Since childhood I have had in me a readiness for fallings-out of the sort I had with Filip Kobal and my Jewish friend, and with others. When it came to a parting of the ways, each time I accepted it immediately. To have a falling-out at first gave me satisfaction, in some cases a sense of triumph. Finally I was alone, which agreed with me and suited me perfectly. Almost never did I later experience disappointment or regret. What had happened was right, and in moments of uncertainty I had only to recall my fallings-out to feel confirmed.
That is no longer the case. True, I still have quarrels with people. But by the next day my sense of satisfaction has gone sour. On the other hand, since my childhood I have also had in me a readiness for reconciliation. And in my memories I always made the first move toward restoring good relations. It came from a bright surge of feeling pushing or propelling me toward the other person. In its abruptness it could also give rise to misunderstandings, which drove others to run in the opposite direction. Alternatively, I was the one who misunderstood — I would throw my arms around the other person, thinking he was leaning toward me, when in fact he merely wanted to whisper the next obscenity into my ear. Mostly, however, my surge of feeling would sweep the other person along as much as it did me, and without wasting another word on our conflict, we would go back to doing things, talking, or playing, in new harmony.
In the end that is what happened to me with my sister. It was the summer before her death, and one afternoon I found myself driving through the Austrian town where she, with whom I had broken off relations over the dissolution of our parents’ household, was in the meantime living. Suddenly I stopped. At first, on the way to her house, I almost hoped she would not be there. But when I was standing in front of it, she absolutely had to be there; if not, I would wait for her, would go looking for her. And of course she was home and leaned her head against my shoulder, and without hesitation brought out buttermilk, bread, and elderberry brandy for me. We sat outdoors side by side on the bench, at our backs the unevennesses in the whitewashed wall of the house; she told me about her operation — her hair was growing back over her bare scalp, which shone through the fuzz. I told her about my house in the foreign suburb, which, with its unstuccoed sandstone walls, she had once mistaken in a photograph for a castle, the occasion, in turn, for an angry letter from her about my forgetting my origins. I told her how the woman from Catalonia had fled, how my son was becoming alienated from me. Now nothing would ever come between us again, and as we sat there in summery relaxation, for the duration of that hour a song was playing around us, unpolished and free and easy, somehow suitable for my sister and me, like the sawing away of a country fiddler at a square dance or a Tyrolese country dance.
And thus I can also picture reconciliation with someone with whom I have seemingly broken for good. Yet if I spin this out in my imagination and examine the idea to see if it is serious and realistic, most of my former loved ones or kin become even more shadowy to me.
Restoring good relations with someone in my imagination, where images seize hold and hold true, has proven successful thus far only with the woman from Catalonia once, and once with Filip Kobal. In that daydream, while the woman from Catalonia was raging silently against me, her eyes dull black and her lips almost white, without hesitation I led her into the next room, where I sat down beside her and held her head, jerking as if bolts of electricity were darting through it, held it between my two hands, which did nothing but wait until the wild gallop inside her skull had subsided.
And in much the same way Filip Kobal came toward me on a sunny forest path in early spring here in the bay. The shadows of the trees’ crowns, still without leaves, cast a pattern on the sand of the path, and when I reached his spot, with another movement of my two hands I casually conjured out of the earth and the light the mythical beast of this region. It was not a chimera, but rather a tiger of the steppes, peaceable, sunshine yellow, branch-shadow black, whereupon my companion and I continued on our way together as though nothing had ever come between us.
These are my fantasies of reconciliation, and I believe in them. But along with them there must also be at work within me a dream-deep distrust, even a revulsion against any form of coming together again.
How else to understand last night’s dream, following right upon the day on which I wrote about the happy ending to the trouble between me and my sister? In the dream she was raging and enormous, hurled clumps of earth at me, then stones, heavier and heavier ones, and was finally intent, in a massive murderous impulse, on bashing in my head with a boulder.
And even the friends and family whom I now accompany from a distance have all been on the point of disappearing from my sight.
With whom shall I begin? With those who merely by virtue of their profession are so similar to me that trust was accompanied from the beginning by something like a natural distrust. Thus even before I knew the singer, I often felt a certain uneasiness when music began to play or so much as a single instrument, as if such sounds were false, indeed presumptuous, lacking harmony with the moment, especially when the music was an actual performance.
My inner conflict over music has meanwhile become insurmountable, my uneasiness as a rule more powerful than my emotional response, especially after the fact. It upsets me most when a voice or an instrument rings out above the rest or emerges all by itself. In this connection I recall from childhood in the Jaunfeld region a singer in our church who now and then performed the solos in the hymns, letting his tenor ring out, especially at night, during outdoor performances, where he stood apart from the choir and invisible, somewhere in the darkness high above the heads of the congregation, for instance up in the bell tower, and suddenly from that heavenly height sang out above the people below and over the entire quiet countryside, arousing general emotion, also in me, the child, who, however, even then felt the clammy touch of something revolting in those solo nights and recoiled from such song, as from the sense of community it created. When I think back now, of all the cultural events in that rural area, I found this the most unsettling, and when I mentioned it one time to the village priest, he revealed to me that before his days with the church choir this particular singer had been the most full-throated herald of Hitler’s Greater Germany.