A couple of his neighbors in turn moved, or pitched their tents somewhere else. In their place came, from the civil-war-torn regions, refugees, the kind of people for whom the bay had always been more than a mere reception camp.
They settled in, here and there around my house, as if forever. They have been very quiet, at least until today, and I have already caught myself asking in the morning at my table, “Where has all the noise gone?” as though I needed it now for getting to work.
These immigrants resembled the original inhabitants, now long since in the minority, except that they were much younger, and even shyer or more timid. They clearly did not wish to be seen, and I sometimes used the child Vladimir, as I walked along side streets holding his hand, to get a good look, so to speak, at the new arrivals. Because it was natural for the child to keep stopping, they could not become suspicious when I imitated him and then perhaps simply followed his gaze.
It was even easier with their possessions, in front gardens and courtyards, or the changes, never major ones, and additions they allowed themselves with their houses. Astonishing that they decorated the exteriors far more with this or that from their new place of residence, the bay, than with things brought along and mementos from their own countries. More than one created a pattern of low miniature beds on the bit of ground between the street and his tiny house, surrounded with wooden posts cut from branches in the local forests, filled up with soil also from there, and planted at regular intervals with local tree seedlings, with plants that no one else, not even I any longer, would have noticed, and which in this region were generally considered weeds.
All this seemed remarkable to the refugees, and feathery mountain ash seedlings as well as the mullein, fox grapes as well as cattails, were given stakes, and tied, often with proper sailor’s knots.
It made me realize that my own ways of doing things are still determined by my once having been a refugee, and not only during those few weeks in my childhood right after the Second World War when my mother and I, leaving my father in Wilhelmshaven, made our way back and forth across the forbidden zones in Germany to equally forbidden Austria, our only papers consisting of a letter from my grandfather: in his house, with both of his sons killed in action, a downstairs room was available, and there was work in plenty. Even years after our arrival in Rinkolach, although the local people who had survived the war showed me almost nothing but kindness, it was still as though I had no right to be in the country, and a large part of that feeling had to do with the fact that on all my report cards, from elementary school to graduation, the space designated for “citizenship” was filled in in different hands with “stateless.”
And in observing my new neighbors I also recognized that my own occasional skittishness (quite unlike my mother, who soon after her return home was pretty cocky again) does not stem from the way I was later transferred so abruptly from my village to the boarding school, but rather from the twisted sense of being a refugee and illegal that had grown into me. And a difference between me and these new arrivals also became clear, in the form of a play on words, and why not, for a change?: they, the immigrants, and I, the emigrant.
And sometimes I simply stood there in the sun in front of the property of these newcomers, holding the child Vladimir by the hand, my mind blank; imitated the child’s quiet, wonderful waiting and watching in the sun or just in the daylight; lost myself happily in the music of his various expressions, or in the sight of his hands held behind him as if to take a running start, as if to fly.
My year in the no-man’s-bay was almost at an end when a new or previous publisher invited me to a discussion of the manuscript, wherever I pleased, in Venice, Granada, Andorra, Potsdam, in any case in “a beautiful place.”
I invited him to meet me at a pub by the Pont Mirabeau in Paris, from which I could see the little square with that delicate iron and milk-glass pissoir. I brought him a couple of pages, photocopied at the only bookstore in the bay, also a toy store, having selected the pages chiefly for the names of beautiful places that occurred on them.
As far as the title was concerned, the publisher asked me to consider that the word “no-man,” like “threshold” or “flight,” on a book jacket had a negative and off-putting effect, and that it was old-fashioned to situate the main plot — he had seen through me — in a remote suburb; a contemporary story had to take place in an urban center; yet the book might find readers in spite of that — because it was me. And then he unexpectedly put on a scholarly air, noting that my text’s way of turning verbs into nouns — instead of “I stood,” “my standing,” instead of “the sky turns blue,” “the blueing of the sky”—corresponded precisely to what had happened to Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages.
Once, after glancing at a couple of lines, he did say — and I noticed for the first time that this man sitting across from me had beautiful eyes now — that despite my declaration in writing, I was still not finished with myself. And afterward on the bridge he offered this to me in parting, to take back to the forest bay: “Both of us know what to think of each other.” What did he mean by that? I brooded, alone in the nocturnal commuter train. And later I thought he probably had the decisive qualification for a book, intuition; but since his life was elsewhere, he despised this.
Something to which I also paid particular attention during this year here was the time thresholds — less the accustomed sequence of plum, cherry, and other blossoms than those that had previously gone unnoticed. Thus it occurred to me once in passing: “Now is the time for the hazelnuts’ neck ruffs to have grown over their heads,” or “It is already summer, but still too early even for the early apples,” or “These are the autumn days when the acorns in the forest are no longer falling singly, but en masse, constantly, and it is advisable to stay away from the forest with children,” or “Yesterday was a pre-winter day, since the ash in the yard dropped all its leaves in the course of an hour.”
It was also such a time threshold when on the main street a skylight that had always been wide open during the day, long after summer, with a giant mirror on the back wall in which nothing but the sky was reflected, was now, in the November rain, more and more often closed, and one morning remained closed entirely, as if sealed up, and that to this day; or the late-fall period at my sitting place by the Nameless Pond, when, under the edible chestnut tree, I had to hold my writing portfolio over my head to protect myself from the periodic pounding, as if of stones, of the tree’s fruits raining down on me, announced in advance by the sound of the husks splitting, while my other hand continued to hold my pencil, and my ears picked out the difference between the drumming on the cardboard and the melodic plunging of the chestnuts, like the plucking of a musical string, deep into the water at my feet, whereupon days followed on which nothing more happened there than the clouding over of the surface and the rising of cold from the bottom of the pond, more and more aggressively. And likewise All Souls’ Day sticks in my memory as such a threshold, when until evening it remained unprecedentedly quiet around the house, and I imagined that even the most incorrigible noisemakers were now visiting their dead in the cemeteries.
By contrast, eternal sameness was embodied for me in the bay by the seasonless palm trees (although they bloomed like other trees, were trimmed, and carried their array of fruit, their dates), perhaps also because they were so sparse, and furthermore usually hidden.