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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Viewer Is Diverted

  The Viewer Takes Action

  The Viewer Seeks a Witness

  Epilogue

  Also by

  Copyright Page

  The Viewer Is Diverted

  I shut my eyes and out of the black letters the city lights took shape. Not the lights of the Old City, but the streetlamps that had just gone on in one of the many housing developments on the southern periphery. The development, consisting of two-story single-family houses, is situated on the big plain at the foot of the Untersberg. Long ago, this plain was a natural reservoir; then it silted up and became swampland—there are still swampy patches and ponds—and today it is known as the Leopoldskroner Moos. At first the streetlamps barely glimmer, then they flare up with a pure white light. By contrast, the arc lamps affixed to concrete poles at the eastern edge of the development, where a turnaround marks the end of the bus line, glow reddish-yellow. Between the bus terminus and the development lies a canal dating from the Middle Ages, fed by the Königsee and by one of the Untersberg brooks; this is the Alm Canal, the “noble Aim.” The development lies right outside the city limits (just before the entrance, there’s a sign with a diagonal line through the word “Salzburg”); it’s called the Oak Tree Colony. All the streets take their names from trees: Alder Street, Willow Street, Birch Street, Fir Street. Only the road coming from the virtually uninhabited peat bog in the west has kept its old name: Cider Press Road. And within the development there are still a few of the old peat cutters’ huts, some fallen into decay, some used for other purposes.

  A trolleybus turns into the circle—a long, articulated vehicle. People get out, schoolchildren, locals, foreigners (who occupy the few wooden houses); all are in a hurry, only the children dawdle. They make their way in a cluster across the little canal bridge, followed by a few teenagers on their bicycles, which they left at the bus stop this morning. All together, they enter the Colony, which was almost deserted only a moment before and now suddenly seems inhabited. Dogs run barking to the garden gates. The phone booth at the edge of the Colony, which just now was dimly lit and empty, is darkened by phoners and people waiting to phone.

  It’s not dark yet. Throughout the city, the lights have as usual come on early. In the dip in the horizon between the Untersberg to the south and the Staufen to the west, there are orange-colored stripes. On the crest of the Untersberg, which is ordinarily dark at this hour, the cliffs glitter in triangular patches. Over the scree basin, below the peak, the last funicular is on its way down. The Staufen, farther away, beyond the German border, is blue-black; only the limestone furrows on its upper slopes are a lighter color; on the summit, the light of a mountain hut flickers. Actually there are two summits, the “big” and the “little” Staufen; as seen from the city, a few miles to the north, the distance between them is apparent. But here on the Moos one mountain is standing directly in front of the other, and the two together form a single pyramid that has no neighbor for a long way around. The summit of the Gaisberg stands similarly alone in the east. Except that, instead of being a pyramid, it’s rounded, wooded, and topped with a plateau instead of a peak. On this side, the first star corresponds to the light in the hut on the Staufen. At the foot of the Gaisberg, just after the barren peat soil gives way to fertile loam, the Salzach flows in the failing light. There on the riverbank, not far from the boulder known as the Urstein, I once met a man who, with a glance at the slightly overhanging cliff and the caverns in it, said: “The world is old, isn’t it, Herr Loser?”

  With the light of that moment, silence fell. The warming emptiness that I need so badly spread. It was a brightening, a primordial rising, so to speak. My forehead no longer needed a supporting hand. It wasn’t exactly a warmth, but a radiance; it welled up rather than spread; not an emptiness, but a being-empty; not so much my being-empty as an empty form. And the empty form meant: story. But it also meant that nothing happened. When the story began, my trail was lost. Blurred. This emptiness was no mystery; but what made it effective remained a mystery. It was as tyrannical as it was appeasing; and its peace meant: I must not speak. Under its impulsion, everything (every object) moved into place. “Emptiness!” The word was equivalent to the invocation of the Muse at the beginning of an epic. It provoked not a shudder but lightness and joy, and presented itself as a law: As it is now, so shall it be. In terms of image, it was a shallow river crossing.

  The emptiness became peopled with figures. On the darkening street of the Colony, a young girl in baggy blue trousers was walking straight into the last yellow glow in the sky. An older woman on a bicycle turned in from a side street, holding a full milk can in one hand (there are a few isolated farms in the bog). An old man was walking from his house to his garden gate and back, changing his glasses on the way out and feeling his pulse on the way back. As usual, the wind was from the west. It had come up strong in the late afternoon but now had dwindled to a soft breeze. Different varieties of trees grew one behind the other in the gardens; some of their branches swung from side to side, others up and down, so that in time one got an impression of uniform motion, perhaps of a loom or of saw blades. In one corner of my room a ball of dust lit by the floor lamp moved about, and in the sky a vapor trail drawn by a blinking metallic pencil flashed in the sun. At the bottom of the canal, clumps of moss drifted about. Out in the bog, a herd of deer jumped across a drainage ditch.

  I live in two rooms in the development’s only apartment house, situated just behind the canal bridge. The house was built in the decade after the war and is only three stories high; there’s no elevator and no balcony. The ground floor is occupied by a supermarket. There’s no other store in the vicinity. When I moved here, someone told me that, when asked for my address, the people at home said, “He’s living at the last stop of the No. 5 line, upstairs from the SPAR.” (This information, however, was not provided by my wife or children but by a neighbor woman.) My two rooms are indeed on the second floor, and sometimes at night I hear the vibration of the freezers downstairs. One of the rooms faces east, toward the canal and the bus stop, right behind which begins the level part of the Morzg forest, consisting mainly of dark spruce and underbrush; the other room has one window on the west and another on the north side; this last has a view of the city. From the Moos just then, all one could see of Salzburg was hidden by the so-called city mountains, the Festungsberg, the Mönchsberg, and the Rainberg; on their summits, one could see blinking ruby-colored warning lights. Though only a few miles distant, Salzburg seemed a long way off, because the thinly populated plain and the city mountains lay in between. The city mountains looked like mere hills, barely perceptible humps, and it was hard to imagine that they consist almost on every side of rather imposing cliffs, a fall from which means certain death. At the edge of the Old City, only a scattering of tourist buses were parked—there are long files of them during the day—and as the squares emptied of people, the gushing of the fountains became more audible. Not so long ago, all the city’s fountains got their water from the Alm Canal, which at present drives one or two mills but is otherwise largely ornamental; there are plans to close it down entirely. The domes of the churches glittered copper-green in the evening light.

  The fountains were turned on again only a few days ago. During the winter, they are covered with wooden scaffolding, and the most one can see through the cracks is the whitened eyes or nostrils of a stone horse. But now on the unpaved Residenzplatz one can again see all four horses with their outstretched or lowered heads, while here in the Colony the end of winter is marked by the depleted woodpiles outside the houses, which in the late fall had completely filled some of the vaulted doorways. In my little bedroom, facing east, there’s a rack with a big shelf just for fruit; this, too, had been piled high at the onset of winter and was now pretty well thinned; the room no longer smelled of apples. The canal below had risen and the melting snow made the water even cloudier than usual. In a few days, summer time would go into effect. Yet the trees were still leafless. Only the elder-bushes were green, bluish at the tips. And another wintry feature: the sun still set to the left of the Staufen; as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t summer until the sun had moved over to the right. The tip of the pyramid was a kind of dating stone or menhir. That day, it had snowed for a short while; higher up, the snow had stayed for several hours; there had been a distinct boundary, straight as a die, running all along the Untersberg, between the dark snowless woods below and the bright snowy woods above, with their clearly discernible treetops. Thick smoke was rising from nearly all the chimneys in the Colony, as if it were a country village. The different-colored smokes, blue, gray, and yellowish, merged in the air and drifted away like the trail of a locomotive. Words came to my mind—“Go home, people” —a variation on a poem two thousand years old, dealing, it is true, not with people but with cattle that had grazed their fill, and with the coming of the evening star.

  I’m a teacher of ancient languages in Lehen, a quarter northwest of Salzburg, on the left bank of the Salzach. Lehen is the city’s most densely populated district and is regarded as a working-class neighborhood. In the middle, there’s a football field, the home ground of the team that used to be called Austria but now, like all Austrian football clubs, bears the name of the corporation that pays the players. As the crow flies, it’s not very far to Lehen from the Oak Tree Colony here in the south. But the peat bog lies in between and there’s no direct road across it, only the lengthwise Moos Road (the plan for a so-called southern tangent has
been set aside for the time being). Consequently, since I haven’t had a car for some time, I’m obliged, on my way to school, to take the bus into Salzburg and change to another bus. On the way home, though, I often walk through the Moos, cutting across the meadows at random until I come to the Alm Canal. From there, the towpath takes me straight to my house.

  I haven’t been teaching lately. Have I been dismissed or given a vacation or granted sick leave, or temporarily suspended? All I know is that there’s no official term for my present status. Everything is up in the air, I say to myself. A few days ago, I knocked a man down in the street. One afternoon on Getreidegasse, which seemed less crowded than usual, I was overtaken by a man, who jostled me and immediately afterward turned to look in a shop window, with the result that we collided. To tell the truth, though, it wasn’t a collision, because I could have stepped aside. I pushed the man intentionally, and it wasn’t just a push, but more like a punch, a sudden impulse, so actually it’s wrong to speak of intention. The man fell to the ground with a strange, almost inaudible cry of pain, then instantly stood up without my even offering him a helping hand. But while still on the ground he gave his assailant a quick look, as if he had understood. Then he vanished into a side street. Possibly he wasn’t even a tourist, but a local. To an outsider, the scene must have looked like one of the usual collisions between pedestrians on this narrow street, only perhaps a little more violent.

  In my decades as an adult, I have twice struck someone: once, on the night of a dance, I hit my girlfriend, who had just kissed someone else before my eyes and in public; and a few years before that—actually I was an adolescent at the time—a boy from one of the lower grades, whose study hall I had been appointed to supervise. It’s true that as we left the dance the girl herself had asked me to hit her, and my one blow, which came as a surprise to me and which I did not repeat though she asked me to, was in itself a solution. At the time, my act gave me real satisfaction. Come to think of it, it wasn’t an act, but more like a reaction, occurring at the only possible moment, comparable to the jump or throw of an athlete who for once knows with certainty: now or never. So my conscience wasn’t troubled and there was no question of reproach. Violent as my blow was, it inflicted no pain—of that I’m sure—but only made both of us smart. That was the turning point. We both recovered from our paralysis. In that instance, I’m innocent. But the slap in the study hall, brought on by some trifling provocation, is still on my mind. Up until then, I had been a man like other men; that slap showed me up as a criminal. The look on the boy’s face—though my blow hadn’t really struck home—has said to me down through the years: Now I know you, now I know what kind of man you are, and I won’t forget it. It’s not the look of a child or even of a person; and it emanates not from two eyes but from a single eye, which in all these years—though most of the time unheeded—has never blinked. I saw that eye again in the man I knocked down on Getreidegasse. It’s dark brown, not at all angry or hateful or avenging, just inexorable; and its intention seemed to be to make me impossible, not to others but to myself. That eye, I sense, is right, and I sense that I, too, am right. The push I had given in the crowd didn’t upset me for one moment. Afterward, as a matter of fact, I looked toward the vanishing point of the suddenly humped, meandering street, and saw my kindred climbing the deserted slope of the Gaisberg. My purpose here is, at last, to find myself confronting as a fact what for so long has pursued me as a mere phantasm. And “in suspense” doesn’t mean “in danger,” but precisely in suspense, or in a state of “in-decision,” as it were.

  The day after the incident on Getreidegasse, I obtained a temporary leave of absence from my job. The motive I gave was the urgent need to complete a paper that was to appear next spring in the Salzburg Yearbook for Regional Studies. This was an interim report on the excavation of a Roman villa in Loig, a village on the far side of the airfield. Though I’m not a trained archaeologist, I’ve spent a good part of my vacations working on digs all over the country, particularly the Hemmaberg in southern Carinthia, where I helped to remove the mosaic floor of the early Christian basilica. In the early days of my archaeological activity, an older archaeologist once said to me: “All you care about is finding something.” It was in part this remark that impelled me to train myself at digs to look less for what was there than for what was missing, for what had vanished irretrievably—whether carried or merely rotted away—but was still present as a vacuum, as empty space or empty form. Thus, in the course of time, I acquired an eye for transitions that are ordinarily overlooked, even by professional archaeologists. Sometimes I playfully call myself a thresholdologist (or seeker after thresholds). This should not be taken only figuratively. I became in fact a student of house, church, and temple thresholds. I studied the thresholds of whole settlements, even though these last, as often when they are made of marble or granite, have been carried away, or, when they are made of wood, have rotted. In the field, I recognize the emplacements of former thresholds by hollows, color gaps, and traces of wood. My work is not merely incidental; once thresholds are located, the whole ground plan can be deduced; they provide boundaries that indicate the original layout of a building or a whole village.

  A glass on my desk contains some sawdust, the remains of a threshold I discovered on the Hemmaberg and wrote my first paper about. Discovering and describing thresholds became a passion with me. During the school year I often devoted an afternoon to it, helping on digs in the immediate vicinity, such as the Celtic Dürrnberg near Hallein or, only recently, the “Roman Road” in Loig. I was usually rather tired the next day, but that actually benefited my teaching; it made me calm and alert, and I listened to my pupils, just as they listened to me.

  My report on the Loig dig was just about finished, including the photographs and the drawings of cross sections and horizontal sections with the small initials A.L. (Andreas Loser) in the lower right-hand corner. The task assigned to me was making measurements of the vestibule; describing and interpreting the floor mosaics was the work of the professionals. “Access to the villa was provided by a door so-and-so many Roman feet wide, with a masonry base for the formerly present wooden threshold. A space so-and-so many Roman feet wide and so-and-so many Roman feet high was set aside for it at the foot of the east wall.” Time and again, while I was doing this work, the black knotholes in the floorboards of my room looked to me like colored mosaic stones, and once a fresco appeared in the white wall: Iphigenia, holding a statue of the goddess Artemis, on her way to the sea, before escaping to Greece with her brother—a mural from Pompeii, intimating to me that my measurements had not been entirely useless. When toward the end I looked up from my paper for a moment, the Untersberg with its sunlit crest was situated in the ancient world, and I saw the corresponding alluvial cones at the foot of the Staufen.

  My desk had been cleared. It’s a small, light-colored office model with a chipboard top and steel legs, and it blended nicely with its surroundings. Beside the glass with the sawdust in it, there is an elongated piece of wood with holes at one end, rounded edges, and slanting grooves of varying width—a so-called hand fondler, carved years ago by my son (more or less as a school exercise), blackened from handling, but still smelling of fresh wood, just as the brown, fist-sized, hardened lump of clay beside it, whenever I pick it up, takes on the smell of the damp gully from which it was taken years ago. Written in pencil on the clay is the Greek word “Galene,” meaning “the calm, radiant sea,” which, according to the philosopher Epicurus, can be taken as a model of existence (the man sitting over it interpreted the luminous graphite word more as a kind of call to order). The last in this row of objects is an egg-shaped lump of clay which not so long ago was broken from a dried thornbush on a Mediterranean island: a puzzling object, a mixture of sand and tiny stones that some sort of insect may have built around a branch of the thornbush, which now on my desk is still inside it, forming an arrow, whose tip emerges at the other end of the egg. A number of deep holes give it the appearance of an ocarina, except that the holes have no outlet. They seem, deep inside, to be joined in a single hollow, though the passages are so crooked that the eye cannot follow them. The interior of these passages glows an intense bright red that seems to enamel their walls. Once, when someone blew into one of the holes, the long feelers of an unknown, black-armored insect darted out of a neighboring hole, and immediately retracted. All these objects might be termed my “callers to order,” because, by pleasantly diverting me now and again, they save me from losing myself entirely in my work.