Only once during that time did a stranger pierce me through and through and yet remain unfamiliar, without dissolving into the double of a type I knew from society. It happened on a streetcar, not an ordinary one but one that went out into the country, the so-called local to Baden. One day, for almost an hour, a woman I did not know sat diagonally across from me, all the way from the Opera House to a central market somewhere outside the city. Beauty is something I have very seldom seen in people, and then always this way: a person was initially not beautiful but became so, over time or all of a sudden. The woman in the local was beautiful immediately, and remained so until she got off; nothing could touch her. When I say, “The beautiful woman was warm and friendly,” it sounds to me like “The grass was green” or “The snow was white,” and yet it is the only thing I can say about her (although I recall various features). She made me see what mattered, in my life, in the book.
It was summertime, many empty seats on the streetcar, a lot of light, especially out there in the meadows, beyond the city limits. A child, not a small one, was sitting beside the beautiful woman, then on her lap. I did not manage, and this was fortunate for me, to see the woman as a mother, as the wife of some man, of a doctor, an architect, a soccer star. She defied all categorization. She could not be a hairdresser, a businesswoman, a television anchor, a speleologist, a poet, a model, a motorcyclist, a second Marilyn Monroe or a second Cleopatra, a queen or a singer.
And during all this time I played soccer on Saturday afternoons with, among others, a cabinet minister of about my age, who once confided in me, in the cafeteria of our suburban stadium, that since childhood he had been waiting for his father, who had disappeared in the mountains, to come home. And a surgeon, with whom I went hiking in the Vienna Woods on quite a few weekends, half circling the city, once described to me how during operations he often felt the urge to plunge both hands into the patient’s liver, for example (he had very large hands).
And frequently I also sat in a certain outdoor café alone, the last one there, and the proprietor, after the waiters and kitchen help had long since left, would come and join me, expounding on the variations in Austrian dialect, intoning the nuances in pronunciation from valley to valley, with barely perceptible sound shifts, like a series of magic incantations; or he would trot out hunting adventures he had as a specialist in sick animals, none of which he had ever left alive, and when he had followed their sweat trail for days, clambering over cirques and dodging avalanches: “There you are, finally!” and “Always a clean shot!” Often almost the whole night would pass while we talked under the linden tree, which kept the rain off the two of us, except for occasional drizzle. Or I stood in half-darkness in the closed ward by the rails of the bed to which the notary’s wife was strapped, while she implored me to report her situation to her husband (who had committed her to the mental hospital).
And the man who sat down next to me in all my regular bars, dressed in the light-colored suit of a man-about-town, was a monk, and every time he was coming from giving religious instruction to pupils each of whose ears he would have liked to box. And the man in a too small gray smock who waved to me from a distance while loading packages in the yard of a local post office on the outskirts of town — I realized it only out on the street — had been the headwaiter at the Bristol Hotel just the week before. And when I rang the bell of the artist couple’s apartment because I had left something behind, I heard from behind the door cries of passion, which the most insistent ringing could not interrupt — and just a moment ago, in my presence, and all evening in fact, they had been spitting their mutual hatred in each other’s faces. And the traveler to India told me that in the place where he went every year, to get away from society here, he rubbed shoulders with the world’s elite, whereupon his equally gentle girlfriend told me he went away only because he had his brother’s death on his conscience, and as she spoke these words she slipped her bare foot between my legs under the table.
I knew the place where the former Olympic bronze medalist in the slalom, long since homeless, slept in an underground parking garage, knew that the deputy mayor went fishing only because of his depression, spent several nights with my construction-worker brother in the barracks in Simmering where his crew of itinerant ironworkers from Carinthia was staying, was one of the few allowed to attend the funeral of the murdered gambling kingpin, a book publisher on the side, at which his SS friend, a presidential advisor at the time, delivered a graveside eulogy during which he repeatedly broke down, and his wife then had the St. Stephen’s concert choir sing the Mozart Requiem, practiced specially for the occasion.
My comédie humaine from the Austria of that period, modeled loosely on Balzac and Doderer and the Civil Code, remained a figment of my imagination.
Although at times I saw all the characters sharply delineated in my mind’s eye, there were still several rather strange reasons why the story did not allow itself to be written, at least not by me. Perhaps the strangest: on the one hand I intended to capture all of society, including the terrorist (today a housewife once more) urging her cause on me in a staccato whisper as we huddled in a broom closet at the chancellery; including the Yugoslav guest worker, his skin reddened from his work in a laundry, in his free time painting signs for pubs on the eastern outskirts of Vienna, a man who despised the Albanians because they “didn’t have any butts in their britches,” father of a half-Albariian child, off in distant Pristina with its mother.
On the other hand not a single person in this society seemed to fit with anyone else, no matter how I closed my eyes and racked my brains, not even within the established groups, academic and social classes, associations, clubs, and cliques.
Each of these people appeared to me in my imagination alone, without a link to a second or third party of whatever sort.
Not that I had in mind a connectedness, even the most fleeting unity, for this society; its members merely refused to let themselves to be pictured in one and the same story. And the others out there simply appeared as doubles.
Another problem was that on the one hand the individuals whom I was considering as preliminary sketches for my own inventions did not cease to baffle me the more they revealed themselves, and on the other hand not one of them seemed inspired by anything — a cause, a mission. (In my conception, “The Society of the Inspired” had been the book’s subtitle, after “The Apothecary of Erdberg.”) After they unveiled their secrets I actually found not a few of them good and decent, and could even admire and respect quite a number of them, and not only a doctor for being on call at night or a politician for switching his allegiance from one segment of society to another or a bus driver on snowy mountain roads. The only problem: not one of them revealed anything that sparked my imagination.
And similarly I was preoccupied with the evildoers, no less numerous; they assailed me, would not leave me in peace, even in my dreams. Yet they, too, did not galvanize or stimulate me, not even the public speaker during whose hate-filled tirades I could picture all the manhole covers blowing off around his followers gathered on the open square, and the skulls of the dead emerging.
Neither the former nor the latter were anything for my book. Among all these many people, none provided the appropriate starting point, or even the most delicately traced first initial; this only my ancestors offered, the dead and the disappeared.