The airport is correspondingly small, as if it were not part of the city but some sort of colonial branch office. The birches outside the terminal building were snow-white, and the luminous green of the young shoots of a larch tree seemed to fill the tree with tiny exotic birds. The stone rocket in the forecourt was replicated in the grass plot below it by a similarly shaped unopened crocus, whose dark violet emerged, ready for takeoff, from its silver-gray involucre.
Now it was midday and warm. Even the short wings of the ubiquitous sparrows sparkled in the sunlight whenever they flew up out of the hedges. From the fields adjoining the airport came waves of manure smell, and cows and pigs bellowed in the former Roman settlement of Loig, a little farther on. The straight line to the horizon drawn by the yellow laburnum bushes on either side of the highway was accentuated by the yellow of a gas station. As usual, I misread a “long-term parking” sign as “long-term farting.”
The air terminal building has two stories, surmounted by an observation deck. The second floor is occupied by a restaurant and a so-called hotel. This hotel consists of a short corridor with a few rooms on either side, so narrow that the two beds in it have to be placed end-to-end. In most of the rooms, the windows look out on the nearby control tower and the runways. Except in summer, the hotel is almost always empty; occasionally, a group will arrange for a banquet in the restaurant and book rooms in the hotel as well. There are no night flights.
The reception desk, behind a glass door that is always open, was, as usual, untended. I got the key from a waiter, whom I found in the terrace café. All the rooms were vacant, he informed me, and they were all the same. I wrote two names in the register: Andreas Loser and Tilia Levis. At least the waiter regarded the latter as a name, for he asked me: “Isn’t that an actress?” He had a bushy black mustache and said, without waiting for my answer: “Or an aviator? Or a foreigner? I’m from Kurdistan.”
It was cold and dark in the room; under the curtain rods and in the shower stall, the hum of fluorescent light. But when the window was open, warm spring air and quiet sunlight filled the room. The airfield didn’t seem to function at midday; there was only a helicopter flying back and forth, close to the ground as though looking for something, like a rescue craft over the ocean. Up in the glassed-in control tower, a man was sitting at the radar screen; he had his headphones on and he was reading the paper.
In the restaurant, I chose a table by the window, with a view of the western villages and mountains. In the middle of a fenced-in grass plot, a feathery brown spruce tree glimmered beside a chapel-blue fire hydrant. I ate light-colored lamb and drank burgundy, which in the bottle was as black as belladonna and in the glass barberry red — they brought out the colors of the landscape.
I spent the afternoon in the village of Loig, at the excavation site (which had been partly filled in). In the pits that were still open, children were looking for mosaic stones that might have been overlooked, and an elderly gentleman with chunks of clay clinging to the soles of his shoes — he had no doubt walked across the fields — was sketching the ancient water conduits in a notebook. A fruit tree, all pink-and-white blossoms, stood by itself in a muddy enclosure; a plump hen and a titmouse were perched on two branches, one above the other — living proof that such diversity of forms and species cannot be mere chance.
Later on, in the air terminal building, where the sun had begun to turn orange and the unoccupied ticket windows seemed extraordinarily massive, an early passenger or greeter was sitting alone in the waiting room, which suggested a bus terminal more than an airport. Later the room filled up. The people standing there had long shadows. The windows were manned, the baggage conveyor belts running. And in the Rent-a-Car stalls — those of one company red, of the other yellow — the mascaraed lashes, the bleached hair, and the hands with lacquered fingernails resumed their places. A uniformed guard with a submachine gun crossed the room, his head tilted slightly back, his eyes half closed, as pale and stiff as a corpse.
Something drew me to all these people, even though the air inside was close and smelled like fermented stale bread.
The sun went down. In the parking lot, which had been deserted all afternoon, long lines of cabs were now waiting with their roof lights on. A movement ran through the leafy plants that twine through the whole lobby, as though in accompaniment to the song pouring from the transistor radio that a young fellow in the shell chair beside me was holding up to his ear. A dog barked and the glassed-in lobby transformed the sound into the wailing of a pinball machine. The plane that was just landing would fly on immediately to another country. It was the end of the holiday; an unusually large number of passengers got out or pressed toward the entrance on the other side. Newly arrived passengers, waiting for their luggage, were unrecognizable shadows behind a frosted-glass door, while friends and relatives crowded around a narrow opening to wave or to signal in some other way. A traveler emerged from the automatic double doors, walked over to one of the Rent-a-Car stalls, where the girl in charge, leaning over the counter like a seller of lottery tickets, held out a finger with car keys on it; he grabbed them in his mouth and at the same time snapped at her finger, which the girl did not pull back but thrust in a little deeper. While the man rushed out to his car, the girl unfolded a piece of paper he had tossed to her, and slipped it under the telephone.
I sat bolt-upright, my legs close together and my hands on my knees. Outside, over the road to the city, a strange new signal shone amid the usual traffic lights, billboards, and cranes: the rising, fiery-red full moon. Inside, between the wings of the door, a young woman appeared. Half hidden by the people in front of her and darkened by those behind her, she was visible as a line from neck to hip. I stood up and took off my hat. In disengaging herself from the crowd, the woman stumbled and described a semicircle. Then, standing to one side, she turned away from the exit, as though wishing in that way to attract someone’s attention.
No one came. The last cab drove away. The plane took off. As it rose into the air, the din it had just made in speeding over the runway bounced back from the Untersberg. The whole rocky mass was still rumbling and roaring, while the plane was already far in the distance, no bigger than a dragonfly. Had the woman’s back, along with the triangle of her scarf, come closer in the meantime, or had they receded? The lobby was almost empty when at last she turned around. Her face revealed a thoughtful beauty; of all beauties, the most thoughtful.
First, she looked out at the fields through the plate-glass front; then at the hat in my hand, as though this were a prearranged sign of recognition; and, last, into my eyes. It was a two-way glance that nothing could cancel out, though after it we blinked into empty space as if something terrifying had happened. She said something in an indeterminate accent, but the accent may have been only momentary. I went over to her and took her in my arms. I was overwhelmed by the one word that was spoken between us: “Du.”
We went slowly up to the second floor; or possibly we ran. I took the key from the untended reception desk. The short corridor seemed to have widened into a suite of rooms. The spotlights in the ceiling cast a procession of circles on the carpet. There was no sound but the soft whirring of the lamps.
She jostled me with her hip, intentionally or perhaps not. She laughed at the room, but the look in my eyes made her grave. She stumbled, or pretended to stumble, across the threshold, which was only a strip of grooved hard rubber.