And this Filip Kobal, who could count on being understood by me in a way that a person probably experiences only once in a lifetime, has, I think, turned his back on me forever.
The last straw was his visit to me here in the bay over a year ago. Since then he has sent me not a single sign of life, not even a card from the places where he gives readings, whereas previously I would receive big fat letters from him in his enormous sign painter’s handwriting, for which I once praised him, like so much else. A reason for his silence toward me may perhaps lie in the country once so dear to both our hearts, Yugoslavia, which he, as he puts it in an article, has unmasked as his “own personal illusion” and has “smoked out of himself,” and which still shines on before me as a reality. But I know that one hour of double-voiced storytelling about that country would suffice, and Kobal and I would be reduced to completely unanimous weeping and cursing, weeping, laughing, and cursing.
No, Filip Kobal has written me off because I settled in a faraway country, rather than where he is convinced I belong. He disapproves, as he told me at the end, of my obstinate, and, according to him, arbitrary, abandonment of my place of origin for something that in no respect seemed necessary, certainly not essential as an “exile” (which, to be sure, I have never in my life asserted a need for). It did no good that on that last visit he roamed for days at my side through the hills and valleys of the Seine, dropped in with me on hundreds of bars, churches, hermitages, houseboats, transmitters, and local radio stations.
I took him to the wintry birds’ sleeping tree by the railroad station, even had my opera glasses with me, so that my nearsighted friend could distinguish the massive branches in the plane tree’s crown from the motionless sparrow-balls. I shared with him the minutes of the last session of the town council, filled him in on the proportional assignment of seats to the various parties, from community to community within the département, with its population in the millions, gave a scintillating account of the early history of the region, from the days of the Romans and the Middle Ages to the liberation in 1944 by the division commanded by General Leclerc. In the church in Sevres he found himself standing with me by the tiny spiral staircase from the twelfth century that began high above our heads in the wall — there was no other staircase, not even a ladder — and ended who knows where; in Ville d’Avray, as the wind feathered the water, I showed him the ponds painted by Corot; on Mont St.-Valérien near Suresnes we breathed the air in the former Gestapo death cells; in La Defense we stood together, buffeted by the night wind, in the ghostly light of the Grande Arche.
In the forests we crouched side by side over the secret springs from which I had scraped away the leaves for him, whereupon they began to pulse before our eyes. I slipped with him into the underbrush to find the foxes’ lair, climbed down with him into the ditch of the giant toad, pointed out to him in passing the rivulet flowing around a menhir, bought apples and milk with him on a farm on the plateau of Saclay, sniffed at his side the great mill of Versailles, passed with him four forest rangers’ lodges in a single afternoon, approached with him, without saying a word, as we made our way uphill on the path taken by Jean Racine and Pascal through the meadows along Rhodon Brook, the barns of Port-Royal, of which I hoped to hear my Filip Kobal say that he had never, not even in our Jaunfeld region, seen such noble threshing-floor roofs, soaring so high toward the heavens, mirroring the centuries.
I introduced him to the waitress in the church-bar of Jouy-en-Josas, who unexpectedly addressed him in Slovenian and turned out to have been born in Kosovelje on the karst and to the tarot players in the back room along the Route Nationale 10, who were a group of itinerant Serbian stonemasons; attended with him the Russian Orthodox Sunday service in the blue wood-frame church in the bay here, no larger than a garden shed, but how many people unexpectedly inside, what an enormous missal, and above us all, in a cloud of incense, the eagle of St. John the Evangelist. I showed him the smocks of the local craftsmen, just as blue as those of the cottagers back home, the shopping bags of the older women, dangling from the crook of their arms on long handles, the pocket knives with wooden grips, so similar to our penknives back home, the numerous blank windows in the houses along the bay, even a hillside with ancient cow paths.
Yet Filip Kobal, after all the days we had spent hiking together, after he had remarked briefly that the region here was exceptionally lively and varied, and that anyone could see I knew my way around like a taxi driver, geographer, and forester all in one — why else would the many people who got lost here instinctively turn to me and receive reliable directions — Filip Kobal said I had spent enough time away from home now. For a long while I had represented a standard for him. As long as I had stuck it out, as his fellow countryman, in writing and also in life, that had given him and a few others the strength to carry on, he would assert. But in the meantime my example was no longer valid. Of course, he himself repeatedly left our country and its people. I, however, had overstayed my time abroad, and it was henceforth inconceivable that he should read my admittedly very original and special writings as before. Of course, he saw the similarities between this place and the region from which we both came, precisely through the differences, but a spiral staircase in Sevres could never be “my” or “the” spiral staircase, something characteristic, something for a book. With all due respect to the pear tree in my yard, likewise to the even older cherry tree, to the neighbors, to the bar acquaintances, to the cattails, bullfrogs, snakes, and otters in the forest ponds, to the air base, the atomic plant, the secret vineyards, the tangle of vines above the brook known only to me: when described, woven into a narrative by me, one who had come of his own volition, they amounted in his eyes to nothing but interference in others’ business, the opposite of a well-founded book — something superfluous, and with all those plane trees, cedars, bamboo stalks, even fig trees and palms, to boot.
And abruptly, as Kobal was lecturing me, he seized me around the midsection, hoisted me in the air, and continued to speak, thus: “It’s true, in the course of these days you’ve let me see, without pointing it out, always only in passing, the Easter fungus on the tree trunks just like that at home, the moss in the ravines, the almost identical rural railroad station, the woman with the washboard, the cassis or currant bushes deep in the woods, the bus station like Klagenfurt’s, the wooden balcony with red geraniums like Kobarid’s, the root cellar like the one behind my family’s house in Rinkenberg. But it isn’t here. This here is a substitute. The originals are somewhere else and have been waiting for you a long, long time. What do I care if you keep a journal on the landscape and the people here, even a chronicle? Even if you sit out and walk out another twenty years here, nothing will acquire mythic depth for you. And the mythic dimension, the earth-fissure world, was your specialty, from the beginning. Without the mythic dimension your books are certainly more manageable, less circumstantial. But they aren’t really yours, don’t really yield a proper book. And don’t tell me you’re on the trail of the mythic world of the Ile de France just because you know the appropriate story to tell when we get to the ‘Crossroads of the Woman Without a Head’ in the forest of Meudon, and likewise at the ‘Crossroads of the Broken Man’ on the other wooded hill, which is called the ‘Forest of False Rest,’ and likewise in the forest two hills farther on, called the ‘Forest of the Hanged Wolf.’ Though the original inhabitants here, of whom, I admit, there are quite a few, like to describe how things looked in their childhood, even they are far from having a unifying history, let alone a legend, a tale, a fairy tale, a tradition. This people is simply not your people, and I mean not only the people of the suburbs here, but the entire French people, so enlightened and linguistically sophisticated that for every situation on earth it has, without even looking it up, a polished, definitive, if not always lucid formulation on hand. From what I know of you, the Mongolians were a more appropriate people for you, also the Indians, the Mexicans. Here in France not even all the stone graveyards with their exclusively elaborate plaques to which I’ve followed you have a mythic aura, certainly not those; these fields of sarcophagi look to me like nothing but sarcophagi, flesh-devouring containers. In this country you have to go back to the Middle Ages to encounter the fairy-tale colors and the gust of myth that at home brushes your forehead around every corner. You mustn’t be without a people, not you. You’re not cut out for mere reporting, for the role of the uninvolved bystander. Consider the warmth, rare though it may have been, that you’ve received from your people in the past. There’s no warmth like it. You’ve sidestepped your people, again and again, and now you’re in the process of losing it. Only yesterday when you came home you were hailed as ‘someone special.’ Today from one end of the country to the other no one greets you. You’ve spoiled your relationship with your people by your absence, and even you stopped believing long ago in a people of readers in the diaspora. By the Milky Way above the Jaunfeld Plain, by the double onion towers of Heiligengrab, by the brewery of Sorgendorf, by the fir forests of the Dobrava still full of chanterelles and a Russian sense of vastness, by the train shooting by in the autumn mist like several trains in one, by the freshly renovated clay bowling alley, by the monument to the partisans, by the IHS carved on the barn gable in Rinkolach, by the woman under the apple tree, by the windows of the farmhouses so low that children don’t need a door to go in and out, by the wilted wildflowers in tin cans in the wayside shrines, by the manna ash trees on the Liesnaberg, even without a pilgrimage up there, by the owl in broad daylight on the chimney of the house next door: connect again, if there’s still time, with our shared Slavic litanies, which always made you quake inside as otherwise only the Psalms, the Odyssey, and the bells of the Resurrection could.”