After wrapping my mushrooms in my brother’s enormous handkerchief, which like various articles of his clothing had been forced upon me for my journey, I approached Rinkenberg and the house, where I was sure of finding my mother lying with her face to the wall, my sister on all fours about to relapse into her confusion, and my father sitting down among the ashes like Job.
Not at all. The house stood open and empty, my mother’s bedclothes hung out of the window, airing. I found the three of them on the grassplot behind the house, with a fourth person, a neighbor, who had helped my father carry my mother out of the house in an armchair. She was sitting there barefoot, in a long white nightgown, an old horse blanket over her knees, and the others were sitting around her on the grassy bench provided by a slight hollow in the plot. At first it seemed to me that I had surprised my family in some secret, as if they were glad at last to be among themselves without me, able at last to let themselves go. For, though quiet, they seemed exuberant; my sister was amusing herself making faces in all directions, imitating the expressions of various people, challenging the others to guess who; one of these various people, the most laughed at — by my father as well, whose hat was on crooked — I recognized as myself. (I had many times felt myself to be unwanted, an intruder, a spoilsport, and often enough I really was.) But when they noticed me, the grassplot was suffused with a radiance which now, a quarter of a century later, brightens this deserted place for me. My ailing mother gave me a smile of infinite kindness, a smile such as I had never known, and it lifted me off the ground.
I sat down with them, the family was complete. My sister quickly prepared the mushrooms, and even I enjoyed them, though as a rule I was keener on gathering than on eating them. Though no table was set up, no cloth laid, it was a banquet, and our neighbor, who had just been leaving to answer the call of work, took time out for it. From then on, all I remember is sitting there for hours without anyone saying a word. Long, narrow eyes, bent at the corners like boat keels. From that unaccustomed vantage point — we seldom sat on this grassplot, ordinarily our washing was spread out there to bleach — my father’s house seemed to stand alone, not in the village named Rinkenberg, but in an unknown and nameless part of the earth, under a strange sky. In the rooms, a breeze that could be felt out here in the soft meadow grass. A pear on the espalier wobbled and fell. The boards of the long-abandoned apiary showed their colors, which taken together disclosed a face, and that face was repeated in the white of the cat half hidden under the dark green box tree. The barouche in the shed, superannuated like the farm implements, stood out from the other vehicles and parts of vehicles with its festive unweathered gloss; one last time it drove out of the shed and over the countryside alone, followed by a flock of birds which proceeded to dive through the air like dolphins. But we were not in an enterprising mood; we had been seized with a kind of timidity, along with a confidence that was all the stronger because there was no reason for it. Only my sister disturbed the order of things with her activity, coming and going, talking, combing my mother’s hair, washing her feet. True, in disturbing the order she also reinforced it; her activity was needed to make the order cogent and enduring; and whenever she touched the woman in the armchair, took hold of her, turned her around, she did so officially, so to speak, as our representative. In my recollection, it is not a group of people sitting there in the sun, but only the usual dazzlingly white sheets, spread out on the grass. Someone is sprinkling them from a watering can, the sound of water is a sharp crackling, the little puddles on the sheets evaporate quickly, and the grassplot is an inclined plane from which everything else, including myself, has vanished, slid away.
That is the story of those hours. But what of the event that made me turn back? Was it just a momentary impulse? Why, to begin with, had I gone to the Mittlern rather than the Bleiburg station? I had missed the midday train and had so long to wait until the afternoon train that I decided to kill time by walking two stations and ten kilometers westward. But incapable as I was of dawdling, of walking slowly, of making a detour, I was still much too early. The Mittlern station, built of undressed gray stone, lies outside the village, at the edge of the Dobrawa Forest, and is a massive, imposing edifice for the Jaunfeld Plain, where almost everything — the houses, the trees, even the churches — and the people tend to be rather small. For an hour I walked back and forth outside it. Not a sound but for the crunching of the black gravel under my feet and, on the other side of the single-track rails gleaming in the sun, the occasional sighing of the wind in the pines, which with their thin trunks and small dark cones I now regard as the emblem of that whole countryside, along with the whiteness of the isolated birches (even the surface roots are white) which fringed the forest and at that time had not yet been moved into parks as ornamental plants. The stationmaster lived on the second floor; the window curtains were torn and in the window boxes grew the inevitable gleaming-red geraniums, the smell of which had always repelled me at home. Behind the windows, no sign of life. At intervals, petals shot downward, somehow reminding me of insect wings. I sat down on a bench in the shade, facing one end of the station. The bench stood beside a bush on which hung, instead of the present scraps of white paper, greenish condoms. At my feet, almost submerged in grass, a circular stone. An old foundation? I raised my head and saw in the end wall of the station a rectangle — a blind window the same whitish-gray color as the wall, but set in from it. Though no longer in the sun, this window shimmered with reflected light from somewhere. In Rinkenberg there was only one such window, and it happened to be in the smallest house, the roadmender’s, the one that looked like the porter’s lodge of a nonexistent manor. It, too, was the color of the wall — yellow in that case — but was bordered with white. Whenever I passed, it caught my eye, but when I stopped to look, it always fooled me. Nevertheless, it never lost a certain undefined significance for me, and I felt that such a window was lacking in my father’s house. Now, at the sight of the Mittlern blind window, I remembered: one night in January 1920, forty years ago, my father carried my brother, a child barely able to walk at the time, here in a wheelbarrow. The child was suffering from “ophthalmic fever” and my father was taking him to Klagenfurt to see the doctor. His nocturnal effort was in vain, the eye was lost; in the picture in the radio-and-crucifix corner there was nothing in its place but a milky whiteness. But this memory explained nothing. The significance of the blind window remained undefined, but suddenly that window became a sign, and in that same moment I decided to turn back. My turning back — and here again the sign was at work — was not definitive; it applied only to the hours until the following morning, when I would really start out, really begin my journey, with successive blind windows as my objects of research, my traveling companions, my signposts. And when later, on the evening of the following day, at the station restaurant in Jesenice, I thought about the shimmering of the blind window, it still imparted a clear message — to me it meant: “Friend, you have time.”
Two — THE EMPTY COW PATHS