And meanwhile on the gleaming cobblestones of the Stradun, the main street of Dubrovnik, the local residents were still promenading, with the place to themselves now in winter. For the participants in this regular evening corso there was an invisible demarcation line toward both ends of the broad street — or square? — at which every stroller who had not yet done so would pivot. In the course of this parading back and forth by the population, not at all casual but downright energetic, no one continued on to the ends of the Stradun, unless he disappeared completely from the mass, heading home, or elsewhere. But anyone who kept parading made an abrupt turn at that demarcation line, swerving his entire body, leading with the shoulder. The majority swerved long before, those who were arm in arm swerving all at once, as if on an inaudible command, heading back in the opposite direction; even groups taking up the whole width of the street turned this way, magically. The few who continued on to the end seemed for those few steps like sleepwalkers. But at the last moment, within a hair’s-breadth of the imaginary boundary, even the solitary stroller or scuffer would wheel around like a swimmer at the end of a lane. The city elders joined the procession, calmly and deliberately, and the most relaxed and dancerlike ones were the children; they had the pirouette at the turn in their blood. In these hours leading up to midnight no one made a false step, none of those strolling up and down missed the turning point. Several people in uniform mingled with the crowd, also a Catholic priest, sailors, an idiot, whose siblings held him by the hand; and not even he lagged behind in the loop. Down by the harbor the cars came rolling out of the belly of the last ferry from the islands. On the night plane to Zagreb sat a Croatian basketball team, almost the only passengers, after their training camp in Dubrovnik. The tallest of the players, also the team captain, sat next to his Serbian wife, who years before had been Miss Yugoslavia.
The waitress and cook of the Ston restaurant had gone home and had left the back door open for us; it would lock by itself. What distances could be opened up simply by such a going to a door in this Yugoslavia. The night light was sufficient for us. The taxi driver was asleep outside in his Mercedes, bought with his factory earnings when he was in Germany. When we finally climbed in, someone roused himself way in the back of the car. It was one of the workers from a construction company with branches all over Yugoslavia that was building a hotel on the bay. He had just been informed that his father had died, far down in the south, in a village in the mountains of Montenegro, and he asked to be allowed to go with us to catch the first bus from Dubrovnik to Titograd. Along the way he told us his father had died suddenly, of a heart attack, a construction worker like him, forty years old. Since the son did not seem that much younger, he was asked his age. He was twenty-five; when he was born, his father had barely started his apprenticeship, and his mother had still been in school. We said nothing all the way to the dark, locked-up bus station outside the city walls. The buses parked around the barracklike station would stand there empty and inaccessible for hours. Their marker plates, with two letters for the place they came from, bordered by the little five-pointed star of the partisans, ranged from MO for Mostar, SA for Sarajevo, BL for Banja Luka to ZG for Zagreb, TG for Titograd, BG for Belgrade, and there was even an LJ for Ljubljana, very far away, and a VŽ for Varazdin, probably even farther away.
Of that night of storytelling I also thought at the time: Actually this should continue now. So although each of us was already supposed to go his separate way, I urged the others to spend one more hour sitting with me the next day on Dubrovnik’s Stradun. And my friends did indeed come, laconic and full of anticipation. I was the one who did not know what to do next. I wanted a continuation and could not pull it off, at least not in their presence.
And therein lies one of my fatal mistakes in life. Just a few days ago I wrote a note to myself: “Always, even in moments of fulfillment, your tendency to think: It’s not here yet! You always experience even the most perfect present moment as a mere advent. You always expect something more afterward, something bigger, the ultimate. Look! It has been here and is here. And why force something unique into repetition, into a series, into permanence? Consider your monosyllabic friends, for whom once was everything.”
Even this morning, for instance, here, behind the house: when I was using a crowbar to loosen the gravel surface compacted by wintry downpours, sparks flew repeatedly; the chain of hills along the Seine contains a good deal of flint. And once I hit a flintstone hidden so deep in the ground that for a moment I saw a spark that shot not into the daylight but down into the dark, and lit it up with a lightninglike reflection off the soil, whereupon the momentary cave disappeared again. And again the unique occurrence was not enough for me, and I wanted a continuation, hoped with every further blow to see an even more splendid hollow illuminated, until I finally went inside and jotted down: “Your greed for continuations, your mania for completeness.”
But didn’t I long ago establish a principle to guide me in such matters, which went something like this: your experience may be fragmentary, but your narration must be complete!? And apparently this maxim, too, like all those that ever lit my path, dissolved gradually, or, as they said where I came from, a wee bit at a time. Goethe, it seems to me, became increasingly sure of himself as he grew older, despite all the childlike qualities he preserved; the child became an imperious child (and at the same time wrote “gently” and “transitorily”), while I am becoming less and less sure with every passing year, and at the same time would like to write as penetratingly and pointedly as ever. Perhaps I still need a master, and doesn’t the itinerant stonemason from the twelfth European century seem closer to me now, his travel notes beginning with an exclamation and a plea: “Oh, where will this drab highway, along which I now stumble for the third winter, among legions of others, finally become my own green path?”
I have experienced nights of storytelling more often with strangers than with my friends. In such hours, the former come together with my friends, as in the fragment of Heraclitus in which the sleeper taps the one who is awake. And I have experienced this most frequently among strangers since I settled beyond the hills, in the hinterland of the great metropolis. The light here probably also has a little to do with it, but mainly it is particular places, the eating places in the region, the bars that close early in the evening. Whenever I can, I want to be among the last. For the most part nothing happens then; the rule is prompt locking-up and the disappearance of all the regulars into the tongue-shaped settlement surrounded by wooded hills. But from time to time the bar — of which there are only two in this particular district — stays open even after the lights have been turned off once, for no particular occasion, in a general, gradual winding-down.
In this transitional moment, a brief, much too brief, night of storytelling takes place among us strangers here. Unexpectedly, the excitement wakes me up, and at the same time I find peace: peace, the great eye. Now the majority of guests leave the café, at the latest at the next hint, the switching-off of the fan or, in winter, of the ceiling-mounted heater. The few who stay behind stand around the room, except perhaps for the one older woman, who sits on the only chair not yet put up on the tables. The iron shutters have been let down almost all the way, the door locked, the key on the inside, and anyone who wants to leave turns it, whereupon someone inside locks up again.