My report on the Loig dig was just about finished, including the photographs and the drawings of cross sections and horizontal sections with the small initials A.L. (Andreas Loser) in the lower right-hand corner. The task assigned to me was making measurements of the vestibule; describing and interpreting the floor mosaics was the work of the professionals. “Access to the villa was provided by a door so-and-so many Roman feet wide, with a masonry base for the formerly present wooden threshold. A space so-and-so many Roman feet wide and so-and-so many Roman feet high was set aside for it at the foot of the east wall.” Time and again, while I was doing this work, the black knotholes in the floorboards of my room looked to me like colored mosaic stones, and once a fresco appeared in the white walclass="underline" Iphigenia, holding a statue of the goddess Artemis, on her way to the sea, before escaping to Greece with her brother — a mural from Pompeii, intimating to me that my measurements had not been entirely useless. When toward the end I looked up from my paper for a moment, the Untersberg with its sunlit crest was situated in the ancient world, and I saw the corresponding alluvial cones at the foot of the Staufen.
My desk had been cleared. It’s a small, light-colored office model with a chipboard top and steel legs, and it blended nicely with its surroundings. Beside the glass with the sawdust in it, there is an elongated piece of wood with holes at one end, rounded edges, and slanting grooves of varying width — a so-called hand fondler, carved years ago by my son (more or less as a school exercise), blackened from handling, but still smelling of fresh wood, just as the brown, fist-sized, hardened lump of clay beside it, whenever I pick it up, takes on the smell of the damp gully from which it was taken years ago. Written in pencil on the clay is the Greek word “Galene,” meaning “the calm, radiant sea,” which, according to the philosopher Epicurus, can be taken as a model of existence (the man sitting over it interpreted the luminous graphite word more as a kind of call to order). The last in this row of objects is an egg-shaped lump of clay which not so long ago was broken from a dried thornbush on a Mediterranean island: a puzzling object, a mixture of sand and tiny stones that some sort of insect may have built around a branch of the thornbush, which now on my desk is still inside it, forming an arrow, whose tip emerges at the other end of the egg. A number of deep holes give it the appearance of an ocarina, except that the holes have no outlet. They seem, deep inside, to be joined in a single hollow, though the passages are so crooked that the eye cannot follow them. The interior of these passages glows an intense bright red that seems to enamel their walls. Once, when someone blew into one of the holes, the long feelers of an unknown, black-armored insect darted out of a neighboring hole, and immediately retracted. All these objects might be termed my “callers to order,” because, by pleasantly diverting me now and again, they save me from losing myself entirely in my work.
The lump of clay with the round black hiding places lay there like an abandoned primeval necropolis where nothing remains but lizards. The lamp illumined the desk, which was bare except for the four objects. The rest of the room, ordinarily unlit, lay in half darkness. In the neighboring apartments, next door and upstairs, water faucets sounded one after another. On the west and east edge of the plain, where the two railroad lines recede into the distance, a long-drawn-out whistling coupled with a rumbling could be heard at regular intervals; and on the express highway skirting the Untersberg, a roaring and a blowing of horns. Some of the apartment-house windows were open to the balmy evening air; a fat man in a white undershirt was leaning out of one of them, smoking; in another stood a clay jar, holding a papyrus plant that shot up like fireworks, its star-shaped greenery strikingly vivid against the yellow sky; in the window downstairs a caged parrot, luminous blue in the twilight, sat silently shaking its head; one of the open windows was empty.
Why did I leave my family? Was I sent away? Was it my idea to desert the three of them? Was there any reason for the separation (which has never become an official divorce)? Did I leave for good, or only for the time being? Haven’t I got the daily routine of each one of them in my head, as though I were secretly still living with them? Whenever I run into my son or daughter in the street, isn’t their first question, put without emphasis, rather as a matter of course: “When are you coming over?”—the kind of thing one doesn’t say to just anyone. Would I live with them again someday? To all those questions I have had no answer, though I believe I know one thing: a final separation will never be possible. In any case, my name, “Loser” (common all over Austria, and also frequent in the phone books of northern Italy, especially in such cities as Gorizia and Trieste), does not in my opinion suggest someone who gets rid (los) of something, and certainly not a loser (in the English sense); it is, I believe, connected with the dialect verb losen, meaning “listen” or “hark.” In the Salzkammergut there’s a mountain called Loser, which starts as a gently rounded hill but culminates in a massive rocky dome; a seemingly unscalable fortress, with sides so steep that they remain almost free of snow in the winter, the few snowy patches suggesting false windows.
On the other hand, I have no idea what my wife is up to, what people she sees, what kind of work she’s doing. Unlike me, she takes easily to new languages — has she become a translator? Is she going on with her studies, which were interrupted by our marriage? Is she guiding tourists around the town? (I once thought I saw her, holding an umbrella over her head and leading a group.) Is she lecturing at the People’s University? I never ask. Even before, I seldom asked her a question. That may be what led to our separation. Inability to ask questions is often my problem. And yet I’m made up almost entirely of questions. But, as a rule, I regard every question as the wrong one and I can’t get it out of my mouth. Or then again, something in me rebels against the kind of questioning that might better be called pumping.
Yet I keep going back to the house where my family live. Though considerable time may have elapsed, there’s no great excitement when I come in; only the conventional evening greetings of people who have been going their separate ways during the day. Once, when I’d been away for six months, my son in his room just looked up briefly from something or other and said: “Well?”
The house is the kind of place where an old-time teacher might have lived — It’s painted yellow, with pointed gables and a wooden veranda that serves as a winter garden. It’s in Gois, which lies a few fields and pastures to the west of Loig with its Roman villa. The guidebooks list Gois as a suburb of Salzburg, but it’s a good hour’s walk from the center of the city and gives the impression of a remote peasant village. The only connection with the Old City is by bus, and the last bus leaves the city before the end of the working day. The road is narrow and little traveled; for a short stretch before the village, it degenerates into a dirt path through the fields. What one sees first of the village is a scattering of farmhouses; there are few new buildings. The walls of the farmhouses are of porous, untrimmed stone in various shades of gray, inlaid with small black slag stones. The doors are made of a kind of pudding stone, and the thresholds of a reddish marble with light-colored veins and numerous ammonite inclusions. This gives the farms an old-fashioned look, as though they belonged to a different period from the one-family houses in their midst, as though they had been built before the Gothic church on the knoll. They form a kind of unit with the knoll in the flat country, a strange formation suggesting a prehistoric mound. Round about there are fields, their base lines pointing toward Salzburg. Of the city one can see only the castle, which from there looks like a bright, delicately shaped stone crown. The fields, on which more vegetables are grown than grain, seem to extend almost to the city limits, thus giving the impression of a vast plantation, capable of supplying the whole city. At dusk, the red lights in the belfry go on — warning signals for planes. On its way back to town, the last bus from Grossgmain, dark inside, stops in front of the village inn, whose curtains, as customary throughout Austria, are drawn immediately after sunset. Despite the short row of streetlamps, no village for miles around is quieter in the evening. Since the church is not a parish church, there are no evening bells. On the other hand, the stars over the fields are brighter here than anywhere else. The constellations can be distinguished at a glance; one doesn’t have to look for them. And the soft rustling of the bushes by the roadside is clearly audible. Seen from the city, Gois consists only of the red lights on the belfry, barely distinguishable from the harsh yellow row of lamps beyond it, marking the Walserberg Autobahn overpass.