Sounds were still heard, but all, even the short, dreamy piping of the titmice outside the window, kept their distance from one another. None had the character of a bang, a crash, a clatter, or a screech; and they sounded regularly, whether far away or in the immediate vicinity, as though reporting for duty; first the motorcycle on the Autobahn, then the refrigerator case in the supermarket; then the farm dog; and still another, high above the plain, was the distant thudding of a boulder blasted off the Untersberg by the overnight freeze and rolling down into the cirque. Each of these sounds fell into the total silence, which it further enhanced; and from the black night, in slow sequences punctuated by long intervals of silence, emerged something akin to Far Eastern calligraphy, undifferentiated black, but formally rigorous and luminous, brightening behind the lids of the man listening as he fell asleep.
But deep in the night — all sound spent, the writing long since gone — after he had suddenly started up and rushed to the window, came the pervasive suffering which canceled out everything that had gone before, and which with its endlessness exceeded even the gurgling death cry. And a cry there really was; a cry, a screaming, a shrieking. Someone is crying out. No, not someone: a child. The endless cries of a child out there, somewhere on the plain. They do not come from the immediate vicinity, but undoubtedly someone in the Colony (and far beyond, in other neighborhoods) is being wakened by them from deepest sleep, in spite of doubly closed windows and barred shutters. And now we all hear the child’s cries and hold our breath (even though in the morning we act as if nothing had happened). It’s no ordinary crying or mewling, nor is it a wordless screaming; it seems more like a call, a repeatedly bellowed two-syllable word, by which someone is being called. The child is helpless. It can do nothing but cry out that one name. It seems to be out of doors or at least in a wide-open house, unable to stir from the spot. This spot can be pinpointed. Recollecting the existence in the region of a home for so-called handicapped children comforts me only briefly. No help is possible; one can only be a witness. And the cries persist. They become so pervasive that the hundred (and more) caverns in the mass of the Untersberg — the ice caves, the tunnels, the chimneys, the clefts, the windholes — burst into a single cry hole, extending from cave to cave. Here in my room, the elusive red-scissored insect slips into the recesses of the sand ball, and in the intervals between cries a fat fly seems to thud over and over again against the windowpanes. Now the child is screaming the extreme suffering which in adults takes the form of innermost muteness; if every sufferer screamed like that, the world would have gone into a tailspin long ago. And in the natural way of things, this child will somehow have to stop crying eventually. (It has indeed stopped.) In the restored silence, the starry firmament will? will not? be restored to its proper shape. The next noise, in any case, still in total darkness, will be the reliable clatter and bumping of the garbage trucks. But I’ll have been a witness nonetheless: I’ll have seen how, for the duration of those cries, Birch Street, Fir Street, Willow Street, all the streets of the Colony, had only a single name — Nameless Street.
The Viewer Takes Action
The monthly tarok game was scheduled for the Wednesday of Holy Week. We meet somewhere in the Salzburg area, at the home of one of the players, who usually invites a fifth, so that each player in turn sits out a hand and merely looks on. (This fifth is often someone hitherto unknown to the others.) On this occasion, the game was to take place in a house on the Mönchsberg, situated, in a manner of speaking, at the bottom of the pass, over which the road, after rising from the plain, leads down to the courtyard of the Festival Theater, and thence to the Old City.
Ever since I was a child, playing cards — and not only the special tarok cards — have for me epitomized “country.” That would have been my answer if asked what I visualize when hearing the words “card game.” Country in every sense: open country, flat country, countrified country, small country (such as Andorra or San Marino), landlocked country, the country which, unlike the state, has no laws but only customs … And, for the adult, cards still have the same magic; they can at any time fit the parts of a country together for him into a whole country. Held fanwise on the four sides of the card table, they represent in my eyes the “heartland,” which, as the game proceeds, projects its colors, its smells, and its language beyond the limits of the room into the country round about. Even as a child, when I only watched, every game was for me a kind of circuit, which in the course of the play opened out into a spiral, etc., until the horizon, as I looked out the window, shared in the colors and symbols of the card country. The police siren outside was drawn in, as was the singing of the crazy man in the gateway of the cemetery. During the first card game I was allowed to take part in, a funeral procession came down the street. The feebleminded woman, who had sometimes let us youngsters look under her skirt, had died. The coffin was draped in white, in token of virginity. It was a day in early January; rain was falling; the trees were black-brown; molehills looked out from the yellowish snow. Yes, to me a card game means that country where I, in accordance with my ideal, can show my colors and pledge allegiance to them; above all, where I can be laconic. It needn’t absolutely be tarok; just that tarok is probably the most varied, or, as someone once said in the days when it was played more frequently, “the most beautiful of games.”
Summer time had been in force for some days. Though the sun was still shining, the supermarket on the ground floor of the apartment house was already closed. The slanting reddish light made the shelves look more spacious. The plastic milk pall — which the old woman, as usual, was carrying on her way to the Moos farm — ordinarily a familiar signal in the dusk, shimmered strangely in the daylight. The houses of the Colony were still half in sunlight, yet the shutters had already been rolled down. Shading his dazzled eyes with one hand, a child appeared at the terrace door in his nightshirt and called out into the garden, where his parents were sitting in strangely premature end-of-the-working-day poses: “I can’t sleep.” Great flocks of sparrows had taken over the deserted streets and the invitingly vacant bridge. The sun’s rays, falling through the slits in the shutters, covered the newscaster on a television screen with slanting stripes.
It was too early when I got to the Mönchsberg; the game was not to begin until nightfall. I might in the meantime have gone down to the city and read newspapers in a café. I have often wondered since then why I didn’t give in to my old habit. Be that as it may, I turned off before reaching the house, and climbed up the road which, with occasional rises and falls, follows the long mountain ridge. I didn’t turn off as a result of any decision, yet I thought: “This decides it.” All the same, I insist: I have never questioned the accidental nature of what I did; I acknowledge it.
With the coming of dusk, the road, which only a short while before had been intermittently crowded, emptied. On all sides, what a moment before might have been a man-made park became a primeval mass of rock.
The ridge of the Mönchsberg is not straight, but recapitulates the meanders of the Salzach below. The mountain consists of the delta rubble deposited by the river as it emptied into the great lake that was there thousands of years ago. The rubble was deposited evenly and rhythmically in layers that can still be discerned in the slightly tilted striped pattern which runs along the whole length of the mountain, and is accentuated in winter by the blown snow in the grooved stripes and by the serried rows of icicles. The rubble — ranging in content from small pebbles to fist-sized stones — is held together by a light-gray block of limestone which with its abrupt promontories, needles, sharp edges, and cracks gives the Mönchsberg its jagged, craglike character. Where the pebbles have fallen out of the limestone, innumerable craters seem to darken the rock. The layer of humus at the top is thin, and the roots of the trees (for the most part, beeches and oaks) grow right through the often porous shelf of rock below it. In some of the hollows off the main road, there is enough soil for a vegetable garden; but there are also swampy patches that are almost inaccessible. Altogether, the mountain, though wholly surrounded by the city, is not at all a “city mountain”; despite its undeniable urban aspects — benches, blacktop paths, streetlamps — the mountain ridge, once the strollers have gone home, throws one back into the wilderness. Barely a hundred yards below, the city is hidden by fog, while up on the cliff the moon may be shining. The snow that is falling around me at the present moment is rain on the city squares down below a moment later.