Suddenly my melancholy changed to something radically different: to something unprecedented, legendary, unheard-of, and yet instantly convincing. Its name was loneliness and what filled me with enthusiasm was not loneliness considered as my fate but the phenomenon of loneliness. What made the word convincing was an image: outside a house in the early-morning light, I saw the shortest banister in the world, hardly the length of a hand, made for a single step; but it was curved and brightly polished and sparkled in the clear air.
A few days later, I had a powerful little experience in the Oak Tree Colony supermarket. (It is the basis of the present tale.) No doubt as a precaution against shoplifters, a tilted mirror is fitted to the ceiling, and chancing to look up, I saw my face in it. People are always saying that children take after their parents. But what struck me at that moment was the contrary; it is not, as others have sometimes observed, my son who resembles me, but I, the adult, who resemble my son. Ordinarily, resemblances between forebears and descendants strike me as distasteful, if not outrageous; but this resemblance was the opposite; and it would never be noticed by anyone but me. It had to do not with the features but with the eyes, not their shape or color, but their gaze, their expression. Here, I said to myself, I see my innermost being, and for a moment I felt acquitted. In the far corner of the supermarket, in the meat department, two white-clad women were standing in total silence. A car rumbled over the planks of the canal bridge. Outside the display window, there was a great brightness; a vault of light spanned the bridge. But this gaze, I asked myself a little while later — what was it like? And the answer: Wounded.
The following weekend, I went to Gois to see my family. “Gois, Wals, and Siezenheim are good,” it is said concerning the three villages on the western fringe of the plain — meaning that they are situated beyond the relatively barren bog. No one was home just then. I went to the toolshed and whetted the scythes, which had rusted during the winter; then I went out to the orchard and mowed the first grass.
The orchard with its many trees and their often interlocking branches is a strange setting for the small “teacher’s house,” for which flower beds and a lawn would be more suitable. The yellow front is covered by an empty trellis, on which heart-shaped apricots were formerly grown. The whole house seems to have been transplanted from somewhere, from a suburb or residential area of the city, to this remote village. In the bay tree beside the front door — dark green, with translucent veins — linden blossoms, maple spores, and bits of straw from the neighboring fields have come to rest.
It was a rainy afternoon in early May. I chopped wood in the woodshed, hoed the grapevines, which were already putting forth fluffy leaves. Then, at the far end of the garden, I sat down on a grassy knoll which the trees had sheltered from the rain. For a moment, the setting sun appeared.
First my daughter arrived, accompanied by another girl. She had her own key, and the two went into the house without noticing me. Up until then, the stairway had been dark and deserted; now a light went on and legs ran up the stairs. Two heads propped on hands appeared in the open dormer window; pop music rang out, and was softened by the faces of the two listeners; I myself had once had an ear for such music. The girls whispered, giggled, scolded, enjoyed themselves; their foreheads, cheeks, throats, and shoulders had the bloom of demanding yet modest, patient yet self-confident brides awaiting their bridegrooms. 0 rejuvenated world.
My daughter’s mother’s car stopped outside the house. She had seen me from the distance and waved. She had treated herself, she informed me, to a little trip across the border, to the Chiemsee, and had taken the boat out to the islands. “Nobody ever comes to see us here in Gois.” In the rain, on Frauenchiemsee Island, she had felt so secure that a shudder ran through her. There was a telephone booth in the middle of the lake. A drunk had looked at her “as if he were blind in one eye.” In the rainy mist, “the lakeshore had been something like a northern ocean.”
As she spoke, I recovered my eye for her. Years before, in the days of our courtship (yes, I was once capable of courting someone!) I wrote to her in a letter: “We come from two different Earths. I from the planet Carefree and you from the planet Care.” The present visitor also found a refreshing severity in her face. In confronting most people, I first perceive the Gestalt, the overall picture; in her case, what I see first is the eyes, almost black, and below them the whiteness of her throat. (I know there’s no point in trying to describe people, however one goes about it; and yet I sometimes feel I have to say something about her.)
Knowing my son would be on his way home from the athletic field, I decided to head him off. We met on the highway where it passes through a cornfield. Once on the meadow, I saw a clubfooted roadworker with his shovel over his shoulder, walking “under the sky”; that was how I now saw my son, carrying a soccer ball in a string bag, walking under the sky; meandering from side to side of the road, yet determined; and at the same time I heard the scraping of his jean-legs.
The visitor then became the cook. The family gathered for dinner in the winter garden, which is on the west side of the house. My daughter’s friend sat down with us; she was to spend the night. The daylight lingered on. Blades of straw glittered in the dung heaps outside the farms; a glow came from the grass under the fruit trees. One could hear the Autobahn — a steady howl. The point where it crosses the border is nearby: a flickering-flaring light as of an oil field between the trees of the semicircular village hill, which with its jagged spruce crowns makes me think of a sleeping boar; the dark hump gives the little white village church on this side of it the dimensions of a cathedral.
It was getting cold on the porch. The guest brought logs and made a fire in the veranda stove. A so-called dwarf palm from the Isle of Silence — a species which allegedly existed only there — waved its fan, and a primitive-looking hare sleeping at its feet twitched a nostril. One of the girls said she wanted a house where there would be a room for everything: a room for stones, a room for plants, a room just for school. A roaring in the east, from the direction of the airfield, meant Frankfurt; another, Linz; another, Amsterdam.
The cook washed the dishes. The woman came into the kitchen with a book, and read aloud a passage from the correspondence of a married couple at the turn of the century: “Your constant absence has given me a higher life, a spiritual drive that would otherwise have remained unknown to me.” She added on her own: “One sex says that to another; but mightn’t a human being say the same to God?” Then we all watched the television news together, and afterward someone cried out: “But some sort of immortality must be possible!”
I went up to the attic and knocked at my son’s door. He said to me in a bass voice: “Don’t stand there so respectfully.” It seems he had heard from his schoolmates that I had been wandering aimlessly about the town, “like a lunatic”; one had told him how I’d been seen coming out of a public toilet and the attendant had called after me: “Never let me see your face again.” He himself had once seen me sitting on a bench between two full plastic bags, “like a tramp.”
Only a flashlight was on, and the attic room was in half-darkness. Little knickknacks, mostly metal or glass, gave the wall over the desk the look of a pilot’s instrument panel at night. We now had the whole plain outside to ourselves. Green was the last color, then everything turned black, traversed by chains of lights. I sat down on the stool beside my son’s desk chair and said: “I have a story to tell you. It’s called Threshold Story.”