But that picture in Vienna had been melancholy and almost menacing, especially because almost the only bright thing shining out of the gloom of late autumn was the ax or knife blade, with which, if he remembered correctly, an almost faceless peasant silhouette was pruning a bare tree, while the brightness of the present dark day appeared now in the round shape of an apple, now in the oval of a corncob, now in the rectangle of a many-colored beehive standing alone on the edge of Rinkenberg Forest, now in the triangle of a chapel’s shingled roof.
These objects, registered just this way in passing, brightnesses even for their form alone, appeared regardless of season and had, in their substantiality, in the wood, the fleshiness of the apple, the mealiness of corn, something ethereal as well, which allowed him to feel himself become, for the moment, fruit, silvery shingles, thin air.
Only once, and then for a long stretch, did that brightness disappear, when a series of unharvested fields intervened, filled of all things with sunflowers, probably self-sown, on this farmland that was more and more being abandoned here, each of the many flower heads, which turned or drooped in every direction, darkened, and this black-in-blackish extending all the way to no horizon.
He stopped then, although the children were perhaps already waiting in their classroom, by an abandoned farm along the way, half in ruins, in whose chimney cap on this chiaroscuro day the old live owl was sitting again, even if the only part of it that moved was the amber eyes, following the smallest motion of his finger as he walked back and forth before it, constantly looking up.
Unlike most teachers, the priest did not try to remember the pupils’ names; barely glanced at the individual faces. When I was back home for a visit one time and he took me to class with him, the way he ignored the children annoyed me at first. It reminded me of all the priests I had known since I was very small, in whose eyes I, and likewise those next to me, did not exist and at the same time had a duty to be there.
But then it appeased me that my friend at least did not impart religious instruction to those entrusted to him. Not only did every child from the outset receive the same, the very best grades: he also did almost nothing but have the children take turns reading the Bible stories aloud, during which he gazed not at the reader but out the window. At the beginning, he said, he had been the expert on the text, and still the reader himself, and then he had recognized how hollow it sounded coming from his mouth, compared with such first-time readers. Often the children did not even need to puzzle out the text, but came out with it fluently, as if nothing in it were foreign to them, and in the process they captured the nerve of the whole in sentence after sentence.
After that one hour in school, setting out with him on foot, I noticed on the other hand that he knew almost everyone, or everyone past school age, greeting people from afar, and loudly, calling them by name: many of the local people, however, including beyond the town limits, did not return his greeting, not even when he waved and gestured. “They don’t want to know me!” he said. And those who responded to him did so without a smile, and hardly anyone stopped to talk. He commented that it was their “guilty conscience,” while it seemed to me, on the contrary, that these passersby did not derive any real joy from their priest, and not because he was this particular one. His showing up resembled that of a keeper of public order, whose way of keeping order was not needed, not by the young people, and also no longer by most of the older people.
Always he had been well received only when he did not present himself as who he was. And now and then he even enjoyed being a kibitzer for a while, a participant, or a first-name friend to the people in his congregation, in pubs, outside shops, at soccer games. As long as that was all there was to it, and he, laying aside the priest, contributed nothing but his share to the conviviality, he was well liked; others interacted with him as they had perhaps always wanted to interact with a brother.
But every time the moment came when he viewed their continued familiarity as inappropriate, and tacitly expected them to consult him as their priest. And because that hardly ever happened, except far off in the villages (did such places even exist somewhere?), according to circumstances he would make a point of calling attention to his profession himself, no, his position, and so abruptly that his previous comrades would turn away from him in shock, seeing him suddenly as a man of the cloth.
He insisted on it, however. To present himself as this kind of authority from time to time was his duty. Of course he considered himself one of them, if anyone was. Yet it was not acceptable for them to keep letting themselves go in his presence; they had to give heed to his central concerns, at least now and then. In the long run he preferred to be cursed as a preacher than to be their pal. It filled him with conflict that, except perhaps when he was celebrating Mass or writing his sermons, he appeared outwardly to be anything but a “Reverend.”
How he loved driving, and fast, especially on this broad, rather deserted plain along the border, where during the period when he was engaged to be married he had even participated in an amateur auto race, with the same number painted large on the Volkswagen that he later used for his laundry in the seminary for latecomers.
Yet Carinthia north of the Drau, where he was headed today around noon, remained, as in his youth, a cold, unfriendly region, almost enemy territory, as if — though this was actually not true, if you looked at it the right way — southern Slavic soulfulness and earth-dreaminess came to an end there, and starting with the northern bank of the river, the landscape, including the fields, which were really no different, and the scattered church towers, were pierced by the gaze of the Germanic front soldiers, extinguished by a word-rattling German-speakingness that kept everything else at bay. This image — where did it come from? — he had still been unable to exorcise entirely; not long ago he had looked at the faces of schoolchildren from the capital city bouncing along in the back of army trucks on the tenth of October, the anniversary of the referendum that had joined the southern region to Austria in 1920, and had seen the faces of these children, obviously gleeful at having a day without school and high-spirited because of getting to ride in such a special vehicle, as those of grim volunteers, or at least children who were up to no good.
Such moods, which he called his “daily dose of dementia,” were calmed now by driving, also by the sight of snow high on the Sau Alps, which ran across the entire countryside to the north, and finally dissolved in thin air over on the other side of the rift carved out by the river, at dinner, where he sat with his “brother in office,” simply by virtue of his now having for the first time that day, not shadowy ghosts, but a person with clear outlines sitting across from him, and quite a young one at that, his mouth, cheeks, eyes, forehead nothing but young.
And thus, when his neighbor told him that the sole remaining Slavic grave inscription in the Ruden cemetery had now been removed, or at least hidden, squeezed in between the wall and German-gold stones, it was he who said that did not mean anything; to overlook it would be a form of strength; what mattered was something else entirely!
And he continued talking, about how urgent a German translation of the New Testament was, one neither as colloquial as Luther’s nor like one of the more recent ones, pitched to the understanding of the average newspaper reader, but one that was as literal as possible, from the Greek, which was akin to German, heart and soul, as were no other two languages he could name.