In the cavernlike fish market of Aomori, where everyone smiled at the carpenter, an older woman with a rubber apron has just given him a few fillets of raw salmon, which he is now eating, crouching in the dusk on top of a snowdrift, behind him poles, swaying boat masts, for the drift has formed right by the ocean, across which he is looking in a northerly direction, toward the island of Hokkaido.
Evening is coming on there, while here in the bay between the hills of the Seine beyond Paris it is the morning of the same day, already spring, with brimstone-butterfly yellow seen out of the corner of one’s eye and thousands of frogs softly fluting, piping, or peeping as they mate in the nameless pond, overgrown with underbrush and trees, out in the forest glade. What kind of alienation is supposed to be hanging over me and him? Don’t I see us as together across the continents?
And now it occurs to me that it was stone buildings that put me on the alert, for instance the house of the harbormaster of Piran, Istria, on my first day by the ocean, the way it stood there alone on the dock, the sky in its windows, without anything around it, without a yard or a portico, stone rising perpendicularly from the horizontal paving stones.
I move on among my friends to the reader. Mightn’t he, too, disavow me and write me off? Metamorphose into someone who despises me?
There was a time when our relationship was in danger. It did not even go that well at the beginning. I met him for the first time in one of the two railway-station cafés in that other Parisian suburb where I lived before coming to the bay here; it was the Bar de l’Arrivée, while the other is called the Bar du Depart. I was sitting there waiting for my son’s piano lesson to be over, and now, whenever I sit out on that terrace, I can still hear, through the roar of the traffic and the rumbling and screeching of the trains, from the top floor the obedient and defenseless groping of the six-year-old child on the huge instrument.
At first the gaze of the person who turned toward me from the next table struck me as that of a double, an evil one. Then he addressed me, without transition, without a greeting, without a question, without hesitation, as if I had been his acquaintance from time immemoriaclass="underline" “Gregor Keuschnig, I’m one of your readers,” which, with my son’s disconsolate scales in my ear, filled me with the uncomfortable feeling that I was this stranger’s chosen victim.
That dissipated as he began to summarize, verbal image after verbal image, my books for me — there were only two or three of them. For in this way what I had created came back to me and seemed solid. As reproduced by the reader, in his tone of voice, my stuff sounded robust and at the same time surprising, and I felt in the mood to go and read it myself right away, thanks to the other man’s roguish acting-out, his dastardly laughter at passages quoted verbatim — as if he were taking revenge on the state of the world.
But later on it was disconcerting again that the reader had eyes only for me. When I had picked up my son, he ignored him, as he did the people and places of the suburb, through which he then accompanied us on our errands. At my house, where I invited him to stay for supper, he did not even glance at the fire in the fireplace, and before that, while I was splitting wood in the yard, he stood around and continued to recite from my books, until I found myself wishing a piece of firewood would fly up and hit him in the head. And even the woman from Catalonia did not exist for him, she whom otherwise no one, not even an animal, ignored.
And then again, as we made our way in the gathering dusk across the backyard to the house, I with my arms loaded down with firewood, the reader holding forth with both hands free, he began to make delicate trilling and fluting noises, his lips pursed, whereupon little birds, sparrows and titmice, came whirring from the trees and bushes and perched on his elbows, which he held akimbo.
Things settled down with the reader only when he was gone, far away, back in his Germany (which at the time seemed more distant from France than it does now). At intervals he wrote me letters full of little stories about the seasons and reports on his country, and never expected an answer. I could say of him that he let me alone, and that did me good. Of course, my father lived in Germany, too, but I was completely indifferent toward him. Germany, a nonplace, despite my sense of finding myself and feeling at home in the smallest German word-hamlets: through the reader it became a country for me. I viewed him from afar as a poet. He was a court of appeal. And you could rely on the reader as on no one else. I took his letters along on my hikes and pored over every word, swore to be guided by them and never to disappoint him. I had confidence in him as otherwise only in the poets Goethe and Hölderlin, in Heraclitus and John the Evangelist. He was the epitome of constancy, never got worked up, and when he spoke, and not only about books, he gave a definite yes or no — my ideal, which I never attained. I, the writer, followed him on his expeditions in reading: just as I came to enjoy my own work through him, I read, after his telling me about them, the writings of others whom I had previously not known or even disliked. I went so far as to copy out sentences from his letters: “I exist in order to read.” Or: “When I don’t know what to do next: the light shed by reading.” Or: “If I start a family someday, down to the last generation it will be a family of readers.”
Then, with the passage of time I noticed something about the reader that made me angry at him again. He was not content to be alone with his reading; he was on the lookout for others of like mind. Like me, there were quite a few here and there in Europe and even overseas who followed his example and read the books he recommended. He encouraged that, too. Through his reading he wanted not only, as he expressed it, to “keep myself in top form,” but also more and more to wield power. True, he felt no desire for public prominence. Nonetheless he presided over a circle whose head he was, the great reader. He presented himself as the authority in a most intimate circle, and thus it fell to him to dictate, without television appearances and newspapers, what was worth reading and what not. I saw the reader on his way to founding a sect, a sect of readers. And thus he claimed for himself and his followers exclusivity, infallibility, singularity vis-à-vis the mere crowd.
The moment came when, after he had again begun to talk in conspiratorial tones about an exceptional book, an exemplary contrast to the prevailing literary nonentities, I wanted nothing more to do with such a reader. And I told him so. Wanting to wield power through reading, and surreptitiously at that, in a whisper, made no sense, I said. He was a bogeyman, a corrupter of children, the antireader, the equivalent of the Antichrist. “Clear out, beat it, let books be books again, each one as best it can!” I blurted that out, unthinkingly, as always when I am in a rage, and when I finally looked at him, his lips were trembling terribly.
Thus we became friends. He continued to write his letters to me, but he never made mention of a particular book. For a time he tried to refrain from reading altogether, but then found that unnatural. Without reading, he said, he could not see the day in a day. The work that suited him was, and remained, reading and deciphering things. And wasn’t writing an invention that to this day held a secret power?