There I sat, contemplating the one word, leafing back to the others: was this a map of the areas of the earth or only of their memory — or perhaps even their obituary? Was it only the fault of the wars that human language in the time I was living in, in my time, was so inexpressive that we speakers always had to emphasize something? Why, at the age of twenty, did I feel tired at the mere thought that some interlocutor might open his mouth? Why did speech — even my own — often banish me to a muffled middle-class living room (where the windows might be “deaf” rather than “blind”)? Why had words lost all meaning? Why was it only the rare mot juste that made me feel that I had a soul?
In the village, on my way to this spot, I always passed a house, one wall of which merged seamlessly with a boulder. Similarly, when I now looked up from the old words, I saw the upper edge of the book merging directly with the air. The book formed a ramp guiding my gaze to the foot of the southern chain of mountains (one Slovene name for which, in literal translation, was “underwing”). There I saw a bare declivity, somewhat veiled by distance, which, however, because of the spruce at the edge of my little plateau, seemed only a stone’s throw away. The slope, overgrown with grass, was hatched to the very top with a dense pattern of disused cow paths. These looked something like stairways, which occupied the whole breadth of the slope and crisscrossed to form nets. The large horizontal pattern was broken by a smaller one of vertical grooves, in which the clay-yellow water of the afternoon rain was now flowing. Seen from a distance, the water moved so slowly that I thought of oozing stalactites. The dead sloping pasture made me think of the cows which had climbed up and down it in the past, an image of slowness, of hulking bodies, stopping now and then to pull up grass, not jumping over any of the steps as sheep or dogs might have done, their udders grazing the tips of the grass, their hooves often getting stuck in the mud. Sometimes they slipped from level to level, thus gouging out channels for the rainwater. One beast jumped up on the one ahead and was dragged a bit of the way on its back. One raised its tail and urinated so violently that I almost thought I heard it, followed by a plopping of dung. And then I actually saw the steaming of urine on the paths. So slow was the procession that it called to mind the crossing of a great mountain range, the baggage train of a migration that had been going on since the beginning of time. And precisely the emptiness — the empty network, the deserted crisscrossing paths, the empty, slightly irregular serpentines — reinforced my impression of animal clumsiness. Here, in contrast to the terraces of a mine or gravel pit, there were no helmeted men with machines moving busily up and down the slope, but an aimless mass almost marking time, with lowered heads, on all fours or slithering on their hind parts, a caravan of carriers and slaves, coming from nowhere and heading nowhere, for which the slope was not even a stopping place, except in the event of a broken leg or an emergency slaughtering.
I thought again of my teacher. As a historian, he took a special interest in peoples who had vanished from the face of the earth. He began his course almost ritually with an example taken from his study of the Maya (because of which the students had given him a related nickname). As a student he had explored the Yucatan for years: “As a geographer,” he said, “I grew tan, and as a historian, pale — as pale as I am now.” The Maya, he said, had never succeeded in building a state, because their peninsula “lacks a great river. Think of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or of the Nile.” Nor had they known the wheel or the pulley or the windlass; the only form of Mayan wheel ever found had been part of a small toy. But what most impeded their political development was their inability to construct a supporting arch; they knew only “pseudo-arches,” incapable of sustaining the roof of a room, let alone a hall. Their one element of cohesion had been religion. Instead of the wheel, they had had the roller, and with it they built roads, used only for processions to their sanctuaries in the jungle. But every peasant’s hut was also regarded as a temple. All life was governed by the heavenly bodies, which were looked upon as sacred, because instructions for daily life could be read from them. The steles dedicated to the sun indicated the time to sow; the hieroglyphics engraved in the stone served as a clock. In these ancient inscriptions, ancestors were also honored; the popular religion demanded that every family should know its origin; the first man, the ancestor common to all, had been made of corn.
The decline of the Maya began when public religion gave way to private worship. “You see,” the teacher went on, “the families were rather unsociable, each kept to itself; the only bond between them had been public worship. But then they began to build chapels of their own, each for itself, at a distance from the others; forgotten was the idea that the house as such was hallowed. The bond was broken. It was then that the hieroglyphics on the steles came to an abrupt end. In the year 900 of our era,” said the teacher, “the last inscription was chiseled into a pillar not far from the grassy area which the Spaniards were to call the ‘Savanna of Freedom.’ Imagine the sparks in the flint, which was what most of the steles were made of.” The end of this people is most strikingly symbolized by the stairs on one of the pyramids: step after step richly decorated with sacred reliefs and glyphs, the sign for the morning star, the sign for the tree that gives the villagers shade, the signs for sun and day, which taken together signify “time”—but on the topmost step only “a few muddled, scratchy chisel marks.”
That stairway appeared to me in the empty sloping pasture. Much larger than the mound in our orchard at home, it actually had the shape of a pyramid and seemed with its hundred-odd steps, tapering toward the top, to reach the sky. I saw the words my brother had ticked climb the slope and then break off. Every line on the slope was an overturned hieroglyphic pillar, lying face down in the mud. The clayey brooks, welling up from scars in the earth, washed syllable after syllable away, until the whole place smoked like a field of ruins where not even the usual cherry trees had been spared. Seized with a need to mourn, I stood up, still holding my brother’s book. Nothing more was moving on the empty steps, not even a blade of grass; even the water stood still; and hadn’t being alive always meant simply being able to breathe with the flowing water, the waving grass, a rising branch? But what I wanted to mourn was not just a solitary death, it was something more: an annihilation. To annihilate means to do away not only with a particular human being but also with what gives the world its cohesion. To eliminate someone like my brother — who, unlike the great mass of those who speak and write, had the gift of bringing words and through them things to life, who never ceased to exercise that gift and to point out examples as he was doing now to me — was to kill language itself, the living tradition, the tradition of peace; it was the most unforgivable of crimes, the most barbarous of world wars.
But I was unable to mourn as I had wished. Instead, the phrase that had been the peasants’ watchword in their earliest uprising—“Our old right!”—kept spinning around in my head. Yes, from time immemorial we had raised a claim that should not have been allowed to lapse. And it had lapsed, because we ceased to raise it. And why did we always demand our right of someone else, some of an emperor, others of a God? Why didn’t we take it for ourselves, essential as it was for our self preservation, letting no one else intervene? There at last was a game in which we wouldn’t have had to measure ourselves against anyone, a lonely game, a wild game — Father, the great game!