Of all those whom I know somewhat, only these seven are this way: eternally unfinished, incomplete, needy, cool, hot, always on the go. My poor carpenter, my rich painter, my loafer woman friend, my empathizing reader, my high-handed singer, my somnambulistic son, my jubilant pastor, the only ones with whom I can be together from afar, strike me, in the morning perhaps more, in the evening perhaps less, as figures of light — bold, fiercely decisive. Whenever I was in their presence, I had only to touch them accidentally to feel to the very tips of my fingers that they were in my head.
I expect something of us — what? Something from the New World. That is unthinkable for me with a single hero, even with two: but from three on it becomes exciting. And to make clear what I mean, I shall offer a variation on an experience of the early Gregor Keuschnig: place beside the pencil on the table a hairpin, for instance, and push a shard of mirror next to them: how astonishing this threesome is. But how much more so when you then roll a pebble toward them, and fifth, blow a piece of string in their direction, and sixth, plop down a lump of resin, and seventh — is this maybe too much already? — nick an eraser among them: what a metamorphosis occurs in every one of the individual objects with each addition, and likewise in all of them together. What an experience, and how it wakes one up, tension created out of nothing, nothing at all.
Yet as far as my heroes and I are concerned, there have been times when I thought in terms very different from “we.” One of the incentives to my present undertaking was actually the question: “Who is the hero? All of you or I?” In the midst of accompanying these absent ones, at the same time as I was observing things around me, the thought repeatedly interposed itself that I was the only one of us doing the right thing with his life. Only a moment ago I might have been wafting away with the smoke from the house next door or traveling with the passengers in the train to Brittany up there on the embankment, at the same moment so wrapped up in a distant friend that what he was doing just then was a first-person experience for me, and already a voice inside me was severing me from such unity, insisting that my life was entirely unique. Particularly in the backyard, there and present in the procession of impressions offered by the seasons, from within the earth-spanning stillness I became indignant at all the absent ones because they did not know what was beautiful, and were leading such a false life.
Even now, separated from the yard by the closed window, at my table in the study, when I look out at the cedar, at the beech, at the three stone kings in the grass, and order my distant friends to file past in review, for a moment also seeing them together as a frieze, I can find myself wondering: Who is more where he belongs, the pastor in his forester’s vehicle, by his deathbeds, or I at my table; which of us is on the right path: the singer with his rising and falling notes, the painter with his pictures, materials, tools, machines, or I with my pencil script?
Am I also a self-deifier? A self-crowned king? One of the millions of self-anointed emperors running around today? The new metamorphosis all the more unavoidable? Or should it be called: expulsion?
Several weeks ago, on a sunny day, at the very first greening, that of She moss, I traced a wide arc through the woods in the bay here. Beside a sandy path, along a newly reforested area, where it was light, I sat down on a tree stump. Although on one side of the path the trees stood far apart and on the other the recently planted ones had barely reached the height of shrubs, I felt as if I were deep in the forest — it was so quiet, hidden, and at the same time lively there. The occasional airplanes, high above, white, hardly visible in the blue sky, were part of it. The whirring of the highway on the plateau at my back receded behind that of not yet fallen tissue-thin leaves in the oaks, still there even now when spring was beginning.
As if it were a marker for the middle of the forest, at this place, unlike at everywhere else I had walked earlier, no more water glistened, not even the usual patches of standing water, and no rivulet. The sand, which had not been dumped on the path as elsewhere in the bay but had worked its way up from the subsoil, breaking through a thin layer of humus, fine as dust, was that of an extended dune, which emerged just as nakedly on the slope, although there it was firmer and more clayey, crisscrossed by roots, riddled in places by the mining bees, slipping into daylight en masse before my eyes, as if from ancient cave cities, reeling, flying upward.
The path ran straight ahead, though continually forming humps and hollows, and disappeared into a distant realm, where a far-off light beckoned, with the same pattern of crooked branch shadows as at the tips of my shoes. The sand changed color from one section of path to the next, going from a loessial yellow to an ash gray, from coal black to a beach white, brick red, desert brown. The colors appeared sharply separated, section after section, and for each one a corresponding animal turned up, as if growing out of that particular sand.
From the pale yellow a brimstone butterfly fluttered up. I saw the gray stretch enlivened by the similarly gray lizards, seemingly just born, a threesome, matching the coat of arms of the suburb, which extends into the woods here. And there, where the path suddenly blackened, to complement it a huge raven stalked along and sparkled, his bowing and scraping reminiscent of a duck, his sparkle reminding me of my runaway wife (a note from whom I had, just that morning, when I stepped into the study, found taped to the outside of the window). But the unpopulated places, too, were churned up by the tracks of animals, not only those of dogs, horses, and cats — which are led through the woods on leashes by their owners — but also those of mice, rabbits, birds, and then at my feet I searched for the print of the local mythical beast; but saw only clumps of rabbit droppings, as if expelled in mortal fear; mouse innards breaded with sand; feathers with tufts of animal fur stuck to them.
As I continued to sit on the tree stump at the edge of the dune path, my mind more and more vacant, I began to feel as though at any moment a horse-drawn carriage would drive by, garlanded, with my departed or defunct ancestors riding in it.
Meanwhile midday had come, balmy air, and the familiar yet always alarming joggers turned up, from the hundreds of office buildings up on the plateau, colorful like nothing else in the forest. One of them, as usual (and, as usual, a different one), called out a greeting. A little later, after the howl of a jet landing at the Villacoublay air base, squadrons of helicopters flew by carrying visitors of state, heading northeast over the hills toward Paris, whereupon it occurred to me that on that day a conference on a civil war was taking place.
I saw a man going straight ahead along the dune path, between sun and shade, up and down, dark stretches of sand and light ones. I caught sight of him while he was still far off, in the place where I could sense that other zone, veiled in distance. It was the medieval stonemason, tramping alone through France at the end of the Romanesque period, the man whose notes I had been reading just that morning. He strode along, although overtaken again and again by one of the joggers, maintaining the same even gait whether going uphill or down, and likewise in the deepest sand, the gait of a villager, shoulders back, arms and legs swinging wide, not of a contemporary villager, but rather of one from prewar days. He was dressed accordingly: a black suit with an open jacket and trousers fluttering around his knees, a white shirt without a necktie, a gray vest. With every change of color in the sand of the path, in a hollow, on a rise, the walker glowed in new splendor, one colorful panting figure after another circling around him. When he paused for a moment, I fantasized that he was hammering his stonemason’s mark into a tree with a chisel. At my spot it was I who greeted him. A laconic greeting in reply, and already his back, shoulders rolling, as if there were balls of air in his armpits.