Yet I was increasingly fearful of disappearing. I felt completely at ease among the Mongolians, included in whatever was going on, and at the same time I was afraid of never getting home. I would not have known where to go home to, yet I felt driven to go home — or a creature that came alive inside me did, like a dog abandoned on a highway median strip. Again and again I had flying dreams, which began blissfully and broke off not with my crashing but with my no longer existing.
Later I read in the works of anthropologists that they experienced something similar. Except that in the beginning they always set out planning to study the foreign people or tribe systematically, and only later recoiled in alarm from it, or from themselves, whereas I did not want to know anything in particular about the local people. Precisely because the things I had known about them beforehand hardly mattered anymore in their presence, I felt at home among them. My very enthusiasm about being among them was partly a function of my ignorance.
Of course I took notes and made sketches, and did both regularly, day after day, to keep both feet on the ground and avoid dissolving in ecstasy. But it was not a question of observing this particular country and its people. The sketches showed only things that might have been anywhere, like a pair of unlaced shoes, viewed from above, or a lightning rod that disappeared at the bottom into a block of concrete. But: were there ever lightning storms? And the Tatars who turned up in my notes were not referred to as “Tatars” or some such thing; they were just villagers or people I encountered.
As we know, on the heels of those anthropologists people journeyed to all the still halfway unspoiled landscapes in the world, arriving by plane, bus, all-terrain vehicle, sometimes covering the last stretch on foot, each of them proudly alone, and even before they got there from their American and European headquarters, they were on intimate terms with the most closely guarded traditional tales of the natives, no matter where. They called themselves “nomads,” had the lightest and sturdiest footgear on earth, as luggage a little backpack with two books; they mingled with the original inhabitants as if they had known them from earliest childhood, and upon their return, in the period before their next departure, this time for Tibet instead of for Australia, they had hundreds of amusing stories, anecdotes, and hair-raising adventures to tell.
I knew a man like this who set out each time with his hands completely unencumbered; he had nothing but his passport and his pockets full of dollar bills. I became fond of him. From each adventure he survived — the coiled snake he encountered when coming down from the Andes and chopped in five pieces with one blow of his machete; the skeletons he stumbled upon in the water at the bottom of a gorge as he let himself down on a rope in the sacred Cenote of the Yucatán Peninsula, victims of the Mayas or recent? — he returned more lost and confused to his Central European wife and his meanwhile grown-up children: Where am I? And what now? And at the same time his stories were much too carefully constructed around a climax for my taste, not that he ever bragged — as though he himself were not really experiencing anything in telling them — and also too matter-of-fact and unamazed: a sweeping gesture, and he was the shaman himself, acted out the dervish. After an evening with him, chock full of perils he had miraculously survived and fluently rattled-off secrets of the bush, from Tierra del Fuego to Hokkaido, I took leave of my nomadic friend with a certain ennui, and found myself longing for a place where there was nothing, yearning for nothingness, nothingness upon nothingness, right around the corner (and half a year later was looking forward to his next visit).
More worrisome were the new nomads, who had no sooner tracked down what remained of the aboriginals anywhere in the world than they put them in a book. These books all shared the characteristic of presenting the most intimate portraits of a people-outside-of-civilization as something that existed in only one place, and then, in the same breath, exposing these portraits to the entire world, with the result that all the fuss about protecting and supporting these peoples ended up by wiping them out once and for all by means of facile stories in which the narrator from distant parts pushed his natives back and forth like pawns and mucked around in their dream as if it were his special property. And perhaps it actually did belong to him, and in the traditions of various obscure tribes he was seeing the cosmos of his childhood, spent in Friuli or in Glastonbury. Except that these journeyers to the ends of the earth never told us that. Their own half-vanished notions, of time, the cosmos, nonbeing, ancestors, doubles, were of no interest to them. To them only the dreams of the last more or less aboriginal human beings constituted a valid book.
But perhaps I was merely envious, as the woman from Catalonia expressed it one time when I was raging against the “plunderers.” Their stories, she said, were more worldly than mine, and also more dialogic. I got in my own way, she said, with my endless brooding over form; I lacked narrative technique, while they deployed such technique effortlessly and wrote now like nineteenth-century Russian novelists, now like American novelists of the first half of the twentieth century. And when I continued to rant about these books that had no narrator any longer but instead a master of ceremonies, about those purveyors of reading fodder whose material was so thoroughly processed that nothing was left to read, she commented that I was also jealous because they had caught on. They had a following — and I? A year ago, that crazed woman standing at my garden gate every morning; and that man dying in the local hospital; and that travel-agency courier; and that farmer’s son in Ontario, Canada.
One way or the other, I continued to be guided during those three Mongolian summers and winters by the idea of a book, and then I did write one, my first, the “Drowsy Story,” which dealt not with the local population but with my village ancestors, long since dead, in Carinthia along the Yugoslav border.
I did that during my day job, which consisted of teaching German or English, or handling correspondence, or giving typing lessons. In the summer I put my table outside, by the edge of the road. Neither dust nor sun nor people bothered me. And from those days I still have a longing to be able, just once in my life, to write an entire book from beginning to end outdoors, and not just in a backyard, but far out on the steppe. Never have I breathed so freely, and moved along with the day so effortlessly. And the local people did not seem bothered in the slightest, and eventually not even the people’s militia. A militiaman who stopped each time on his rounds and looked at the sheet of paper in front of me one day even predicted a glorious future for this beginner.
Writing the book became the one great experience of my years in Mongolia. Although the woman from Catalonia hardly visited me, I did not take up with any native woman. Only once did I walk with a girl down a dirt road, behind a herd of cattle, which, although we were too far back to overtake them between the stone walls, let loose with their constant farting and defecating one stench after the other on the half-infatuated couple. And when my sister came to visit, I did lie in her embrace, but only in a dream.
Back in Europe I went through that period in which I firmly believed in the possibility of connections among individuals separated by great distances, including people who did not even know each other personally.
With my first writing phase behind me, I saw myself as pretty much alone in my further undertakings and thus caught wind of a person here and a person there, particularly beyond the borders — a writer, a naturalist, a linguist — who had likewise struck out on his own to track something down, and thus, as he moved along his particular orbit, belonged to me as I to him. These few, all of whose works I studied, appeared to me in my imagination like the landscapes that filled me with greatest enthusiasm: in the midst of all that hemmed me in, they provided an inner source of light. That was a feeling of exaltation such as I never experienced with friends. These others like me caused something within me to glow, or saved me, like my two or three favorite parts of the world, from despair. It was not merely a way out, but rather a destination refreshing to my heart.