I followed him with my eyes, past all the bomb craters to left and right, obscured by the joggers as he was, until he disappeared into that so very different section of the path, no longer in the present but also no longer in his Middle Ages. And what had I just read in his notes? “I do not belong in the current era. I only wreak havoc there.” And on the other hand: “Today I shall find something I thought lost forever; there are such days!” And what was written on the paper the woman from Catalonia had stuck to the outside of my window? “We must remain at odds for a while longer. And even longer. And even longer.” But didn’t that thought come from me?
PART 2
1 — Where Not? Where?
The adventure stories that meant the most to me told of a person’s search for the most suitable place for him to live. For example? And weren’t those actually fairy tales? And which ones?
In my youth I wanted to be swallowed up by a metropolis. But none of the Austrian and German cities through which I passed fit that description. Not only the manner of the passersby but also the sounds, the smells, and the buildings made me feel like a stranger to those parts. And at home in the country I had perhaps been everything but that. Being a stranger to those parts also implied the opposite of what I desired: to be swallowed up. Even the springlike fragrance of lilacs in the villa sections of Graz, Vienna, Munich, Berlin could plunge me into misery. At the sight of the palaces of Schönbrunn, Nymphenburg, and Charlottenburg, of the magnificent hanging gardens along Hamburg’s Elbchaussee, of the Cologne Cathedral, even of the great rivers, the Rhine, the Main, the Danube, running through great cities, I had the sensation of dust in my eyes.
The first time I felt I had become one with the wide world was in a town: that time among the limestone blocks on the harbor of Piran on the Istrian Peninsula. It was a mild evening between Easter and Whitsun, the same as now, thirty-five years later; I had just taken that examination on Roman law and wanted nothing in my mind but the white-gray boulders rearing up before me, with the gentle harbor waves breaking in the gaps between them. In Spanish towns, the largest and the smallest, I then had a similar experience, for instance during my summer semester in Santiago de Compostela, with the sensation, which always took me by surprise, that these places expanded from day to day, with more and more corners emerging from the shadows, even if today it may be no more than a newspaper stand far back in the dark lobby of an apartment building or tomorrow the wooden ladder leaning against part of the church ruins on an overgrown island in the river.
Yet neither there in Spain nor in Piran in Yugoslavia was there any question of staying. At the time, for my further training, the suitable metropolis seemed to be Paris. That stemmed first of all from the fact that beginning with the moment of my arrival nothing there repelled me or excluded me; that not the slightest element interposed itself between this world-class city and me, who, and I felt I was this, was open to the world. And then again it was a color that revealed the place to me: the light, expansive gray of the asphalt on the boulevards that gave me the impulse to set out, to walk and walk — something I had had no desire to do everywhere else — and to cover the entire city, in all directions. Here was my future; here I would later on live as well as work. And at the time I could picture doing both only in the center, where I actually did have an apartment — at least it seemed central to me, which, indeed, gradually became true of almost every part of Paris; I never had to go through even the smallest lifeless stretch between my lodgings and the lecture halls, the left bank of the Seine and the right, the laundromat and the movie grottoes; and besides I had got away not only from the lilacs and the jasmine but more importantly from the whole Western European great outdoors and was quite content with the unchanging gray trunks of the plane trees.
When I had to return to my country for my year in the Viennese courts, and after that a position in the legal department of the Austrian Southern Railway, it occasioned a pain similar to what I had experienced in childhood when I was dragged away from the village of Rinkolach to that horrible boarding school. I sat with my suitcase in an outdoor café by the Gare de l’Est, the asphalt at my feet showing the innumerable overlapping imprints of bottle caps from the hot times of year, and I felt as if I were experiencing all this for the last time. As if along with the gray of Paris I had to take leave of the world. A few drops of rain fell and were gone at once. At the thought of the coming years in Austria and my profession as a lawyer, I became aware for the first time of that black cloud, of which I could not tell whether it welled up inside me or on the horizon, which was poisoned by it, the cloud that meanwhile, I imagine, is merely resting, always ready to become active again. But a decade later I was living back in the metropolis where I belonged and working in the profession for which I am halfway suited, if for any. Working? Profession? I embarked on my project.
Not until I began to look for a place to live did I come to know the outskirts of Paris, along with the gates leading out of the city, arranged like the markings on a clock. There had been no real gates for a long time, merely streets, which as a rule widened into squares at the point where they crossed into the suburbs. The apartments I saw in the inner quartiers were usually more beautiful or more elegant, often even quieter. But I chose a place near one of those squares, which, as time passed, came to signify to me more departure than entry gates, unless I was away for weeks and somewhere else entirely, for instance in the mountains: thus I returned once from a hike in the Pyrenees, dozed off on the evening bus from the airport, was surprised in my sleep at the unexpectedly more powerful and at the same time more even noise of the engine, finally appropriate to the wheels and the enclosure of the bus, opened my eyes and saw myself turning onto one of those well-lit boulevards that lead straight from all the provinces of France into the center of this city, for which the word “metropolis” seemed fitting as for no other in the world — and behind us, as a broad outlet into the blackness of night, the square of the Porte d’Orléans.
And there I also lived for a couple of years with the woman from Catalonia and our son. All the rooms except Valentin’s, which gave on a small walled garden, were dark and with no particular view; from one of the windows I could see the city bus depot at the gate. From her Iberian childhood Ana was used to darknesses of a very different order in houses, from the front doors far into the interiors. And I actually appreciated the lack of a view. From my years in the vineyards, with a view of Vienna, the hills of the Vienna Woods, and the Pannonian plain, stretching to infinity, I still felt ill at ease with any panorama or belvedere (the street in Sievering where I lived in a rented apartment was also called “Bellevue”). Sometimes, when I sat facing that view for a long time, I could feel the pain, agony, and death struggles in hospital rooms down below, all mixed up together, and I understood that neighbor who during the winter months saw the bare stakes up and down the hills of the vineyard outside his picture window as the crosses in a cemetery, and likewise that other neighbor who, to get away from the distant and even more distant horizon of the lowlands, including the magnificent sunsets, finally moved to the most confining hilly moraine country, from where he wrote me that the lines of the landscape crowding in on him had cured him of the fear of death that had haunted him on his “Bellevue” property.