I feel my heart; the dog turned too and hasn’t lost more than fifteen steps; in a matter of seconds the rabbit catastrophe will occur. The child hears the hunter hot on its tail, it is tired. I want to jump between them, but it takes such a long time for the will to slide down my pant pleats and into my smooth soles; or perhaps the resistance was already in my head. Twenty steps in front of me — I would have had to have imagined it, if the baby rabbit hadn’t stopped in despair and held its neck out to the hunter. He dug in with his teeth, swung it a few times back and forth, then flung it on its side and buried his mouth two or three times in its breast and belly.
I looked up. Laughing, heated faces stood around. It suddenly felt like four in the morning after you’ve danced through the night. The first one of us to wake up from this blood lust was the little terrier. He let go, squinted diffidently to the side, pulled back; after a few steps he fell into a short, timid gallop, as though he expected a stone to come flying after him. But the rest of us were motionless and disturbed. The insipid air of cannibalistic platitudes hovered around us, like “fight for survival” or “the brutality of nature.” Such thoughts, like the shoals of an ocean bottom, though risen from great depths, are shallow. I would have loved to go back and slap the silly little lady. This was a noble sentiment, but not a good one, and so I kept still and thereby joined the general uncertainty and the swelling silence. But finally a tall, well-to-do gentleman picked up the hare with both his hands, showed its wounds to the onlookers and carried the corpse, swiped from the dog, like a little coffin into the kitchen of the nearby hotel. The man was the first step out of the unfathomable and had Europe’s firm ground beneath his feet.
The Mouse
This miniscule story, that in fact is nothing but a punch line, a single tiny tip of a tale, and not a story at all, happened during the first World War. On the Swiss Fodora Velda Alps, more than three thousand feet above inhabited ground, and still much farther off the beaten track: There, in peacetime, somebody had put up a bench.
This bench stood untouched, even by the war. In a wide, right hollow. The shots sailed over it. Silent as ships, like schools of fish. They struck far back where nothing and no one was, and for months, with an iron perseverance, ravaged an innocent precipice. No one knew why anymore. An error of the art of war? A whim of the war gods? This bench was abandoned by the war. All day long, from way up in its infinite altitude, the sun sent light to keep it company.
Whoever sat on this bench sat firm. The moon rose no more. Your legs slept a separate sleep, like men who, having flung themselves down close together, exhausted, forgot each other in the same instant. Your own breath was strange; it became an occurrence of nature; no, not “nature’s breath,” but rather: If you noticed at all that you were breathing — this steady, mindless motion of the breast! — something of man’s swooning at the blue colossus of the atmosphere, something like a pregnancy.
The grass all around was left over from the previous year; snow-bleached and ugly; bloodless, as though a huge boulder had been rolled away. There were innumerable humps and hollows near and far, knee-high timber and alpine meadow. From this motionless turmoil, from this decayed, yellow-green frothy break of ground, again and again your glance was flung ever upwards at the high, red, overhanging cliff which sliced off the landscape in front and from which your glance retreated, shattered into a hundred vistas. That jagged cliff was not all that high, yet above it loomed nothing but ancient light. It was so savage and so inhumanly beautiful, as we imagine in the ages of creation.
Near the bench, which was seldom visited, a little mouse had dug itself a system of running trenches. Mouse-deep, with holes to disappear and elsewhere reappear. She scurried around in circles, stood still, then scurried round again. A terrible silence emanated from the sullen atmosphere. The human hand dropped off the armrest. An eye, as small and black as the head of a spinning needle, turned to look. And for an instant you had such a strange twisted feeling, that you really no longer knew: Was it this tiny, living black eye that turned? Or the stirring of the mountain’s huge immobility? You just didn’t know anymore: Had you been touched by the will of the world, or by the will of this mouse, that glowed out of a little, lonesome eye? You didn’t know: Was the war still raging or had eternity won the day?
So you might have continued at length to ramble on about something you felt you could not know; but that’s all for this little story, that had already come to an end every time you tried to end it.
Clearhearing
I went to bed earlier than usual, feeling a slight cold, I might even have a fever. I am staring at the ceiling, or perhaps it’s the reddish curtain over the balcony door of our hotel room that I see; it’s hard to distinguish.
As soon as I’d finished with it, you too started to undress. I’m waiting. I can only hear you.
Incomprehensible, all the walking up and down; in this corner of the room, in that. You come over to lay something on your bed; I don’t look up, but what could it be? In the meantime, you open your closet, put something in or take something out; I hear it close again. You lay hard, heavy objects on the table, others on the marble top of the commode. You are forever in motion. Then I recognize the familiar sounds of hair being undone and brushed. Then swirls of water in the sink. Even before that, clothes being shed; now, again; it’s just incomprehensible to me how many clothes you take off. Finally, you’ve slipped out of your shoes. But now your stockings slide as constantly back and forth over the soft carpet as your shoes did before. You pour water into glasses; three, four times without stopping, I can’t even guess why. In my imagination I have long since given up on anything imaginable, while you evidently keep finding new things to do in the realm of reality. I hear you slip into your nightgown. But you aren’t finished yet and won’t be for a while. Again there are a hundred little actions. I know that you’re rushing for my sake; so all this must be absolutely necessary, part of your most intimate I, and like the mute motion of animals from morning till evening, you reach out with countless gestures, of which you’re unaware, into a region where you’ve never heard my step!
By coincidence I feel it all, because I have a fever and am waiting for you.
Slovenian Village Funeral
My room was strange. Pompeian red with Turkish curtains; the furniture had rents and seams in which the dust had gathered like tiny boulder beds and bands. It was a delicate dust, unreal rocks in miniature; but it was so very simply there, so uninvolved in any action, that it reminded of the great solitude of the mountains, bathed only in the rising and falling of flood light and darkness. In those days I had many such experiences.
The first time I set foot in the house, it was completely saturated with the stench of dead mice. Into the shared antechamber that separated my room from that of the teachers, they threw everything that they no longer loved or cared to keep: artificial flowers, food scraps, fruit peels, and torn dirty laundry no longer worth the effort of being cleaned. Even my servant complained when I asked him to clean it up; and yet one of the teachers was prettier than an angel, and her sister was gentler than a mother, and every day she painted her sister’s cheeks with naive rose colors, so that her face would be as beautiful as the peasant madonna in the little church. They were both loved by the little schoolgirls who came to visit; and I myself learned to appreciate this, when once I was sick and they gave me to feel of their goodness like warm herb cushions. But once during the day, when I entered their room to ask for something, for they were my landladies, both of them lay in bed, and as soon as I turned to leave, they jumped out from under the blankets fully dressed and ready to help; they even kept their filthy street shoes on in bed.