Never would he have thought that he could be so pleased by a success — his first. And now: how bright the foreign lights became, of Corinth, then Nemea, then Argos, then Nauplia; how it gave him, who had meanwhile been feeling the tug of home, the impetus to continue his journey, to set out on foot. There were successes that hollowed one out; not this small first one. “I would like to make something,” he wrote to me on his twenty-second birthday from mountainous Tripoli in Arcadia, “that would put me in a class with the painter of the chambers of Thera.”
Upon receiving notice of the prize, he had bought himself a suit, as well as shoes, which, hardly worn, he is wearing today as he waits, in mid-December, in Patras for the ferry to Brindisi to dock. He long ago learned not merely to read Greek but also to speak a few words, whether ancient or modern, such as helios, sun, and cheimon, winter, and in every place he immediately found the one roomy café, each time with a high plaster ceiling and the most elaborate neon-light patterns, where he had his spot, with or without drawing pad, amid the clicking of the dice tossed by the old customers, and no matter where he was, he called it Neos Kosmos, New World. (Didn’t kosmos originally mean “decoration”?)
Now in wintertime the shrill chirping of the cicadas had long since fallen silent, yet in the rocky expanse, especially that of Arcadia, one could imagine it all the more vividly. Only a short time ago, toward the end of his year’s journey, Valentin informed me that he encountered his father a few times, in the form of doubles, and very strange ones indeed. This happened to him, however, almost only by hearsay, once in Delphi, where in a tourist café there was talk of a rather scruffy fellow who had introduced himself as “Gregor Keuschnig, writer,” had let others pay for his meal and then disappeared with the loveliest woman in the group; and then again in a restaurant, estiatorion, by the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where on the wall hung a postcard, addressed to the proprietor’s lovely daughter, with my signature forged, and above it thanks for help in time of need and for the unforgettable hours with her (postmarked Paris).
And one time Valentin even saw me in person, by the Piraeus ferries to the Aegean islands, where “I,” barefoot, ragged, younger than in reality, “the writer G.K. in crisis,” was offering to sell to my fellow countrymen waiting in line cartoons that I had drawn myself and carried in a portfolio. Again and again my son in his days as a disc jockey had played a song by the singer titled “I’ll Throw My Father Off My Back”: there, at the sight of my double and counterfeiter he recognized that he had stopped needing to do that a long time ago.
This morning in Patras, on the stone steps, in the upper town, he had witnessed a man trying to lure his escaped parrot back into its cage from a tree. The bird’s master did this by calling up patiently to the escapee, for hours on end, in a very tender voice, while the bird talked back to him, and he had the cage on his head, its door open, and on the tip of the cage, the sharp spike there, he had stuck an apple, which he turned now and then, or also tossed away into the air, while out of the tree only sparrows flew constantly.
In between the man put down the empty cage, withdrew, and waited in silence. The escaped bird did not budge. More and more neighbors approached, cautiously, and softly offered advice. And then, as the midday ferry was already blowing its whistle down in the harbor, my son came over and gave the apple on the spike a gentle push, so that the stem, instead of sideways as previously, now pointed straight up toward the pappagallo in the tree. And in that moment the parrot dropped, as if in free fall, jungle-yellow.
And now Valentin is making his way slowly toward the bay here, for the reunion we are all going to celebrate.
My friend the priest on the Jaunfeld Plain had been constantly on the move all year, but hardly outside of his parish, except for the visit, occasioned by his sermon defying the Pope, to the bishop in K., who, without a word’s being spoken between them about the whole matter, agreed with him that the caption under a photograph of the two of them in the next church bulletin should read that the child of Siebenbrunn had merely come into town, as farmers often had in earlier times, “to look at the clock again.”
It was chiefly on account of the dying that he could not get away, even though he did long to now and then. There were no more of them than usual this year, but the need seemed to have grown, among the old as well as among the young, for someone like him, since no one else did it anymore, to stop by, every day if possible, with his disdainful gaze, and lay on his hands. Then they wanted him to stay, even if he just gazed out at the landscape, with his back to them, or read the paper. He was in agreement with the Protestants in at least one respect, namely that faith alone was decisive, and was close to disapproving of so-called good works; these, and here he was of one mind with “his” writer, the apostle Paul, should be refrained from, “lest any man should boast.”
Except for those who lay dying, all year long hardly a soul in his parish of many villages asked for him, and only very rarely did his appearing cause eyes to light up anywhere; the majority even turned away, not hostilely, only sullenly: “Oh, him again.”
At the end of October he telephoned me, as promised, because on the Jaunfeld, in the village of Rinkolach, and on the house of my ancestors there, the first snow was falling, “flakes feathered like arrows,” falling in town, on the contrary, horizontally, looking in the headlights of the dense stream of rush-hour traffic like towropes; besides, my brother had discovered his singing voice, the last one in the family to do so, and was singing in the church choir, with such a beautiful voice that Urban, as happened every time when he succeeded at something — and he succeeded at almost everything — broke out in lamentations at his own life-weariness.
In dark November, lacking sun also because of the mist off the dammed-up Drau in the west, the priest dreamed a repetition of the event that had preoccupied him since that night in the Lower Austrian seminary for those called late to the priesthood: again he found himself, as in reality there, lying in the bed of someone else, who was fast asleep, as he had just been, and he? How in the world had he ended up in this other bed, next to a huge strange body that left him no room? Where was his own bed? How would he be punished? Expulsion from the institution? A mark of Cain on his forehead, for life?
Then at the beginning of December came such a heavy frost that the bed of the brooks flowing through the Jaunfeld toward the Drau, from the Petzen and the Karawanken Mountains, froze over from the bottom, up over the pebbles, enlarged into ice balls, whereupon the water on top, forced upward, spilled far over the banks. And for the first time in decades the villagers became skaters again, out until late on full-moon nights, as if things had never been any different in the interval; and blocks of ice weighing tons were cut, as if for the icehouses of a different turn of the century.
Advent had long since arrived, and there were still a few refugees in the rectory, from the German civil or cousins’ war, refugees from the north and west for a change, instead of from the south or east as usual, Bavarians and Hessians from larger cities, driven out by the Saxons or Frisians or Saarlanders, then seized here by a kind of paralysis, incapable of going home, although since the summer peace had returned to their areas; perhaps they also harbored thoughts of remaining forever in this rather empty land of pines and wayside shrines.