The circle of lamplight on my desk; the bicycle stand down at the bus stop (replacing the pyramid of the Staufen, which had vanished in the darkness); the driver sitting in the waiting bus; the dog lying in the garden of the house next door; the stacks of shopping bags in the supermarket; the birds roosting in the bushes; the dangling creepers on the Salzach meadows; the emptiness of the long wooden bench in front of a farmhouse; the crisscrossing paths on the plain; the crookedness of the quarter moon (in place of the blinking airplane that was there before); the green spirals in the vegetable gardens; the sinkholes in the Untersberg karst (an inverted pyramid); the slow rotation of the disk in the electric meter; the falling dew; the gravel banks deposited on alluvial cones; the body lying in state; the winged ram.
Leaving the book open and the lamp lit, I went downstairs. I sat with the driver in the stationary bus. Outside, on the bench in the shelter, lay a folded newspaper; under it, a seemingly congealed puddle of vomit. When one looked at it a while, the face of the almost naked young woman on the billboard beside it became open and expectant. On the railing of the canal bridge, a couple were sitting pressed close. The man had his arm around the woman. She was wearing white patent-leather shoes which, as they kissed, protruded motionless from above the bottom crossbar.
Now and then, the hazel catkins at the edge of the woods gave off a yellowish dust, without being visibly stirred by the wind. Many of the darker, barely nascent catkins on the lone birch were shaped like bird’s claws. The moon was tinged with red, which according to The Georgics meant storms (a whitish coloration would have foreshadowed rain).
By then, the buses were running only at infrequent intervals. This one had stopped for so long at the terminus that it seemed to be waiting for someone. Then a young girl with a red coat and far-echoing high heels emerged from the Colony and got in; her eyes were ringed with black and she had pink circles of powder on her cheeks. During the ride she stood beside the driver, occasionally resting her hand on his shoulder and grazing him with her hip. The ground fog drifted across the road, as often happens in the evening on the plain, with periods during which one could see quite clearly. After a few stops, I got off near the illuminated glass wall of the indoor tennis courts in Gneis, still far from the Old City. The girl behind me said: “An Indian”—which was startling, because, only a short while before, a child coming toward me in the street had shouted out the same word to its mother: “Look, an Indian!”
Behind the high, illuminated wall of the tennis-court building lies the municipal cemetery, in the darkness an elongated mass of bare trees that could be mistaken for a park; the lighted candles on the graves were invisible. The tennis courts resounded with thumped balls, shouts, and running steps. Now and then, the white shape of a shoulder or a hip could be seen on the opaque glass. The air ducts of the snack bar adjoining the sports stadium gave forth a roar of voices, suggesting an overcrowded beer hall rather than so small a room. The serried cars in the parking lot were wet with dew. The wide open field on the city side of the cemetery kept disgorging strollers and joggers, who either headed for nearby cafés or vanished into one of the new apartment houses, the biggest of which were not even as tall as the poplars (there is still not a single high-rise building in the entire Moos district). When the bus drove on, the overhead wires showered sparks at the crossings, and when it was gone, the wires far down the road continued to flash in the headlights of passing cars — a trail of light in the night sky, enlivened by the spiraling light-colored pigeons in the mist around the tennis-court building and the moonlit clouds between the steeples of the Gneis church. The evenings are lively in this suburban section, quite unlike those of the Old City, where the streets and squares are almost deserted at this hour and the few remaining passersby are excessively quiet when they are not shouting. There was a smell of wood fires (or was it a last remnant of the smoke from the crematorium, which during the day could often be seen rising above the treetops?). Buzzing monotonously, a single-engine airplane described an arc over the inhabited zone (this time there would be no crash; not here, at least).
To one side, tennis courts and cemetery; to the other, the Alm Canal. At the foot of its embankment, there’s a building that looks like a home, the Canal Tavern. To reach it, one passes through a vacant, treeless field, across which the tavern’s luminous sign can be seen from far off, at dusk soft-white against the eastern sky, in the darkness glaring — an outlandish signal on the low house at the edge of the field. The café is run by a pensioner, but he has put it in his wife’s name (for fear of losing his pension). The front garden is even smaller than those in the nearby development, and the jukebox is not in the café proper but in the entrance, which has the size and proportions of a vestibule in a private house. Beside the jukebox, there is a similarly lighted vitrine with food in it.
As I had walked part of the way through the fields, I kicked the caked mud off my shoes before going in. Here, too, the indoor sounds — abrupt bursts of unanimous laughter, competing shouts, the gurgling espresso machine, and in brief pauses the suddenly tenacious keynote of the jukebox — gave the impression of a tightly packed crowd. But when I went in, I found the two low-ceilinged rooms almost empty. At one table sat four card players, all wearing hats, and at the next, three young women, one well advanced in pregnancy, one with a faint mustache and hair dyed reddish-brown, the third with a dachshund at her feet. A fifth man, keeping the card players company, was holding an accordion, on which he softly accompanied the card game, using different chords for different phases of play. The landlord was leaning against the bar; a pencil attached by a string to his belt dangled down below his knees. Piles of illustrated magazines on the window ledges reached to the tops of the potted plants. There were no newspapers in racks as in the cafés of the Old City; if anyone asked for a paper, the landlord brought his own copy from his apartment on the upper floor. Both rooms front on the canal embankment, which extends well above the lower edge of the windows and keeps out most of the daylight. The few tables are oversized, as in a country tavern, an encouragement to “sit down and join us,” and the tablecloths have a pattern usual in taverns, a white lozenge against a larger, darker one; on the tablecloths lie piles of beer coasters and a wicker basket containing condiments and wooden toothpicks (though no longer made of “pliable barberry wood”). The light in the rooms was dim, in striking contrast to the garish sign outside; only at the table, under that lamp over there, was it somewhat brighter.
After a day of working alone, it does me good to go to some café, if only because of the place names that are dropped here and there in the table conversation: Mauterndorf, Abtenau, Gerlin, Iben. Then, in my weariness, I manage to show that glimmer of interest in everything around me that makes me, or so I believe, inconspicuous; no one, I feel sure, will turn to me, let alone against me. When I leave, no one will talk about me. But my presence will have been noticed.