At my feet piles of dark droppings shaped like olive pits: did that indicate there were still rabbits here in the woods? Two heavy fists pressed down on my shoulders, which were then the hoofs of a horse that whispered something into my ear.
Everything splendid I have experienced since my birth awakened in me, and I wrote my ancestors the following postcard: “Come. Get yourselves here!” “And my friends,” I thought further, “in just a little while they will tell me their stories from this year, altogether differently from my versions, and also entirely different stories. Away! Out of the forest!”
Porchefontaine belongs to Versailles, yet the palace is far away. I have never felt really drawn to it, as though there, unlike in no matter what churches, final extinction reigned. The kings would never return? And a royal city without a river, even without a brook? Who knows.
Porchefontaine, more a suburb than a part of the town, has at any rate become dear to me. And at the same time the Echelles proprietor, with his establishment there, and I argue incessantly about whether his region has more to offer than mine. If I cite our transmitter, he counters with his “more essential and also more graceful” water tower (which, however, is not located within the township); if I praise our railwaymen’s hanging gardens, he rates the couple of flower beds at the Porchefontaine station above them, because the (sole) shed there is made not of corrugated metal but of solid railway ties (yet the majority of the beds have gone to pot, and no trace of terracing); and even if he concedes that there are hardly any palms in his region, he still considers the only two there, which, standing side by side, constitute a pair, more interesting than our eight or nine, in that they are “like an entire forest,” whereas ours are isolated, in my Goethe’s expression, merely “huge stalks.” The only things for which he envies us are our very own buses — those of Porchefontaine, long accordion vehicles, wide, space-devouring, belong to Versailles, the capital, which has priority. Yet we are in agreement on the fact that the houses in our two bays, with forests round about, are in all respects ideally sisterly, and therefore would not need sister cities anywhere in Europe (except that in his bay there have been rumors of the construction of an underground highway, straight through the foot of the mountain).
The day before the day before the day before yesterday, on the way there, going downhill, I pushed leaves with my foot over the traces of the wintertime mushroom seekers, if possible more violent than their predecessors, the earth churned up by them as if in a hasty burglary; or weren’t these perhaps the traces of birds going after worms? And at the campsite of the foreign-seeming windbreak workers, this time I found debris, an empty pack of not at all common cigarillos and likewise a bottle with the label of a fine Bordeaux. And a desperate dog went panting through the woods after his master.
It was stormy. An express train, visible halfway up on the Porchefontaine embankment, let out an Indian war whoop, while many passengers nibbled on shish kebab as if on a train through Greece. A temple bell rang, a muezzin called out over the sea, the settlement spread far inland along a fjord, by the sunken road at my back Scottish dunes overlapped, before me lay a giant’s glove, I brashly stuck my hands into the winter stinging nettles; didn’t they sting? Oh my, yes!
And what happened then? Evening could come now. The light down below at the edge of the woods was rocking in time to the wind in the branches, between flaring and fizzling. From the already dark thicket a stone flew past me, no, a bottle. A child playing? The transformer, long before the first house, was clothed in marble, as one might expect of the palace town of Versailles, and was called sirène. Then in the first house a woman was sitting in the lamplight, snipping stitches out of a piece of fabric, while two cats sat in front of the house like a pair of shoes, and an adolescent asked me the time (my answer, as I saw later, was wrong), and a few steps farther on the first driver asked me for directions (my information, as I realized too late, was completely wrong), and the next one asked me for a light (I had none, and he drove on, cursing).
I went, as the proprietor and cook had instructed me, to buy bread, watched, in the evening line at the bakery, as the inhabitants of Porchefontaine, at least the older ones, fished for coins in purses as shabby as those in my bay — which made me think they had at home not so much piggy banks as piglet banks — and carried my sheaflike load, which my arms could barely encompass, to our place of celebration, hearing halfway there, from a sprawling orphanage, otherwise silent as the grave, the voice of my son echoing.
The restaurant gave the impression, as always, that it was just being renovated, because of the ladders leaning on all sides against the isolated building, all the way up to the eaves, so close together that from afar it looked as though they barred all access; and high above it all another ladder swayed, fastened by ropes to the ridgepole, of rubber, inflated with helium, covered with electric bulbs, which now at night were on.
The restaurant, looking from the outside otherwise like a house no different from the others in the area, stood, with a garden in between, at the foot of the embankment where commuter and express trains traveled at different levels, both above the roofline. The proprietor had secretly, immediately after moving in, uncovered the source of the Marivel brook, located there, as he had discovered from the original maps of the area, and long since integrated into the sewer system, all the way to where it flowed into the Seine at Sevres; he had lined the trickle according to the model of the Fontaine Ste.-Marie in front of his earlier tavern. For the first time after almost a hundred years under ground the Marivel has thus become visible again, at least up to the end of his property, and also sounds decidedly different from the way it sounds through the manhole cover down the street (whose course even today, as long ago, faithfully follows the windings of the vanished brook).
On this evening our tavern had a garlanded entrance, not very conspicuous, because so soon after Christmas other doors in the village were also decorated, only differently.
Inside, in a space unexpectedly as large as a barn, the master of the house was standing alone by the fireplace, and it seemed to me I had already come upon him decades ago in his stirring up of the fire, in the same black custom-made suit, standing erect, with a very long poker that allowed him to do what he had to without kneeling. And as always he was showing his Egyptian profile.