And this is how we worked things out between us. I always keep my arrival secret from him, and whenever I come home to Rinkolach I double back again and again, under cover of darkness, through the underbrush, and the district priest tracks me down, blocks my path, confiscates my open space, ruins my time at home, and after my initial resistance, I accept the unwelcome company, indeed even want to be with this other person for the time being.
But who knows? What I do know is that after that nocturnal quarrel, the new beginning we both made, despite the powers of reconciliation I ascribed to myself, must be credited exclusively to my local friend. Was it only during my childhood that I could make up so matter-of-factly, for instance with our neighbor’s son? Didn’t I cultivate not long thereafter in boarding school one or two insurmountable enmities? Have I in the meantime become one of the “irreconcilables”? At any rate, that word appealed to me for a long time. But even there I no longer know.
I see my woman friend under the Turkish sun, while here in the Seine hills the first blossoms are raining down from the trees, or rather, I sense her this way, in her environment there, the white-glistening delta of a river between the place where it flows out of the Taurus range and where it reaches the sea. She is turning a piece of wood in her hand that has lain in the water for a long time, in fresh water and in salt water, a narrow cylinder whose wooden parts, the fibers and splinters, have been almost completely replaced, into its very core, by finger-long, spiral-shaped bivalves that have grown into it. Only the outward form remains that of a cudgel, which lies heavy in her hand, heavier than one made of wood could ever be, heavy as stone.
Remarkable that I can think my way to this woman (although she also helps me, as do the others on the road, by writing to me now and then or sending me a sliver of wood, and although I carried with me just such a shell-encrusted piece of wood along the southern shores of Turkey until it began to stink, and the captain of the ship threw it overboard, as he did with everything that did not belong on the ship). Remarkable, because we were once a couple, and our story ended in a way that makes a subsequent friendship appear miraculous. At the time I fled in horror from this woman who loved me.
And here I interrupt this passage. For it seems questionable to me, and not for the first time, by the way, when I refer to the person I was in the past as “I,” not only the child, but also the person from as recently as last year. My “I”-uncertainty is equally great for all the years, and pertains to almost everything I did, everything that was done to me, and everything that happened to me. It is as though I constantly had to put quotation marks around myself in my memories. “I” looked after my three-month-old sister. “I” was mugged. “I” was resuscitated. “I” gave a speech. A moment in which I am not questionable to myself is a rarity, even reinforced with an exclamation point. Then I woke up next to my dead grandmother! Then I walked with my grandfather, facing into the raindrops, through the dust from the path across the fields! Then I sat all summer and fall, and wrote, looked out the window, yes I! Then I caught sight of my son, yes, I! Then I swam in the middle of the year in the middle of the river, yes, I! Yet with most of my experiences I find it difficult to say “I,” would rather substitute some other word, except that none presents itself. I have no choice but to use an undifferentiated “I” as the subject of my active and passive experiences, no matter how false it rings to me.
Onward. Through. So at that time I was my present woman friend’s lover. I was thrilled by the two of us. I wanted to tell everyone I knew about her and me, and did so, too, in my circle: about our first meeting on the main bridge in Maribor, where I knew at once that we would become a couple. I even told my son, at the time still a child, about her, and had to hold myself back from flaunting my rapture with the other woman in front of the woman from Catalonia.
Yet our story, as far as I am concerned, had begun beyond the body, as an idea, long before I knew my friend: it was that my woman should come from the country most closely related to me. Of course, this idea, which, by the bye, was as erotic and captivating as anything could be, had been forgotten instantly when the woman from Catalonia turned her head on that very different bridge in El Paso, and also remained forgotten for years; it came back to me only with the appearance of my friend on the great bridge in the southern Slavic town of Maribor, with people streaming by and the Drawa flowing underneath at an autumnally slow pace, as wide and bustling as a river in China.
I then avoided any touch for a long time. I did not even want to look her in the eye, as if that would have been too familiar. One night, when the moon was full, she led me to a snow-covered field high above the city, and I did nothing but stand there for an hour; the snow lying on the ground and rustling, its crystals on top forming tiny gables, made more noise than I, and when she reached for my hand I slapped hers away.
When we finally became a couple, more as a result of her prodding, almost pushing, it made me unhappy. As she undressed, with the agility of a teenager, I was thinking that it was all over.
And something was over, namely my idea about her and me and our people, and something new was beginning.
After we had been together, she promptly disappeared, without saying goodbye. Utterly downcast, I fell asleep and awoke the next summery morning as the entirely different person at whom “I” had already marveled as a child, usually also upon waking: unspeakably happy, shot through with sweetness, connected to everything outside of me, irrepressible.
And in the months that followed, this sort of immediacy prevailed between us as a particular elegance, without any danger of a false step or a misunderstanding. It was a grace that made us invisible. When I think back, I see neither a face nor a body, but in its place the roots of spruce trees growing across the wood road, the clothesline on the terrace, the succession of moraines rushing by on the horizon through the open train window. When I was with her I felt as if I had been swallowed up by an earthquake. That boy who looked right through us as he passed the place by the forest path where we were lying. The band of reed cutters who poled their boat past our sandbank, each looking in another direction, anywhere but at us. Once we lay together under a cherry tree, and again the two of us disappeared, and the only memory image that remains is of the cherries up in the tree, as if each time I looked up there were more of them, small, round, glowing red.
And every time, my memory reminds me, I found myself alone afterward. I see her dashing away from the circle, and already she is around the corner, out of sight, inaudible. Since she always presented herself as a sort of adventurer, disguised or shrouded and veiled, she did not leave behind the smallest image.