For a while these few traumatized individuals were lodged in one of the abandoned schoolhouses of the area, speechless, their eyes lowered, and just last night, before his departure today, he had said Mass for them there. While at the Kyrie eleison, the sentences from Scripture, the Hallelujah, his heart as always was suffused with warmth, and, he told himself, as he did every day, he could get along without any celebration except, for all eternity, that of the Eucharist, of thanksgiving, of Communion, with the transformation of bread and wine into the divine body and the divine blood, still he gazed at the refugees’ absent or confused faces with such scorn, increasing as the moments passed—“Could you stop boring the whole world with your misery!”—that the final blessing with which he sent them forth was hardly out of his mouth when all of them burst into laughter, at first still awkwardly here and there, then unanimously relieved.
And this morning he sat by the window of his office and waited for daybreak — while yearning for the winter’s night to last a good while longer (as the weeks of Advent meant more to him than Christmas itself; for its celebration this time the priest from the next parish would take his place). He, without domestic help, had ironed his shirts, rinsed out his coffee cup, had even, long before sunrise, gone skidding over the most terrible roads around the Rinkenberg to give his vehicle the patina of a forester’s car, for my sake, and the day before had instructed all the dying to hold off until the new year and his return, and was now sitting, as he otherwise seldom did, quietly, in his traveling clothes, the heavy tome he had just been reading balanced on his shoulder.
Down below on the icy path, likewise as if for the first time since all the wars and events of the century, a glazier with his rack of panes on his back, which caused a glittering all around in the first rays of the sun. But his main attention was focused on the holes, the ventilation pattern in the wall of the tumbledown barn across the way, shaped like a circle of sunflowers, in the middle an opening in the shape of an acorn, like that of the ace in a deck of cards. Pavel had already been waiting a long time for something to waft into his face from these pitch-black grids, like that third calling. And what if this one revoked the two previous ones?
With my other distant friends I shared during the year here in my bay fewer such moments, perhaps because they all ended up too far away, and furthermore in places of which I hardly had an image (or too definite a one), perhaps because they were either too young or less old than my son Valentin and Father Pavel, perhaps also because I received no word of them, as was the case with my singer.
Nevertheless, even without a complete train of images, I continued to see the wandering through the world of each individual friend — I had only to point my thoughts in his direction — in a sharply delineated light: this was like looking through the telescope in my house at the moon, the full moon, which each time made me feel as if I were not only seeing the glaring white surface but were also gazing into the depths of the smallest crater, at the bottom of the basin there with its boulders and their shadows.
Thus almost the only thing I knew about the architect and carpenter was that he, more in the latter role, had been on the move until now, into the winter, from one mountain village to the next in southern Japan, and was offering to work for farmers, repairing their wooden structures. As a rule he did not even ask, but without ado worked his way in from the outer edge of the property, from a lean-to in the meadow, a turnstile, a rack for drying straw, the lattice door of a root cellar. Just the sight of these Japanese villages, huddled together with their curved, bronze-dark roofs overlapping, as if dedicated to the heavens, made tears sometimes come to his eyes. Not to jump onto the train of images like so many architects today, but to add his own to the organically developed image!
If he was not remunerated every time, he was at least tolerated, especially since he promptly went to work in a way that brooked no contradiction. He did, to be sure, stay out of the way, yet did not behave like a stranger, but as if he were at home, on the karst or in Friuli, except that now, abroad, he finished every one of his projects. And after his return he would adhere to this pattern on his own building site. “It’s time to build”—this was one of the few messages I received from him.
The tools for his repair work, work which had the aura of inconspicuousness, he fabricated himself, or the Japanese farmers occasionally helped him out with tools that had long since been deposited in corners, behind the machinery: there were still carpenter’s pencils around, for marking boards, no different from everywhere in Europe, the special short-handled hatchets, the long, flexible string, and to go with it the old carpenter’s cans with a red liquid through which the string was drawn and then snapped against a tree trunk to mark the cutting line, a smacking sound on the wood probably heard everywhere in the world.
Occasionally he also came through large cities like Osaka, and noticed that there all the physical or “dirty” work was usually done clandestinely, by strangers like him, only with darker skin; the screens in front of new buildings under construction allowed one to see in even less than those elsewhere, and it was also as if the workers there had explicit instructions to remain out of sight: a rarity when in the midst of the construction noise a human figure could be seen in a gap in the screen, and then with his back to the street, a rear view, and promptly swinging hand over hand back into the wings.
For a few hours, during a night in a hotel by the station, somewhat like one in England, made of brick, except that it was in Tokyo, after he had looked out at the maze of tracks in the railroad yard until the last commuter trains pulled in, from which station officials with long poles with hooks on the end fished out more and more drowsy drunks, in suit and tie, with briefcases — a constant staggering back and forth over all the platforms, combined with being shoved along, push after push — the carpenter in wintry Japan went insane. In him, this patient man, it was more the eruption of an impatience he had been holding in for a lifetime, or the sudden cessation of those different experts’ voices in him; it jolted him out of his sleep, whereupon he paced up and down until daybreak, repeatedly and with all his might pounding his head with both fists; the last time this had happened to him he had been a child. And he would have continued in this fashion if, with a small billowing of curtains, the Mongolian woman, the bride of Hokkaido, had not appeared to save him, putting him to bed and silently taking him between her legs.
And the following morning, alone again, Guido set out toward me in the bay, with a stopover in Alaska, where he wanted to study the characteristic wooden shelters known as cachés, which were built on stilts against bears and had always interested him; and on the telephone he promised to build a window seat in my study, with a writing surface above it.
Since the flight from Narita to Anchorage did not leave until late in the evening, by way of farewell on his last day in Japan the architect took for the second time the commuter train to the Eastern Sea of Kamakura, to try, weak as he still was from his night of madness, trembling in every limb, to gain new tranquillity before the house-sized Buddha there. And afterward he had time for the beach on the Pacific, where at sunset yet another (or the same?) group of girls in dark blue school uniforms yet again threw very long-stemmed roses into the waves, like lances, at intervals, into dusk, in which the colors of the flowers drifting out to sea, especially the red, became things unto themselves.