The monastically labyrinthine vicarage was deathly still in the brooding Romanian summer afternoon. In the main building— the Counselor’s small apartment and my own little room were located in a side wing — Dr. Glondys might be preparing one of his famous sermons, and in view of this awesome possibility everyone naturally was tacitly enjoined to be as quiet as possible.
Dr. Glondys was an important man and was granted special status among ordinary humans on the strength not only of his ecclesiastical office and the prestige that devolves on patently large talents and responsibilities, but also of his awe-inspiring appearance, his manly handsomeness. Tall, slim and of innately dignified bearing, he carried on his broad shoulders a head that was the image of the classic portrait of Goethe. It had become known that he was a neo-Platonist — the term obviously drew a blank with most people, but nevertheless prevented one from raising one’s voice, slamming a door or, unimaginably worse, engaging in guttersnipe whistling. Therefore not a sound was heard throughout the vicarage; the square in front of the Black Church, where the harshly imposing Honterus drilled his accusatory index finger into everyone’s guilty conscience, was deserted.
My little room was confining and rather gloomy. So as to have better light, I sat in the window recess, cut so deeply into the building walls that I felt as if I were sitting in a cell. The window, with a view of the tiny garden, was closely framed by an ancient vine, its trunk as thick as an arm, which wreathed it with leaves like Silenus’s head — a very drowsy Silenus, for the whole world dozed in the wine-hued afternoon light. The confused buzzing of summery flies threaded the hour, sluggishly trickling away. Across from me, among the leaves on the ledge of a wall, a cat slept rolled up into a furry black and white ball, and up above, in the high skies — those spanking blue bright Romanian June skies — swallows tweeted.
I had before me an 1873 issue of Over Land and Sea. From its yellowed pages rose a subtly musty whiff. A foxed steel engraving of a three-master with reefed sails in a small palm-fanned harbor in front of a background of steep volcanic cones — this lured my imagination into the airy remoteness of spiced shores. But there remained a floating core of consciousness filled with nothing but a transparent void — I would have called it my “I,” had I been asked — that was neither here nor there but, instead, in an anguished and tormenting nowhere.
The bright light falling through the vine leaves drew serrated curlicues on the magazine pages, and the brownish-black letters of the old print took on a green hue, as in the scarlet-fever book of my early childhood. As if the paper bore a visible watermark, another even more remote vision was superimposed on the picture of the exotic harbor with its bare house-cubes, zebra-striped awnings over the windows and corbeled balconies under the palm fronds through which the spice winds blew. It was a vision so dim and fleeting that not even its outline could be perceived: more impression than image, more remembrance of a mere echo than an actual sound, more a hint of a feeling than a feeling itself. And yet it could be expressed in words. It was a vision rendered in the pale color-tints of English children’s books, with the changing light coming through curtains barely moving in the breeze, between which the eye could follow, over massed crowns of trees, a row of poplars lining a country road that extended all the way to the darkly purplish mists of a faraway horizon — a vision that for me contained all the sweetness and warmth of my parental home, all its luminosity shimmering through the birches and rowan trees, the smell of baking, the sound of my mother’s voice. It all now seemed more remote, more fanciful and more inaccessible than even the three-masted earth-circling schooner of a bygone era, and much more irreal and incredible than the medieval surroundings in which I found myself transposed as if by a spell, sitting between these thick walls, entwined by thick creepers, with a thick book on my knees.
I looked up. Over the heavy roof of the vicarage, the steeple of the Black Church rose heavenward. The blueness into which its pointed spire cut like the prow of a large vessel was swarming with swallows flitting hither and thither. Among them also hovered falcons around the spire; at times pigeons threw themselves from a ledge with a splattering of wings, circled the church tower, then dropped down on its roof like a handful of snow, or they slipped into holes in the brickwork that had been put there to hoist blocks of stone when the church was built. I had been told that falcons sometimes pounced on the pigeons with such wild impetuosity that they shattered their own heads against the stone whenever the pigeons managed to escape into those flight holes. I didn’t like to hear such stories, for my heart was on the side of the falcons, but I believed them. Just now, a swallow swung from a hole and rose vertically, as if drawn fluttering along an invisible string, in total disregard of the falcons and in an apparent enraptured longing for heaven; it alit on the uttermost extremity of the minute hand on the tower clock. It was a quarter to three.
I waited for something to happen, but nothing happened. The falcons kept on hovering and the pigeons flitted to and fro in passionate hunting. Nor did the minute hand of the clock continue in its upward motion. The weight of the swallow was enough to keep the pointer horizontal. (Thus, another story also was proven a lie — to wit: that the hands of the clock were so heavy and the strength of the clockwork correspondingly so powerful that once, when an incautious sexton had looked out through the peephole in the dial as the hands were pointing to five minutes before twelve, he got his head wedged between them and cleanly cut off as by scissors.)
The skies were a piercing blue. From afar, coming from the hilly slopes beyond the town moat, could be heard the cheerful noises of a bevy of boys — lost in the wind and as if shrunk and made transparent by the distance: a sound merely dreamed, possibly. And indeed, the reality it evoked for me was totally abstract. I imagined those boys as being lively, but they were also abstract to me, like the sailors from the schooner pictured in the old magazine, whom I fancied roaming through the streets of that exotic harbor town. The boys were surely engaged in wild games, and I almost could feel their hot breath; at the same time a sense of being excluded from the rich stream of life cut deeply and painfully into med, whether at a remove of a mere hundred paces or of thousands of miles overseas. I was overcome by a fear I had hitherto not experienced. The world around me split up into imaginings, illusions and lies — and I was no longer one with the world. The tangible world around me — the book on my knees, the gnarled tangle of vines along the wall and even the wall itself, the vicarage wall in front of the mighty Black Church of Kronstadt in Transylvania — all this no longer truly contained me. The core of my being had been left behind in a lot, homefelt at-homeness in Bukovina, remembrance of which I could no longer summon up; even less could I have demonstrated that it was more than a phantom, an illusion, a myth of myself. I was in the Bukovina in as abstract a way as I was in that far-off exotic harbor or with the boys playing games. I began to doubt my own factuality. I could not have given my name with any kind of conviction; it would not have sounded as if it were my own.
The swallow sitting at the end of the minute hand of the tower clock did not move and the hand itself stood still. Time stood still. The sound of the children was lost in space. The tweeting of the swallows fused into a single piercingly high note like a thread spinning away into the skies. The deep blue of those skies, in which thousands of swallows were scattered like tiny playing-card clubs, seemed all at once transformed heraldically into a reverse ermine: a black sky seeded with swallows of a forget-me-not blue. And thus it became transfixed. The whole world stood still.