And the money for his trip was almost entirely his own, from working as a disc jockey in various young people’s nightclubs and from selling his first pictures; a contribution came from my sister’s estate, which, because it consisted of almost nothing, struck him all the more powerfully as an omen. My son sometimes makes so much of his frugality that I have come to view it as one of his main characteristics, like his punctuality, which does not stem from a sort of obsequiousness but rather manifests itself as that of a tyrant, whose time one wastes at one’s peril; woe unto him who, regardless of the fact that he may be much older and even more powerful, comes even a quarter of an hour late to a meeting with my son, let alone without an excuse.
Having arrived in Ljubljana on a frosty January day by train, by way of Graz and Maribor, Valentin continued on by bus to Nova Gorica. At first Yugoslavia was merely a country he had to pass through on his way to his site for a walking tour, Greece. It meant as little to him beforehand as his ancestors. Although receptive to and gifted at foreign languages, new ones as well as old, he gave everything Slavic a wide berth, except the literature, as if its very sounds were an imposition; the music, whether folk songs or the works of nineteenth-century Russian composers, even repelled him; he felt as if his blood were being sucked out by those “parallel fifths, which are taboo, and not without reason, in melody” (whereas I at his age had shivered through entire nights in my pitch-black student room on the Kahlenberg with Mussorgsky).
Nevertheless he could do nothing now, as at other times, but keep his eyes and ears open. In contrast to his father, who in something new often notices an incidental or grotesque feature, or nothing at all, he immediately notices the salient characteristics, and quite casually. I have often wondered whether he, who has this eye for whatever is essential to a phenomenon, and yet, it seems to me, is never astonished at anything, is really cut out to be the researcher he wants to become someday. In many respects he is superior to me — but what is his passion? his dream?
Thus he had now set out, almost too well prepared, I thought, on this yearlong journey, had anticipated every unusual situation and had taken something along for it. But was that really true? Didn’t his main baggage consist of a present from the petty prophet of Porchefontaine, Valentin’s benefactor from the time he was a child, an ancient Greek biography of Pythagoras, in which the philosopher’s guideline for life had less to do with tools and measuring instruments than with untrammeled observation of phenomena and committing them to memory?: thus Pythagoras had had his disciples get out of bed each morning only after they had repeated to themselves the previous day’s lessons, and then those from the day before; this retrieval of the day before yesterday, without aids, purely from memory, was, according to his biographer Iamblichos, perhaps the essence of the Pythagorean doctrine.
And thus my son, on closer inspection, had his few tools — his army knife, drawing pencils, a geologist’s hammer — more as a sort of ballast, to keep “both feet on the ground.” Committing the phenomena to memory was not something he set out purposefully to do; rather he brushed by them, his thoughts elsewhere: “If you expect an object to leave a lasting impression,” he told me once, “you mustn’t under any circumstance stare at it; you should look through it, though attentively, and only then will the impression be reliable and lasting, and its gestalt will give rise to discoveries more readily from an afterglow than from the thing itself!” (His other approach was to turn away intermittently from his object, intentionally immerse himself in something else, so that, when he turned back toward it, he could “catch it as it was!”)
Valentin produced that day-before-yesterday experience often on the same day by falling asleep right after an event, for moments that took the place of an entire night, and, after the first waking up and recalling, falling asleep a second time: now, after the passage of barely an hour, he saw the object in the light and form of the day before yesterday. Wasn’t that sufficient as a dream?
A trip by bus on a winter’s day, through an unfamiliar country, was particularly suited for this kind of brief, two-time slumber. And thus the “day-before-yesterday effect” assured that even before he reached Postojna, the prehistoric dugout from the moor of Ljubljana that he had just seen in the museum there had engraved itself upon his memory for the rest of his life, its length, weight, peat-blackness, fissured surfaces.
On the bus he had breathed a peephole in the ice flowers on the window, through which he looked out in his own fashion, barely moving his head. They entered an area almost without human traces, deserted and more than deserted, leading into an expanse with invisible boundaries, in spite of the cold already green as in spring, as if made for fruit growing, except that no roads led there, and even the few cart tracks immediately came to an end: this had to be one of those areas that at unpredictable intervals, hardly related to precipitation, was flooded, the result of subterranean water pressure, which made it shoot up like jets from holes in the ground, forming large lakes from one day to the next, which could then be crossed only by boat.
Yet my son took in not the image of the strange landscape but a subject for scientific research: nature as “landscape” did not count for him. He was not interested in looking at things, or at any rate he hardly lingered over that. He immediately, as a matter of course, shifted his focus to the particulars, allowed these to impress themselves on him, distinguished them from one another, and looked for what they had in common.
The first thing he had always looked for, beyond the phenomenon, was its underlying principle. And having detected this, as a rule instinctively, in the twinkling of an eye, he was able, as he then once wrote me from his travels, to achieve “an entirely different view.” Except that he did this in passing, kept it to himself, explained nothing (at most uttered, more to himself, his one-syllable “Look!”), and only when he was asked came out with his conclusions, inferences, his always convincing theories, which, translated literally, were of course “observations.” Thus in his account of that bus trip he merely mentioned in passing, along with Traveling Band on the radio and the way his nostrils froze during the short rest stop in Vrhnika, the gray that altered from one type of tree to the next — thousands of shades of gray, passing, blinking, flashing by his peephole, and only later, in the spring, during a longer stay on Lake Ohrid, did he set about writing down his “Observations on the Variations in Winter Gray.”
Then the so-called Threshold of Postojna, a threshold also in a historical sense for all the migrations of peoples through the ages, from east to west, actually more flight than migrations, and more a narrow pass or battlefield than a threshold.
For Valentin, however, this was a mere threshold in the rock, a geological formation. For him there was no such thing as history, and in politics he was a self-proclaimed idiot. He did not even know that the Yugoslavia he was using as his corridor had earlier been Communist, had even earlier been overrun by the Germans, had even earlier been a kingdom, and even earlier … If chastised, he would at most have responded that such “earliers” were everywhere, extending back into prehistoric times, and that would be all well and good if everyone did not arbitrarily derive from his particular “earlier” all of — what was it called? — history, and then, from that, exclusive rights to the present. “I learned in school that two thousand years ago this was the Roman province of Illyria, and today in Ljubljana I saw in a window the book title Are We in Reality Not Slavs but Illyrians? To me what is real should be first and foremost what exists now.”