At that point I thought of my teacher, the writer of fairy tales, who precisely because he was absent had been a kind of prop to me in the course of my journey. There was never any plot in his fairy tales; they were mere descriptions of objects, and each story dealt with only one thing, a thing which, as accessory or scene of action, must have been familiar to readers of folk tales. The subject of one tale was a hut in the forest, but without a witch, without lost children, without fire (except at the most for a puff of chimney smoke, soon carried away by the cold wind); and beyond the Seven Mountains there was nothing but a brook, so clear that its bed could be mistaken at first sight for a road — fish could be seen swimming over its dark elongated paving stones until at last the water, rushing over a round protruding rock, gave forth an endless sound. The only one of his fairy tales in which anything “happened” was a description of a bramblebush (of course without a struggling Jew tearing himself to pieces in it); this bush is in the middle of an impenetrable wilderness but is surrounded by a large circle of sand where, in the final sentence, a first-person narrator suddenly turns up and throws a handful of sand, “and then another, and still another, and so forth and so on,” into the brambles. According to the author, these “one-thing tales” were supposed to be “sun tales” and manage without the usual “moonlight of spooky additives”; “sun and subject,” he thought, were fairy tale enough; they were the “situation.” A single glance at a treetop, he held, sufficed to produce a fairy-tale atmosphere.
Seen as a collection of one-word fairy tales, the dictionary did the same thing for me: it gave me images of the world, even when, as in the case of the strawberries strung on their blade of grass, I had not actually experienced them. Around every word I came across in my ruminations, a world took shape, as much around “an empty chestnut husk” as around “the wet tobacco left at the bottom of a pipe” or even “a sunshower” or “the white weasel,” which also means “a saucy beautiful girl.” And just as certain passages in my brother’s letters, comparable to the fragments from the Greek seekers after truth, had a kind of halo around them, so now isolated words traced circles that made me think of a prehistoric figure who lived in the hazy centuries before those early stammerers, namely, of the legendary Orpheus. Only a few of his idiosyncratic terms had survived; neither his poems nor his songs had been thought worth collecting, only his peculiar names for things: “woven chains” for the furrows in fields, “bent shuttles” for plows, “threads” for seed grains, “Aphrodite” for the sowing season, “the tears of Zeus” for rain.
On me, too, word circles had the effect of fairy tales, for though the terrible, the repellent, and the evil were amply represented in them, they were only a component which took its place in the whole and, in the dictionary at least, could never win out. My teacher found fault with the stories I had been writing at the time, saying that I had a weakness for the macabre, that I was positively addicted to the gloomy and gruesome; the law of writing, by contrast, was to create, letter after letter, syllable after syllable, the brightest of brightnesses; even a last breath, he said, must be transformed into the breath of life. And now, immersed in the dictionary’s “rain of blood,” “rat turds,” “spittle of disgust,” “the fecal sausages of the earthworm,” “shoes moldering in a corner,” a beast named “understone” (a viper), a place called “land of moles” (the grave), I felt free from my addiction to the gruesome or even to the tragic and found in the contemplation of names a pattern in the world, a plan, which transformed country people and a village house into world people and a big-city house. Every word circle a world circle! The crux of the matter was that every circle emanated from a single foreign word. When people felt unable to communicate an experience, weren’t they always wailing: “Oh, if there were only a word for it!” And in moments of recognition, weren’t they much less likely to say “Yes, that’s it!” than “Yes, that’s the word!”
But wasn’t I taking the side of a foreign language against my own? Wasn’t I attributing this one-word magic exclusively to Slovene, at the expense of my native German? No, it was both languages together, the single words on the left and the circumlocutions on the right which — sign after sign — curved, inflected, measured, circumscribed, constructed space. How fortunate was the existence of different languages, how meaningful was the allegedly so destructive Babylonian confusion! Wasn’t the Tower of Babel actually built, though in secret, and didn’t it, after all, reach up into the heavens?
Day after day, I opened the book of wisdom more excitedly. Is there any word for the adventures I was experiencing? What can one say to express the simultaneous experience of childhood and landscape? There is a word, a German word, and that word is Kindschaft![3] I clap my hands in amazement!
Time and again in my afternoons on the plateau I applauded the epic of words. And I laughed as well, not the laughter of ridicule, but the laughter of recognition and complicity. Yes, there is a word for the bright spot in a cloudy sky, a word for the way an ox runs back and forth on a hot day when he’s stung by a horsefly, for flame suddenly bursting from a stove, for the juice of stewed pears, for the star on a bull’s forehead, for a man on all fours extracting himself from the snow, for a woman stocking up on summer clothes, for the sloshing of liquid in a half-empty bucket, for the trickling of seeds out of seedpods, for the skipping of a flat stone over the surface of a pond, for icicles hanging from a tree, for the raw spot in a boiled potato, for a puddle in clayey ground. Yes, that’s the word!
But was my plan still valid? Wasn’t the word for “the sound of two alternating flails” obsolete, since the corresponding implements had for years been hanging inactive in the museums? Wasn’t “the sound of a falling body” the meaning that survived? Didn’t the term which in the past century designated only “emigration” lose its innocence when the events of the last war changed its meaning to forced “resettlement”? Didn’t the old book suffer from the absence of resistance fighters, of partisans, for whom the “partisan,” that obsolete, halberd-like weapon, was hardly a substitute? And even back at the time when the dictionary was compiled, were there not a striking number of designations for places where something had been but was no longer — for fallow land “where barley formerly grew,” for the place “where the barn used to be,” the stone surface “where bushes used to grow”? And even at that time, were footnotes not appended to certain particularly inventive designations, to the effect that they were no longer in use? And hadn’t the scholars included in their book any number of words which even their source, the oldest inhabitant in the most remote valley, had stopped using except in word games? So, instead of saying that words had fairy-tale magic, wouldn’t it be wiser to say that they performed the function of a questionnaire: What is my situation? What is our situation? What is the present situation?
Yet, at the same time, they were fairy tales; for in answer to every word that questioned me, even if I had never seen the thing it stood for and even if it had long departed this world, the thing invariably gave rise to an image, or more precisely, a radiance.
One afternoon on the plateau I came across the last word my brother had ticked. As in many other cases, the date and place were supplied: “At the front.” In the early stages of the war he always carried the book with him; it was only at the end that he left it home, along with his jacket, “as a baptismal present.” The rest of the dictionary, more than half of it, showed no further pencil marks and seemed never to have been opened; there were no prewar blades of grass or wartime flies pressed between the pages.
3
This brunch-word might be rendered as “childscape,” except that the word Kindschaft actually exists in the meaning of “filiation” or “adoption,” as in Romans 9:4, “the adoption, and the glory.” [Trans.]