Instead, altogether different from that literary Old Nick, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had passed by just recently, flesh and blood as only he could be, on his two hundred fiftieth birthday, coming through the side door behind which he had been sitting all the while, not like Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in Mount So-and-so, but in a picture, and had taken the new, enlarged Germany in his two hands, with the expression “dear little place,” the sort of diminutive otherwise used by him only in conjunction with observation of his beloved plants.
And with him the Brothers Grimm once again set about collecting fairy tales; Novalis returned, as a sculptor, at the sight of whose sculptures people, themselves turned to stone, at the same time continued on their way lighter of foot; Eduard Mörike went out and bought an answering machine for his rectory; August Sander prepared to do photographic portraits of the German faces of the twenty-first century; and entire army groups on their newly saddled horses mobilized in underground clay pits all across the country — not to seize power but merely to send a signal. The reader’s tour through Germany became a trip around the world.
On the eve of his departure for the bay here, he sat by that pond on the forest’s edge where once upon a time he had seen himself and his love as one in perpetuity (and the very next day they had already come to a parting of the ways). The water was in an entirely different place from the original water, and yet was the same, down to the very reeds: the period now — or the interval? — had made every individual place in Germany interchangeable with all others; one place there contained them all.
Over his shoulder, in the last light of this December day, he had in view a field with apple trees, one of them in its leaflessness still chock-full of golden-and-white fruit, and below at its foot, in the already almost night-dark realm or little place, the silhouettes of two children, both with an apple in hand, as the last spots of brightness, in each of which he saw an open book, held out toward the other, or a palm frond. And a dream appeared to him in which he, surrounded by marksmen and dart throwers, had said, “Enough. This is my house, the reader’s house. Get out!” The throwers and shooters obeyed, and one of them even said, “We have need of your steadfastness!”
As Wilhelm turned from the apple tree back to the waters of his youth, he saw himself there as a silhouette from those days, now with the first stars, whose silent reflection in the pond was crisscrossed by the shadows of bats. The grass on the bank was furrowed by tank tracks, and beyond the apple orchard stood a dark farmstead, abandoned by German emigrants.
From the singer no word had been received to this day, since his hike in the summer snow way up north on the Scottish island of Skye. In the eyes of the world, he was missing and presumed dead. At the same time he was spotted going on a bear hunt in Skopje in Macedonia; as a mercenary in Africa; dancing with a native woman in New Guinea; covered with blood as he came to the aid of a woman who had had an accident on a highway in the Tyrol; lying drunk on the steps of a Moscow subway station while hordes of passengers stepped over him — and all that on one and the same day, and at least as many similar situations on each of the following.
I myself saw him driven far off his original course, as had always happened to him on his hikes to the ends of the earth, only more willingly this time than ever. Precisely as a result he would bring back all the more from his journey. And that was of course what he had in mind: to return to us with a song such as had never been heard in the world, his “last” insofar as after it silence would reign, once and for all, also for further last songs, to be sung by others, not by him.
Thus on the move, in the meantime hardly off the beaten track and alone anymore, but in the midst of masses of humanity, he sang, as I pictured him, not a single note during the entire year, likewise gave anything explicitly designated as music a wide berth, whenever he could, which was becoming increasingly difficult toward the end of the century. In order to expand, and also to break, albeit harmoniously, his own voice, with which he never wanted to be finished or completely trained, he sought out and sampled, from continent to continent, unfamiliar voices, not those of singers, but rather of people who were merely talking, unheard of and unsung. How rare in the world was a voice de profundis, from the very depths, at the same time light as a bird, at the same time piercing. When he thought back over the year, from everywhere almost exclusively insulting and angry speaking voices came to mind, and the most angry ones, also the most ugly and despicable, were as a rule the authoritative or indeed the trained ones; what a relief, for instance, to hear for a change, coming from a train loudspeaker, the voices of the railroadmen themselves.
If he tended to seek out people on the margins, he did so not because the oppressed, minorities, and refugees were to be found there, but because of the voices there. If elsewhere the laughter and even the weeping of passersby seemed corrupted, in the shadows and the underground world he encountered at least occasionally a sound he could then allow to resonate in his song. And also without weeping and laughter: how beautifully many an Albanian in Kosovo spoke his Albanian, many a Georgian in Azerbaijan his Georgian (and vice versa), with what purity many a pair of lovers spoke the language of their country, many a dead-tired or angry person said whatever he said (the conventional folk music was something else again).
Thus the singer learned for his voice. The melodies and rhythms, on the other hand, just came to him as always, when everyday sounds continued to reverberate in his ear — an accordion door closing, steps running in the salty desert, branches brushing against the bus window. What he was finally still lacking for his “last song” was the lyrics, except perhaps for the snippet “soul of lovers, sound of the people” (not by him). Yet once he had the right voice inside him, quietly stored there and ready to be amplified at the right moment, in a way the world had never yet heard, why shouldn’t simple humming suffice — even if for an entire hour — and it would be a revelation (with room for another)?
Yet now he still needs the concluding voice, the fade-out, the fade-away, and for that he must go to the region he comes from, here in the no-man’s-bay. To be sure, yesterday, Christmas Day, he was recognized in Venice, pissing off the Rialto; in an old-age home in Dublin, playing Father Christmas; and in New Zealand, watching a charity rugby game all alone. But I knew that Emmanuel was in one of the cemeteries here in the wooded hills above the Seine, taking part, as the third mourner from the left to the rear, in the funeral of a resident of the bay, unknown to him as to me, in the course of which no word was spoken. Next to the house of the cemetery watchman, among the graves, children’s clothing was hanging out to dry on the line. On not only one of the edge-of-the-highway bushes did I see scraps of a poster with the singer’s face that had blown there, though for a concert of the previous year and in another city. And at the same time, or so I pictured it, he was standing at a densely populated central intersection, among the passersby, a pad in the crook of his arm, on which he was sketching out his song, note by note, roughly following the sounds on the asphalt, a somewhat different kind of pollster.
Hardly any of what happened during the year in the bay became public knowledge, except for the emergency landing of a visitor of state, on the way from Villacoublay to Paris by helicopter, in a clearing here: a photograph in Parisien libéré, though only in the suburban edition, of the man with his entourage standing with a drink in the Bar des Voyageurs.