Stick to the path; even so, you won’t meet anyone; the dark men escorting you to the left and right, fanning out now and then into the pale savanna, are juniper bushes. Hours, days, years later, you will be standing at the foot of a white-flowering wild cherry tree, with a honeybee in one blossom, a bumblebee in another, in the third a fly, in the fourth a beetle, in the sixth a butterfly. What glitters like a water hole on the path up ahead is a silvery snakeskin. You pass long rows of woodpiles, which on closer scrutiny prove to be camouflaged ammunition dumps; you pass round heaps of stones, which turn out to be the entrances to underground storehouses; if you touch them with your foot, the rock is cardboard. At every step, grasshoppers will squirt up at you from the middle strip of grass. A dead black-and-yellow salamander moves almost imperceptibly along the wagon rut. When you bend over, you discover that it’s being carried by a procession of dung beetles. After all these tiny creatures, the first animal of any size, a white-faced fox, a dormouse wrapped around a branch, will look to you like a brother. That breeze in the solitary tree over there — a moment later you feel it on your face. Your resting place is a cave; to explore it you won’t need a lamp, because daylight shines in from the far end and through a few holes in the roof. Water will drip on your overheated forehead, and in a niche there are quail’s eggs, not bullets but stone balls, rounder and lighter in color than in any mountain stream. As you go your way, you shake them in your hand, and their smell, quite unlike the stinking heaps of bat’s dung, will bring the widely ramified clay chambers of the Karst caves into your room as long as you live.
Now you can go naked; the wild sow, one enormous black-brown hump, which bursts grunting and panting out of the underbrush on your right, followed by two piglets no bigger than hares, and crashes on into the underbrush on your left, has no eyes for you. Your feet stamp the ground, your shoulders soar, and your eyeballs touch the sky.
At your next resting place, you hear a long-drawn-out croaking of frogs in the stillness; a delicate monotone in the desert. You will go toward it and come to a puddle that takes up a long stretch of the path. The water is clear, a single feather is floating on it. The deep-red bottom shows a hexagonal crack, the hoof prints of two deer, any number of arrow-shaped bird tracks pointing in all directions, a cuneiform inscription that asks to be deciphered. You find its counterpart in the sky where a patch of azure blue the size of your big toe appears in the middle of honeycomb clouds — speaking of cirrus clouds, the Karst people say: “The sky is blossoming,” just as they say: “The ocean is cascading,” where we would speak of a rough sea. The feather will blow away, the wind will raise a swell in the long puddle. Stretch out on the bank, using your bundle of clothes as a pillow. You’ll fall asleep. One of your hands will pass between your knees and take root in the earth, you will hold the other to one ear (the torn corners of our eyes, brother, come from listening). In your dream you will hear the pond spoken of as a lake, and see a boat with your hazel stick as a rudder in the rushes by the shore; a dolphin will spring up from nowhere, its back bent into a dolina by the weight of the fruit it is carrying. Your sleep will be short but refreshing, and you will be roused by raindrops on your ear — there can be no gentler awakener. You will get up and dress. You will not have been out of the world, but for once wholly in it. And sure enough, a duck from the savanna will come flying low, land gently on the puddle, and swim back and forth in front of you; and a cow that has lost its way will stop and drink. You will let the rain fall on you. It will make you so calm that butterflies will alight on you, one on your knee, another on the back on your hand, while a third will shade your brow.
As you continue on your way through the Karst, the sky will turn blue again (only the usual black pileup to the north, beyond Mount Nanos, will give you a feeling of “weather”); the trees will sough clockwise, each with its own music, and you will understand why, when the rustling of the oak trees was especially loud and penetrating, the ancients heard it as the voice of the oracle. You will take notes, and the scraping of your pen will be one of the most peaceful sounds under the sun. It will lead you back to the hundred villages and city quarters (the Karst movie house, the Karst dance hall, the Karst Wurlitzer), which, when night falls and the sky is again overcast, will be recognizable in the soundless wilderness by the circular glow here and there on the cloud cover. There you will be regaled with white bread, Karst wine, and that special ham that will give you an aftertaste of your walk with all its smells, from the rosemary of the middle strip to the thyme at the foot of boundary walls and the juniper berries of the savanna. You will need no more for the present. And one day in the course of your years, you will come to the place where the sunlit patch of fog on the horizon far below you will be the Adriatic; and knowing the region as you do, you will be able to distinguish the freighters and sailboats in the Gulf of Trieste from the cranes in the shipyards of Monfalcone, the castles of Miramar and Duino, and the domes of the basilica of San Giovanni di Timavo. And then, at the bottom of the dolina at your feet, between two boulders, you will discover the ultra-real, many-seated, half-rotted boat, rudder and all, and involuntarily, taking the part for the whole (you will then be free enough), name it ARK OF THE COVENANT.
A time will come of course when walking, even walking in the heartland, will no longer be possible, or no longer effective. But then the story will be here and reenact the walking.
On that first trip, I was in the Karst for barely two weeks, on just about every day of which I was someone else. I was not only a seeker after traces but also a day laborer, a bridegroom, a drunk, a village scribe, a member of a wake. In Gabrovica I saw the bell that had fallen out of the church tower; it had dug deep into the ground and children were playing on top of it; in Skopo, emerging from the wilderness, I frightened the solitary old woman hoeing in the dolina; in Pliskovica I went into the only church that was unlocked on weekdays, and sketched the black-and-yellow hornet that was crawling over the altar cloth; in Hrusevica, brookless like every other village in the Karst, I marveled at the stone statue of St. John of Nepomuk, who as a rule is found only on bridges; in Komen I stepped out of the movies into a moonlit night, brighter and more silent than the Mojave Desert, through which Richard Widmark had just fought his way; got lost in the chestnut forests of Kostanjevica, home of the only tall trees in the Karst, where the ankle-deep rustling of past years’ leaves and the crunching of nutshells underfoot can be compared to no other sound in the world; strode through the freestanding portal of Temnica, which from the edge of the footpath leads out into the steppe and wilderness; bowed my head in Tomaj before the house where died the Slovene poet Sre
ko Kosovel, who when hardly more than a child celebrated the curative properties of his region’s pine trees, stones, and quiet paths, and — at the end of the war, when the alien monarchy ended and Yugoslavia began — entered (“clanked into”) his capital city of Ljubljana, where he, the brother of my waiter and my soldier, made himself the herald of the new era and, perhaps in the long run not brazen enough for that sort of thing, too much affected by the “stillness” (tišina, his favorite word) of the Karst — see his conspicuous jug-ear — was not long for this world.