What tormented me most was not this place I had got myself into, this dark, supposedly haunted tunnel, but a sense of guilt. Not because I had left my family in the lurch, but because I was alone. That night, I discovered that even if I had done no particular wrong, it was a crime to be alone of my own free will. I had known that before and would learn it again in the future. A crime against whom? Against myself. Even the company of enemies would now have been a lesser evil. And hadn’t my girlfriend, who unlike myself was fluent in Slovene, offered any number of times to guide Filip Kobal through his legendary homeland? Could I conceive of anything better at this moment than our two bodies breathing together? Than to lie beside her all night and wake up in the morning with my hand on her belly?
But the real nightmares were still to come. The story interrupted when I left the station restaurant went on in my sleep, but now it was different from what it was in my waking state — it was violent, abrupt, incoherent. It no longer poured out of me with an “and,” a “then,” and a “when,” but chased me, harried me, drove me, sat on my chest, choked me until the only words I could get out consisted entirely of consonants. Worst of all, no sentence was ever completed, all my sentences broke off in the middle, rejected, maimed, garbled, disqualified, while at the same time I was forbidden to stop talking and, without pausing for breath, I had to keep starting all over, trying again, as though chained for life to a verbose, senseless rhythm which brought forth no meaning but with its retrograde movement destroyed and devalued what meaning I had arrived at during the day. Dragged into a dream light, the storyteller in me, only a short time before seen as the secret king, had become a forced laborer. Caught in the embrace, which would end only with death, of a story that had struck me when awake as the soul of gentleness but had now become a cruel monster, I was powerless to frame a single serviceable sentence. How malignant the spirit of storytelling could be!
And then, after a long onslaught, I suddenly succeeded in turning out two clear sentences, the one following naturally from the other, and in the same moment the pressure on me was relieved, I had a companion again. In my dream, this companion was a child; true, the child corrected me, improved on my story, but in so doing commended the teller. After that a tree, laden branch after branch not with fruit but with stones, which if not for the child would have signified “disaster,” proved to be a miracle tree; a number of confident swimmers including myself disported themselves in the raging flood, and the sleeper felt the ground under his cheek to be a book.
Thus, my longest night included an enjoyable hour of half sleep, during which I was able to stretch out. Part of my pleasure consisted in lying on my back with my hands clasped under my neck, listening to the dripping from the ceiling of the tunnel. For a change, I didn’t have to lie on my left side to feel at peace with myself. I had crept into the tunnel as a refuge, and now I made myself at home, using my brother’s overcoat as a blanket. The darkness around me was a good deal lighter than long ago in the potato cellar. From the nearby exit, gray on gray, glowworms kept flying in and out. Holding one in the palm of my hand, I lit up an astonishingly large circle around me. I always associate the sleep of the exhausted Odysseus on reaching the isle of the Phaeacians with this sort of sheltered feeling.
But when the hour was over, my sleep suddenly fell away from me, and it was then that I began to feel alone for good. Half sleep had been, as it were, my last companion in solitude, my guide and protector. And now from one minute to the next it proved to be a delusion. My word-mangling dream had been a whirligig of ghosts, and now my waking seemed to be the punishment it threatened. And this punishment consisted not in being exposed to the elements in an undoubtedly inhospitable place, but in being stricken dumb. Here, far from human society, objects ceased to have a language and became enemies, executioners in fact. Yet what was destroying me was not that the iron bar protruding from the tunnel wall reminded me of torture or execution — but that, though sound of body, I was without company and, stricken mute, no longer company to myself. True, I saw the bar bent in the shape of the letter S, of the figure 8, of a treble-clef sign, but that was once upon a time; the fairy tale of the S, the 8, and the treble-clef sign had lost its symbolic meaning.
So I fled. Not from dread of the tunnel’s history, not from the silence or the stifling air, or for fear of a cave-in or a lineman — I’d have been only too glad if the lineman had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and cursed me in every known and unknown language — but in a single impulse of horror at the otherworldly speechlessness that was pressing in on me, for over and above bodily death it meant destruction of the soul, which, now that I am trying to speak of it, is recurring more violently, more devastatingly than ever. Then I had only to run a few steps to be out in the open, whereas today I am confined to the tunnel; there is no escape, no niche, no parapet, and my only way to humankind is to equip the objects of a mute planet, whose prisoner I have become through wishing (mea culpa) to be a storyteller, with eyes that look at me forgivingly. And that is why I now see the little knot of glowworms in the grass outside the tunnel blown up into a fire-spewing dragon guarding the entrance to the underworld — whether to defend a treasure there or for my protection, I do not know.
But what the upper world, or just the world, can be, I learned on the way back. Though it was still a long time till morning and there was no moon, I could see the contours of the valley clearly. The river that went with it, the Sava Dolinka (or, as my father would have said in German, “die Wurzener Save”), was a dull glow moving between the sparsely wooded banks. On a sloping meadow leading down to the water, a horse was standing beside a tree; though it was too early for flies, the horse was swishing its tail. The sound it made in pulling up grass was the dominant sound of the countryside, accompanied by the faint murmur of the river and the rumbling in the distant freight yards. Between the railroad line and the bottom of the valley, the meadow merged into a cluster of small gardens, which in my memory have remained “the hanging gardens of Jesenice.” They formed a pattern of vegetable patches and fruit trees, surrounded by low fences; in the center of each one, there was a wooden hut with a bench in front of it. This pattern, partly sloping, partly terraced, continued down to the river, from which the gardens seemed to draw their water. Their color, already growing visible, was a yellowish white: in the trees, early apples, and in the gardens, beans. The path beside the tracks where I was walking was soft — the dust was so deep, so dense and yielding, that it didn’t even retain my shoe prints; and the dew didn’t moisten it but collected in little balls that stayed on the surface. With my first step out of the tunnel, a stone weight had fallen from my shoulders and the taste of metal was gone from my teeth; my eyes were washed, not by the dew, but by the strange sight of it. The previous night, I had taken in the details of the valley, but now I saw them as letters, as a series of signs, beginning with the grass-pulling horse and combining to form a coherent script. I now interpreted this land before my eyes, with the objects, whether lying, standing, or leaning, which rose up from it, this describable earth, as “the world”; and I was able to address this land, without special reference to the valley of the Sava or to Yugoslavia, as “my country.” And at the same time this manifestation of the world was the only conception of a God that I have managed over the years to arrive at.