Voices resound, and each one is the voice of our mother. Trees rustle, and each one rustles above our cradle. Roads divide in the form of a star, and each road is the way home.
He who called himself Paul, my creature and friend, was there again and had become as old as I. He resembled a friend of my youth. But I did not know which one, and therefore, I was somewhat uneasy with him and kept a polite distance. He drew power from this. The world no longer obeyed me, it obeyed him. Consequently, all previous things had disappeared and had collapsed in meek improbability, shamed by him who now ruled.
We were at a square. The place was called Paris, and in front of me was an iron beam standing straight up high. It was a ladder and had narrow iron rungs on both sides. You could hold on to them with your hands and climb on them with your hands. Since Paul wanted to climb, I began, and he was next to me on a similar ladder. When we had climbed as high as a house or a very high tree, I began to feel frightened. I looked over at Paul, who did not feel afraid, but he perceived that I was scared and smiled.
For one split second, while he smiled and I stared, I came close to recognizing him and recalling his name. A gap in the past was ripped open and kept splitting until it receded to my early school years when I was twelve years old, the most wonderful time of life, everything full of fragrance, everything ingenious, everything with an edible aroma of fresh bread and with an intoxicating shimmer of adventure and gilded heroism — Jesus was twelve years old when he shamed the scholars in the temple. By twelve, we have all shamed our scholars and teachers, have shown that we are smarter than they. Memories and images stormed in convulsions upon me: forgotten school notebooks, detention during the noon hour, a bird killed with a slingshot, a jacket pocket filled with sticky stolen plums, boys splashing wildly in a swimming hole, torn Sunday pants and a very bad conscience, fervent evening prayer about earthly cares, wonderful heroic feelings of splendor while reading poetry by Schiller.
It took only a second, a flash of lightning, an avid rushing sequence of images without a focus. The very next moment, Paul’s face looked at me again, tormentingly somewhat familiar. I was no longer certain of my age. Perhaps we were boys. Farther and farther below the narrow rungs of our ladders were the masses of streets called Paris. When we were higher than any tower, our iron poles came to an end, and each ladder was crowned with a horizontal board, a tiny platform. It seemed impossible to climb upon them, but Paul did it with ease, and I had to do it, too.
Once on top I laid myself down flat on the board and looked down over the edge as though I were on a small high cloud. My gaze fell like a stone and did not hit a target. Then my friend pointed somewhere with his hand, and my eyes became glued to a marvelous sight that hovered in midair. All of a sudden I saw a strange-looking group of people in the air suspended over a wide street at the same level of the highest roofs but still very far beneath us. They seemed to be tightrope dancers, and indeed, one of the figures walked back and forth on a rope or a pole. Then I discovered that there were many, and most of them were young girls. They seemed to me to be gypsies or nomadic folk. They walked, lay, sat, moved at the height of the roofs on an airy scaffold made out of the thinnest planks and poles similar to an arbor. They lived there and were at home in this region. Beneath them one could sense the street. A fine whirling cloud extended from the ground until it almost reached their feet.
Paul made a remark about this.
“Yes,” I answered. “It is touching — all those girls.”
Of course, I was much higher than they were, and I clung fearfully to my post while they floated lightly and fearlessly, and I saw I was too high. I was at the wrong place. They were at the right height, not on the ground and yet not as hellishly high and remote as I was; not among the people and yet not so entirely isolated. Besides, there were many of them. I saw clearly they represented a bliss that I had not yet attained.
But I knew that I would have to climb down sooner or later from my gigantic ladder, and the thought of it was so oppressing that I felt nauseous and could not bear being up there one second longer. Full of desperation and shaking from dizziness, I felt beneath me for the rungs of the ladder with my feet — I couldn’t see them from the plank — and I hung for some horrifying minutes at that terrible height suffering from convulsions. No one helped me. Paul was gone.
In profound dread I made some dangerous stabs with my feet and hands, and I felt myself enveloped by something like a fog. I felt that it was not the high ladder or the dizziness that I had to experience and endure. In fact, I lost perspective and could not determine the shape of things. Everything was foggy and uncertain. At one time, I was still hanging on the rungs of the ladder feeling dizzy, and then the next thing I knew, I was crawling, small and fearful, through dreadfully narrow underground shafts and corridors. Then I was hopelessly wading through swamp and dirt and felt the filthy slime rise up to my mouth. Darkness and obstacles were everywhere. Terrible tasks with serious yet concealed meaning. Fear and sweat, paralysis and cold. Hard dying, hard being born.
How much night surrounds us! How many dreadful, awful paths of torment we take! Go deep into the shaft of our run-down soul, eternal poor hero, eternal Odysseus! But we go on, we go on. We bow and wade. We swim and wade. We swim and suffocate in the slime. We crawl along the smooth treacherous walls. We weep and despair. We moan fearfully and sob loudly in pain. But we move on and bite our way through.
Once again images arose from the turbid vapors of hell. Again a small stretch of the dark path was illuminated and formed by a modest light of memories, and my soul pushed its way out of the primeval world into the familiar sphere of time.
Where was this? Familiar things confronted me. I recognized the air that I breathed. A large room in half darkness, an oil lamp on the table, my own lamp, a large round table somewhat like a piano. My sister was there and my brother-in-law. Perhaps they were visiting me, or perhaps I was at their place. They were quiet and worried, full of concern about me. And I stood in the large dismal room, walked back and forth, stood still, and walked again in a cloud of sadness, in a flood of bitter, suffocating sadness. And now I began searching for something, nothing important, a book or scissors or something like that, and I could not find it. I took the lamp in my hand. It was heavy, and I was terribly tired. I soon put it down and then picked it up again. I wanted to search, search, although I knew that it was in vain. I would find nothing. I would only confuse everything even more. The lamp would fall out of my hands. It was so heavy, so painfully heavy, and so I would continue to grope and search and wander through the room for the rest of my miserable life.