The two lights inside me have gone out. First the distant and the closer countries vanished from within me — the steppes of Mongolia, the highlands of the Cerdagne in the Pyrenees — then my imagined allies beyond the seven mountains. (My only remaining ally resides on the nearest opposite slope, and at the end of our visits to one another I see in this petty prophet of Porchefontaine more and more a caricature of my idea.)
Was this merely because I later met my absent figures of light face to face, or rather was brought together with them, through intermediaries?
Each of them seemed possibly even more reluctant than I, at any rate less generous with himself, or, on the contrary, proposed an alliance to me, thereafter plaguing me across the continents with dedications of his early-morning aphorisms, his minutest linguistic or legal glosses, his exhibition catalogues from Lübeck to Solothurn and Osaka.
None of these scattered folk casts light anymore. Nowadays the diaspora does not provide a community for me, and offers me nothing for my book.
Meanwhile it is almost March here in the bay, and finally snow has come, too. Last night the roofs of the cars coming down from the plateau had a thick layer of white on them, and the sparrows in the birds’ sleeping tree in front of the Hôtel des Voyageurs crouched there in the cold, fluffed up to twice their size.
And in front of the unlit palace of Versailles, shining out of the darkness, after an hour’s walk in a westerly direction along the Route Nationale 10, veils of snow crystals slithered and lapped over the huge, deserted open square, and a young stranger, his Walkman over his ears, the only person out and about, smiled at me out of the snowstorm, and I thought of several people who had once meant something to me, whose day I had accompanied in my thoughts for a time, and who nonetheless were now out of the question for this story of my distant friends.
In contrast to the singer as text seeker, the painter as filmmaker, the carpenter as architect, the reader, my son, the priest, my woman friend, I have lost those others. A whole series of people who for years were very close to me no longer exist, and not because they have died. They are all living, on the other side of the railroad tunnel, in Paris, farther away in Munich, Vienna, Rinkenberg, Jerusalem, Fairbanks, Ptuj. From time to time I still hear from these people with whom I was once on such good terms. But it no longer moves me, there are no sympathetic vibrations inside me now; when I hear them mentioned, I feel reluctance and revulsion. Unlike my rally participants, no matter how I would like to recall their image from before, I cannot bring them to mind. The trail of light left by these figures, who once seemed cut out to be companions for life, has been extinguished, and its place has been taken by something dark, without our having become enemies.
And that seems final. Never again, I have to assume, would we find our way back together, either through a heart-to-heart talk or through your or my masterpiece.
And then yesterday, continuing around the side of the palace of Versailles, between those pitch-black former edifices of power, on the street with its massive cobblestones, on which the tires made a deep, humming sound as the cars rounded the bend, I saw the snow dancing tier upon tier into the night sky, transected by a dove, and thought of the only politician who had ever been close to me, who now, after his fall from power, sat there in his retirement quarters, around the corner from his successor, in the heart of Vienna.
He had been a professor of jurisprudence, with an international reputation, summoned from everywhere to deal with urgent situations like a crack firefighter; then minister of justice, and it was no mere rumor that he secretly ran the government. Abroad, too, this little Austrian cabinet minister was received as a major statesman. And it was he who phoned me himself, long after I had left the diplomatic service, to say he had just finished my book about my youth in the rural boarding school; he had stayed up all night reading. He invited me to call on him as soon as possible, at the office or elsewhere, at any time of day.
So I met with him again and again, this man whom I had previously known only from a distance, at the university, where he had never been one of my examiners. We met either at his place in Vienna, on the rare occasions when I came to that city, or in Paris, where I was already living at the time, or later outside the city, in the Seine hills, though in a different suburb. The double doors in his ministry seemed to swing open by themselves, and not until I was leaving did I notice how high up the latches were. And likewise, whenever I stood with him at the window in his cavernous office, the squares and parks of the city seemed vertiginously far below, and I was in a hurry every time to get back on a level with the ground and out into the fresh air as soon as possible.
Perhaps he did not have that much power, but it was his power I sensed above all, specifically as a sort of remoteness from ordinary people, even when he recited to me his entire schedule of meetings for that day, with people from all levels of society, from a reception for the Boy Scouts to having a glass of wine with war veterans. I, who spoke with no one for days or weeks on end, saw myself in comparison, at least during those hours, as closer to life, perhaps even immersed in it.
Astonishing how formal his bearing was there, so entirely different from the way he came across on the telephone, although of all his visitors that day I was the only one who had no agenda and also as a rule came at noon, when in any case he merely slipped behind a screen for a snack, in half-darkness. Each of his gestures he acted out, repeated, as if to call attention to it. It was as though this hour with me had an agenda after alclass="underline" to bear witness to him in office. To be sure, he never said so, but it became apparent that he was inviting me as a chronicler, or at least as one such. Even the delicately rolled slices of ham and dill pickles he shared with me in his niche were supposed to be recorded for later. He never asked about my work, only reported on himself, his next piece of legislation, his most recent trip abroad, not exactly in the form of dictation but certainly with a few repeated turns of phrase that I was supposed to note. He shared these stories with me — about his illnesses, his mistresses — in the tacit conviction that I was there to capture them for posterity.
This became the game that brought us together, operative particularly during his visits to Paris, where each time he appeared with such a large entourage that to me, the witness, at least during his period in office, the country we had in common seemed to possess worldwide importance. When he strode through a salon or a hall of mirrors, with his likewise dark-suited, though much younger, more athletic-looking gentlemen at his heels, always about to dash off to his next appointment, he left in his wake the aura of a historic moment; that was how matter-of-factly and majestically he embodied his power.
And in his presence that impression never faltered, even when he ducked away from his retinue and drove with me out to the little restaurant in Fontaine Ste.-Marie, in the first forest bay beyond Paris, sat there outdoors under the giant oaks and sniffed the cloth napkins, always still a bit damp, pointed out to me the button missing from his double-breasted suit, or the way his eyes were watering because they were no longer used to the country air, enjoying his anonymity with almost childlike pleasure, one among others on the terrace, yet with emphatic, constantly repeated references to the next gathering expecting him over yonder in the metropolis.