, I knocked a man down in the street. One afternoon on Getreidegasse, which seemed less crowded than usual, I was overtaken by a man, who jostled me and immediately afterward turned to look in a shop window, with the result that we collided. To tell the truth, though, it wasn’t a collision, because I could have stepped aside. I pushed the man intentionally, and it wasn’t just a push, but more like a punch, a sudden impulse, so actually it’s wrong to speak of intention. The man fell to the ground with a strange, almost inaudible cry of pain, then instantly stood up without my even offering him a helping hand. But while still on the ground he gave his assailant a quick look, as if he had understood. Then he vanished into a side street. Possibly he wasn’t even a tourist, but a local. To an outsider, the scene must have looked like one of the usual collisions between pedestrians on this narrow street, only perhaps a little more violent.
In my decades as an adult, I have twice struck someone: once, on the night of a dance, I hit my girlfriend, who had just kissed someone else before my eyes and in public; and a few years before that — actually I was an adolescent at the time — a boy from one of the lower grades, whose study hall I had been appointed to supervise. It’s true that as we left the dance the girl herself had asked me to hit her, and my one blow, which came as a surprise to me and which I did not repeat though she asked me to, was in itself a solution. At the time, my act gave me real satisfaction. Come to think of it, it wasn’t an act, but more like a reaction, occurring at the only possible moment, comparable to the jump or throw of an athlete who for once knows with certainty: now or never. So my conscience wasn’t troubled and there was no question of reproach. Violent as my blow was, it inflicted no pain — of that I’m sure — but only made both of us smart. That was the turning point. We both recovered from our paralysis. In that instance, I’m innocent. But the slap in the study hall, brought on by some trifling provocation, is still on my mind. Up until then, I had been a man like other men; that slap showed me up as a criminal. The look on the boy’s face — though my blow hadn’t really struck home — has said to me down through the years: Now I know you, now I know what kind of man you are, and I won’t forget it. It’s not the look of a child or even of a person; and it emanates not from two eyes but from a single eye, which in all these years — though most of the time unheeded — has never blinked. I saw that eye again in the man I knocked down on Getreidegasse. It’s dark brown, not at all angry or hateful or avenging, just inexorable; and its intention seemed to be to make me impossible, not to others but to myself. That eye, I sense, is right, and I sense that I, too, am right. The push I had given in the crowd didn’t upset me for one moment. Afterward, as a matter of fact, I looked toward the vanishing point of the suddenly humped, meandering street, and saw my kindred climbing the deserted slope of the Gaisberg. My purpose here is, at last, to find myself confronting as a fact what for so long has pursued me as a mere phantasm. And “in suspense” doesn’t mean “in danger,” but precisely in suspense, or in a state of “in-decision,” as it were.
The day after the incident on Getreidegasse, I obtained a temporary leave of absence from my job. The motive I gave was the urgent need to complete a paper that was to appear next spring in the Salzburg Yearbook for Regional Studies. This was an interim report on the excavation of a Roman villa in Loig, a village on the far side of the airfield. Though I’m not a trained archaeologist, I’ve spent a good part of my vacations working on digs all over the country, particularly the Hemmaberg in southern Carinthia, where I helped to remove the mosaic floor of the early Christian basilica. In the early days of my archaeological activity, an older archaeologist once said to me: “All you care about is finding something.” It was in part this remark that impelled me to train myself at digs to look less for what was there than for what was missing, for what had vanished irretrievably — whether carried or merely rotted away — but was still present as a vacuum, as empty space or empty form. Thus, in the course of time, I acquired an eye for transitions that are ordinarily overlooked, even by professional archaeologists. Sometimes I playfully call myself a thresholdologist (or seeker after thresholds). This should not be taken only figuratively. I became in fact a student of house, church, and temple thresholds. I studied the thresholds of whole settlements, even though these last, as often when they are made of marble or granite, have been carried away, or, when they are made of wood, have rotted. In the field, I recognize the emplacements of former thresholds by hollows, color gaps, and traces of wood. My work is not merely incidental; once thresholds are located, the whole ground plan can be deduced; they provide boundaries that indicate the original layout of a building or a whole village.
A glass on my desk contains some sawdust, the remains of a threshold I discovered on the Hemmaberg and wrote my first paper about. Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me. During the school year I often devoted an afternoon to it, helping on digs in the immediate vicinity, such as the Celtic Dürrnberg near Hallein or, only recently, the “Roman Road” in Loig. I was usually rather tired the next day, but that actually benefited my teaching; it made me calm and alert, and I listened to my pupils, just as they listened to me.