Outside the momentary gobbling of a turkey, the drone of a night plane, the seemingly even more distant screeching of truck brakes.
It was perhaps the last mild evening of the year, and therefore he sat for a while afterward with the neighbors of the deceased on their farmyard bench, long enough for an entire tribe to line up on.
With their backs against the wall of the house, half in darkness, half in the glow of the barn light a little farther off, they sat in silence, facing the barely discernible pattern of the ventilation slits in the barn — in the form of solar rays — hearing the rustling and crackling in the invisible famous branching linden tree (and the hundred-year-old cherry tree) in the middle of Rinkolach, and sat and sat, again as in an earlier time, with which, my friend now thought, something could still be undertaken, something could be done; and not at all sure that with artificial lighting of the dead-end street a “long-cherished wish” of the villagers would be fulfilled, as the community newsletter regularly stated.
How he loved the night wind, the black on black. No star was in the sky. No child was crouching under the bench. A riddle from the old days: “What’s lying under the bench, and when you grab it, it squeals?”—“A chain.” All across the plain ladders were standing in orchards. In the last train from K. the heads of the sleeping passengers were leaning against the windows, and the locomotive’s whistle echoed far into Yugoslavia. A palm tree rustled in the sun on the outskirts of Jericho. In a new German translation of the Bible he would put “confidence” in place of “hope.” The woman next to him brushed the dandruff off his coat collar with a hand that was neither cold nor warm, more mineral-like, like flintstone.
And again, without any movement, he felt, in the first hour of night, the approaching morning, this time, however, as something ice-cold that reached into his armpits and then alarmed him mightily. At the same time, he felt “longing” coming back, his favorite word. No, it was a hunger, in the middle of his heart, and it was not coming back, but had been there forever. And then he caught himself also thinking, “No, I did not give up today — not yet!”
What? Did he need a third manifestation?
7 — The Story of My Son
To be asked about my son, by anyone at all, has always put me in a bad mood, out of a clear blue sky; it has immediately destroyed the harmony between me and the other person. It was even worse when I was expected to tell stories about him. “Tell us!”: the very form of this invitation rubbed me the wrong way, and all the more so in conjunction with my own child. At least one way out was to say terrible things about him, to revile him from afar, and in general to invent atrocity stories about him (which also could be counted on to elicit an entirely different kind of sympathy than when I morosely stuck to the truth).
Even very early on, whenever I told a third person something about him in his presence, he himself would break in, as if his father were guilty of betraying him. In his absence I still suffer the effects of this, such that when I am forced to speak of him I vividly picture his disapproval. But the law of silence that pertains to my son’s life, including trivial details (these in particular), originates for the most part with me. Already long ago, even without the child’s punishing stare, I was usually conscious when talking about him that this was actually a form of gossip, and inappropriate.
I also strenuously avoid asking other parents about their offspring, and when I happen to do so after all, out of politeness or heedlessness, or heedless politeness? I feel hostile in advance toward any answer they may give, and then I am sometimes surprised at how enthusiastically they come out with the answer, even in the case of bad news, as if certain fathers and mothers found themselves in their verbal element only when speaking of their children — why else would their conversational tone be transformed into triumphal blasts?
My resistance to telling anyone about my son seems therefore not to follow a universal law. Isn’t it actually crazy that I already resent it when a person asking me about my son presumes to use his first name?: “So, how is Valentin these days?”
It is something else again when it comes to telling about my next of kin or ward when no one is asking me about him. Then I occasionally succeed in being perfectly relaxed about it, speaking in a voice seemingly made up of several voices together, so that my son, I am certain, would not only approve but would also feel validated. This kind of storytelling I have inside me. Only it comes out decidedly too infrequently, because it is either the wrong listener or more likely the wrong moment (is there even such a thing as the “wrong listener”?).
And telling stories in writing is something else again. There, without a specific audience, without my voice’s getting in the way, not forced to wait for the right moment — that is within my control when I write, which unlike any other activity gives me an awareness of having time — my telling stories comes to me in a way that oral storytelling comes only by pure luck, often invalidated the very next day. Only in written form is my storytelling suited to my nature, on the right path, at home, no matter whom it deals with, even my son.
This has meanwhile become a conviction, reinforced by the observation that all my life, whenever I opened my mouth to tell a story, even if I was bursting with it, I hardly ever found a hearing, but instead alienated others and spoiled their fun. Where was the humor I kept trying to slip in edgewise? Only through my writing and being read was a change brought about.
This year, when my son was traveling in Southeastern Europe, almost always alone, I did not worry about him, for the first time. Nothing could happen to him, and for moments at a time this very thought made me uneasy again.
Yet wasn’t it true that in the preceding years, at precisely those times when I knew him to be in danger, my otherwise constant worry about him had ceased, replaced by a pleasurable sense of acceptance? And since the dangers, always major ones, had multiplied of late, hadn’t that very fact rendered me immune to my age-old worry about my closest kin? But: was he really still my closest kin? And: who was I without my age-old worry?
For example, that time when Valentin was trying to hitch a ride on the outskirts of town and his leg was almost torn off by the kick starter of a motorcycle that grazed him as it whizzed by, and he would have bled to death then and there if help had not arrived immediately, as I left the hospital where my son was lying with shattered bones and went home in the middle of the night, I felt receptive as never before to this particular hour of the night, to the region altogether, and grateful; the way things were now was right; I had shed a part of myself, a part that was past its usefulness. Only an adult could be as light of heart and unshakable as I was then — or unmoved? At any rate, that hour, and the others that followed, almost fatal to my son, gave me a standard by which to measure.
It is not entirely accurate to say that Valentin undertook his journey to track down his father’s youth. One stimulus, among several others, was a story I had invented out of the whole cloth, a first-person narrative (a form that always suggests itself when the bulk of the task facing me consists of inventing and playing out the possibilities), the only one of my books he read, actually at the suggestion of, no, under orders from his girlfriend, although otherwise he knows the classics, as well as my contemporaries, from Filip Kobal to Kazuo Ishiguro, also Peter Turrini and Max Goldt, and now at twenty-two, out of fear of soon having nothing more to discover, is a great reader, the only one among thousands, but wasn’t I the same in my day? And besides, time and again he has knowingly deviated from the route of my story and has picked up the story again only at intervals, as a sort of travel guide, more testing it than using it (“many mistakes, but apparently intentional ones”).