Seen in the slanted windowpanes of the control tower, the headlights of the cars driving straight on the road below were moving in curves. On the abandoned tables of the workers’ cafeteria stood glass sugar bowls, their lids all casting identical round shadows on the white crystals underneath. In a dark room to one side, an electric iron and a baby’s bottle were discernible on the windowsill.
Through the dark hotel room, whose only light came from the airfield — a multicolored dotted pattern on the walls — ran a shudder, followed by stillness. Does an individual, doubled up in dying, circling around himself, not sometimes feign to be two hostile beings locked in a life-and-death struggle? Here, for once, the reverse was true: two beings quietly side by side, not dying. Far enough apart to bring them close. Someone asked: “Do you remember?” as though there were a memory in common. Someone said: “Then ‘weakness’ is another word for ‘being in the right.’” No one said: “Save me”; at the very most, “Help me.”
The room was cramped, yet the two bodies made space for themselves. We fitted nicely into one of the beds, at the foot of which lay a white, towel-size mat. Looking for her in the dark, I sensed her presence all the more deeply. No, no need to look for her. She was there. Moved to the core by her body’s being there, I hesitated — and by my hesitation she knew me. Yes, it was the woman who recognized the man; and it was she who with a resolute, majestic gesture united with him.
In passion, our bodies did not diverge but remained together. They consummated the act, which was not a frenzied struggle but a mighty game, the “game of games.” In that night of love, another time reckoning and another sense of place took over. Now it’s raining (the wet concrete runway is a quiet lake). Now the full moon is shining on a little gondola-shaped cloud with two lovers in it. Now the shower of sparks from the intersecting bus wires is in your body. Now your shoulder is your face again. Now the eastern sky is a Spanish-lilac color. Now for a moment the woman’s speaking becomes a singing. She means nothing by it; she is only singing her beauty.
Dreams came. I stepped out of the story, walked down a sloping meadow by night; the brook at the foot of it shimmered in the morning sun; there were human silhouettes on the bank. Was it another dream when, head tilted back, I looked into a woman’s womb as into the inner recesses of a cupola tapering from turn to turn? When I wanted to convince myself, the eyes of a beautiful stranger rested on me. It must have been a dream in any case that, one with each other, we became a native of the world’s center.
The strange face with the closed eyelids and lips made me think of a primeval stone figure, expressing — it is uncertain which — bliss, mischief, or danger; in the next moment, it might smile at me or spit at me or both at once. Instead, it opened its eyes and looked at me; and a woman’s voice — anonymous no longer — said: “I must leave you now. It’s late.”
Outside, a procession of small cars with blinking lights on top drove along the runway. During the night, the moon had waned a little. A baggage truck rattled; a gate opened in the parking area. Smoke rose from the farmhouse at the end of the runway; in the courtyard, a slowly striding male figure on his way to the barn.
When I asked her when I would be seeing her again, she replied: “Once upon a time there were.” Did that mean that wishes were in order? “Not wishes, but questions.” So I asked her how she saw me. I was in need of being described a little. “Give me a portrait of myself. It can be false if you like.”
Then she replied: “You don’t seem to be wholly present; you breathe discontent. You’re kind of run-down. I desire you but I don’t trust you. You have something on your conscience; not theft, or you’d be on the run. It’s plain that you are outside ordinary law, and it makes you suffer in a way. I don’t trust you, and I do. You are like the man in the doorway. Though very ill, he went to see a good friend. In leaving, he stopped at length in the doorway and tried to smile; his tensed eyes became slits, framed in their sockets as by sharply ground lenses. ‘Goodbye, my suffering Chinaman,’ said his friend.”
“Did they ever see each other again?”
The portraitist said nothing more. Already in the doorway, her only reply was an immensely friendly laugh. I shut my eyes and heard a sort of answer after alclass="underline" “In the end, the friend said to the friend, ‘At last a Chinese — at last a Chinese face among so many native faces.’”
That morning, I cut across the fields and visited my mother in Wals. She lives in an old people’s home on the large, almost always deserted village square. We sat together in the garden, on a wooden bench under a pear tree with pink-and-white blossoms.
At first she mistook me for the postman, and later she addressed me by various other names. From time to time she recognized me, and then she giggled, keeping her mouth closed to hide the stumps of her teeth. Her eyes were very bright, her face as small as a child’s, her head no bigger than a headhunter’s shrunken trophy. She was eating an Easter egg, more scraping than biting, and the painted shells fell into her lap; she gulped the whole yolk down at once. She studied me at length and then said: “Aren’t these cruel times we’re living in? Even before you went away to the army, I was always sorry for you.” She asked me how my “business,” as she called it, was getting along. “You and your business,” a traditional turn of phrase, which was not meant to be disparaging, but betokened a sort of respectful awe. And then another strange word felclass="underline" “If it weren’t for you, I’d be discomfited now.” Whom did she think she was talking to? Once, when she said: “When you were little, I often hit you with the cooking spoon,” she meant me. And later on, she again meant me when she said: “Your father and you are weavy people. You’re always weaving back and forth between home and somewhere else, and you don’t find your place either here or there.”
When in parting I put some money on the bench for her, she whooped several times for joy, and stomped around the bills in a heavy-footed dance, in which she was joined by some of the other female residents.
I then crossed the square to the church; in the memorial chapel there was a big book containing photographs of the war dead. My father was killed at the very beginning of the war and never saw his son. His picture, which is in a plastic sleeve, does not, like most of the others, show the dark stamplike mustache under the nose, but perhaps he was too young for that when the picture was taken.
From the church terrace, one looks down into the hollow where the Saalach forms the border with Germany — a cold mountain stream with broad gravel banks. One could skip flat stones into the bushes on the opposite bank. Everything in me shrinks back from the country on the far shore — as though that were the beginning of nothingness forever and ever.
That same evening, I stood beside another river. In the early afternoon, I had flown via Zurich to Milan, and from there taken a local train to Mantua. A few kilometers to the south, there is a village named Pietole, which was formerly called Andes and is believed to be Virgil’s birthplace. Past the village, behind a dike, flows the Mincio, which Virgil called “immense,” making its way “in slow meanders” through the Lombard lowlands, “its banks fringed with swaying reeds.” Today, according to certain editions of Virgil, the Mincio is little more than a brook. This, I saw when I got there, is not true; on the contrary, the river answers exactly to Virgil’s description of two thousand years ago. In places, it even separates into several arms, with wooded islands in between.
White water lilies with yellow centers rose and fell in the slow current. Little fishes leapt into the air. On one of the wooded islands, a cuckoo called, and a heron glided overhead. Far beyond the river, flames shot into the air from an oil refinery.