The Moravian Night Read online

  The person among us who always broke in with questions about mundane matters now wanted to know where the incident with the idiots on the outskirts had taken place and how the weather had been at the time, and this time he received a reply for a change. The outskirts had been those of Santiago de Compostela, whose center, the destination for pilgrims and the site of a statue of the saint whose feet had been kissed until they were shiny-smooth, the zigzag traveler did not specifically avoid but never considered visiting, without giving it any thought, indeed without any thoughts, as was often the case as he continued on his way or let himself drift, roving and roaming. And the weather was just the weather. And he told us furthermore that it must have been a Sunday. For that same day, in late afternoon, still on the outskirts, he had gone to a soccer match that pitted Compostela against Numancia, teams in the Second Division. He felt a need, as happened again and again after that, to be in the thick of things, to use an expression that his brother applied to the village idiot back home, whom he described as always being “in the thick of things.”

  In Spain, matches between Second Division teams drew crowds almost as large as those in the First Division, and accordingly he actually found himself in the thick of things. He, the traveler from afar, yelled and whistled like the others, jumping out of his seat when a goal was scored—though in contrast to the other spectators, he jumped up for both the home team’s and the visitors’ goals. He shook his head in solidarity at the referee’s knuckleheaded rulings at the penalty kick, and sympathized at the end of the match with the local spectators (there were hardly any others), who, with umbrellas, canes, and crutches—surprisingly many of the latter, reminding him of his Balkan homeland—wanted to swarm the referees or pounded from the bleachers on the plastic canopy under which the players disappeared into the locker rooms. Nonetheless, however much he was in the thick of things, he knew such behavior was out of bounds for him, and not because he came from neither one city nor the other. No matter how many conspiratorial glances he exchanged with those around him, he remained alone. And that was his doing, not theirs. Once, it seemed to him, remaining alone in the midst of a crowd had meant something. It had often given him pleasure. But now it burdened him, more and more as the match proceeded. In addition, he felt an increasing sense of guilt, for something he could not identify and therefore could do nothing about. By being the way he was, and where he was, even as he laughed with the man seated next to him when a player slipped and fell, he became guilty, without lifting a finger, of something that could never be set right. The floodlights came on: one was all the more alone. In the high-rise apartment buildings on the outskirts beyond the stadium, the first lights appeared: one yellow card, then another. And what a cold yellow. It serves me right. A sense of guilt at the very thought of not having to go to work the next day, unlike the locals. Leaving the stadium, alone, in the dark. And how quickly the crowd had dispersed. A gradual sensation of greater lightness. And the score of the Compostela: Numancia match? You have three guesses. And where he spent the night? In a hotel on the outskirts, as the only guest that Sunday evening, “for forty-nine euros, plus local taxes.”

  At this point, one of the rest of us on the boat picked up the thread of the story for a while. We had already grown so accustomed to one voice, that of our host, and to the direction from which it came in the semidarkness of the boat’s salon, that we involuntarily swiveled around when, during a fairly long pause that our host took to catch his breath, from one of the small tables to the rear a second voice suddenly chimed in, its timbre entirely different from that of the other voice. But because the tone and the rhythm matched, after the first few sentences we adjusted to the change in speaker and perspective. The night, along with the Morava and its banks, constituted the third voice, in a manner of speaking, against which background the two other voices blended effortlessly.

  The man who now picked up the narrative was someone with whom the former writer had crossed paths by chance during one of the next stages of his journey. “I saw you without your noticing me. And I then accompanied you along a route that happened to be mine as well, not sneakily but rather quite openly, and nevertheless unseen by you, until our paths diverged.” This substitute storyteller spied his friend and ours in the early hours of the day following the soccer match, or the morning of another day, at a railroad station between Santiago de Compostela and the Atlantic—though not on the coast of Portugal, allegedly one of his destinations, the farthest westward destination on the European leg of his journey, but rather along the Atlantic coast to the north, that of Galicia. (And not for the first time, instead of the word “tour,” the words “zigzag course” turned up in the story.) The station was located along the stretch between Santiago and La Coruña, and only two trains a day stopped there, one heading toward the ocean, the other into the interior. The station, far from the village whose name it bore, had been closed for a long time, including the ticket counter and waiting room, with no staff on duty, the windows and doors bricked up, a mere whistle stop, with only the platform accessible. “With your suitcase, you were sitting there alone in the sun, on the ground—no trace of a bench—leaning against the wall of sparkling Galician granite. At first I did not recognize you; that was how unfamiliar the man sitting there looked, perhaps also because he allowed himself to be seen only in profile, and did not react to my approach with so much as a blink, although I had been driven there from the village in a car.” But then: was it his friend? Yes, it was. “And I heard myself shout. And no reaction to that either.” After that, he could not say why, he let the other man be. “In spite of my delight at this fairy-tale encounter.” He confined himself from then on to glancing now and then from a distance at his odd traveling companion: that was how unapproachable he appeared—and here the guest imitated our host’s style of storytelling—“no, inaccessible.”

  Some time remained until the train was due, or the train was late, so the former writer began to stroll up and down the platform. Before turning and heading in the other direction he would pause briefly. He gave a deep sigh, a deeper one each time, if possible, until finally one of his sighs gave way to humming, and this to laughing, and this to a repeated cry. Was it true, then, as all the European newspapers had first predicted and then reported, that his old friend was well on his way to going completely insane? What seemed to confirm those reports was that he now pulled off his shoes and jumped off the platform onto the sharp crushed rock of the rail bed. That he then crouched down and gazed for a long, long time into the hollow space beneath the platform, where there was nothing to see but perhaps an abandoned hornets’ nest, an empty cement sack, a rusting uniform button, a scrap from a shirt, a book, or a porno magazine. That he remained standing between the tracks even when the train, not yet in view, could be heard approaching from afar, as a chirping up in the wires, and kept his eyes fixed on the sleepers, still made of wood along this stretch of mine, staring at the “eyes” in the blackish wood and the oil and other droplets, shading his own eyes with one hand, as if he were looking not at the ground but rather at something far off, on the most distant horizon possible. That he sniffed, his nostrils flaring, as if there were something to smell or as if a stench were coming from the lavatory hut next to the station, long since out of commission, its door gone, with only the outline of the bowl visible, the drainpipe stopped up with crushed rock? That he—with the train in view now—in addition to his staring and sniffing raised a finger to draw something in the air (or was he writing?), as if deaf to the blast of the locomotive’s whistle warning him, and then, in the train compartment, still barefoot, his shoes next to him, continued scribbling or sketching, now on the rain-steamed window, for the train and its passengers were coming from the rain, as was fitting for an episode taking place in my Galicia.

  I took a seat diagonally across from him. But even if I had been sitting directly opposite him, he would not have registered my presence, as I by now realized. That my writer had gone off the deep end seeme
d clear from his confused scribbling on the cloudy window. With the best will in the world one could not decipher the writing. And not only his bare feet and his dirty fingernails gave me the impression that this person was not just inaccessible but had become one of the untouchables, from the lowest caste far off in India (where furthermore, after what he had declared to be his last book, many years earlier, public figures had prophesied the rest of his future). And in addition, as if to confirm my suspicion, he now stuck a dove’s feather with a blood-encrusted quill in his hair, heedless of anyone else’s presence, and began talking to himself, loudly and incessantly, keeping it up all the way to La Coruña. Among other things I recall the following: “Everyone is the way he is. And all the shoelaces that won’t come untied. Oh, jumble of morning thoughts. My mother’s singing prevented me from becoming a singer. I’m disturbing people, but I don’t want to disturb them. God loves the bashful giver more than the merry one, and He loves the agitated giver most of all. How we wander about in the universe. I love too little. It’s no disgrace to breathe. Green has been passé for a long time. From so much looking I no longer see anything. Actually one should die more often. No one rules the world. Worrisome that it can’t be told. At least I’m alone. It’s terrible how one loses track of oneself. Everything is an error. Take words, not colors! Nothing is good for you! Don’t buy anything! So much time! And tomorrow it continues…”

  Here the boatmaster interjected that of course he had recognized his Galician friend. But he had decided that during this phase of his journey he should have dealings only with strangers. “That was how it had been decided, that was how it had been conceived.” And accordingly he had not let the other man get close to him, had acted in his presence absent-minded, confused, unapproachable. He even imagined that for the other man, and not for him alone, he was invisible. His idea was that if he wished, he could perhaps be seen, but perceived as a mere daydream. He had only to concentrate, and for the world around him he would vanish into thin air, as the world would for him. To overlook and make himself be overlooked: as he imagined it, that had always been his form of power. And that being the case, would he have been disappointed at being recognized this time, as his very own self, in flesh and blood, despite personifying a figment of the imagination? Not in the least: after this interjection, he urged the interim reporter to continue. “What else happened with me on the train? And after that? I trust you followed me in La Coruña? What can you report of me as I made my way through the city? What did I do there? How did I seem?” Yes, he was eager to have someone else recount happenings involving him, much as in childhood he had never been able to get his fill when his mother described what he had done or said at such and such a time. “And what else did I say, Mother? And where did I go after that? And where did I hide the next time? And who was the next person I beat up? And what was my next sleepwalking episode like?”

  “When we arrived at our destination,” the other man continued obediently, “I stuck to his heels for only a short time. After all, I had work waiting. But during my lunch break I ran into our traveler again, and then again after work. Or had these encounters been prearranged? Be that as it might, at noon I saw him in a funeral procession. He was walking in a long column of local people behind the hearse, completely integrated into the crowd. He had changed his clothes, if indeed it was him, which I doubted at first: a dark suit with a white shirt and a tie, and a hat. No, it was him. I became sure when, walking along like the others, hesitating at a traffic light or such, then continuing, he looked over his shoulder once, and after that again and again. I recognized him not only by his face, clean-shaven for a change; it was the way he turned his head as he walked, the gesture I most associated with him. In all the time I had known him, he had glanced over his shoulder at regular intervals wherever he went, perhaps less because he expected to see something behind him than because he hoped to sharpen his vision, his spatial vision, or for some such reason; that was my impression. But if this time he intended, as a member of the mourning party, to orient himself and gain keener vision this way, his looking over his shoulder hardly made sense, because his eyes were glittering with tears, and their source could not have been the Atlantic wind in La Coruña alone; why else, whenever he turned his head to face front again, would an unmistakable shuddering of his whole body have been visible that could be caused only by sobbing? I was standing too far away to hear it. But it was a powerful sobbing, gripping his entire body, more intense than could be observed in anyone else in the funeral procession, especially in the members of the immediate family right behind the hearse. And that aroused my suspicions again. As someone familiar with the town, I had knowledge of the deceased, and if my writer, a stranger to the region, had heard anything about him, he would have realized that this was not someone to mourn. No, he knew nothing about the dead man, let alone having been acquainted with him. So did that mean that this person weeping uncontrollably was not who I took him for? I moved in closer, forgetting my plan of spending the lunch break with a seaside sweetheart. And again I thought no: someone wearing such squeaky shoes, who in the midst of his sobbing and moaning tugged incessantly at his cuffs, who even flashed cuff links, and such cuff links, too, could not possibly be the person who had become dear and precious to me and indispensable for my spiritual well-being, no matter how nondescript, even repellent, his physical presence seemed to me time after time. And what if this was a double, one of the many who, as far as he was concerned, according to him, were in circulation all over Europe?

  “After work I ran into him again, and a third time later that evening. The first of these encounters took place at dusk, in the marketplace by the ocean. He had changed his clothes again, was positioned by a fish stand, not as a customer but as the fishmonger’s assistant, probably just for that one hour, wearing a rubber apron and wooden clogs on his bare feet, and stripping the scales off wolf fish for the last customers of the day, chopping off the heads, not quite expertly but less clumsily than I remembered him from before, during his writing period, and then after closing he stood there with the other vendors, hosing down the tiled floor of the market hall, enjoying himself more than I ever would have expected, with the sound of the water pouring from his companions’ hoses seemingly tuned to the background noise, if one listened closely: the distant roar of the ocean.

  “But that actually was his double, wasn’t it? If it was, you could pick up some details with respect to the original that you might have failed to notice in his presence. The man by the fish stalls, viewed as a double, opened your eyes to the specific characteristics of the person in question. So what was he like?” “How did I look to you?” (Another question from our host, clearly eager for the answer.) “First of all, like a person without cares. Like a big child, at least so long as you were with the others. A playful person. You behaved nonchalantly, apparently not taking your companions seriously. Staying somewhat apart, but secretly the center of attention, comporting yourself like someone who, without being specifically observed by anyone, was constantly aware of being observed. If someone spoke to you, you looked past him, thinking about something else entirely. Or you failed to understand anything, so much as a single word, even when the statement was repeated, and even less if it was repeated again. In my eyes, you seemed not just slow on the uptake but simply dumb, dumb as a post, as a—what was the expression that used to turn up often in books—a doorpost, someone who spends his days staring into a corner of the room, or into the ‘idiot box.’ But in the very next moment: suddenly you were listening. A single word, or merely a slightly different tone of voice, and you would be all ears, completely present, with an intensity such as I had hardly ever experienced, certainly not in my romantic relationships, whether in the city by the sea or the interior. In order to be able to listen, you went so far as to turn off your water spigot. Your face flushed bright red at what was said, shared with you, told, passed from the speaker to you, and you alternated between nodding, shaking your head, clenching you
r fists, and splaying your fingers. And in the twinkling of an eye you regained the authority that had seemed to slip away from you almost entirely during your moments of idiocy. And when you seemed to have had enough of such thorough listening, on went the spigot again, and as if nothing had happened you went back to the motions of wrapping up the workday, having time, being in the present and self-absorbed, in the company of others.

  “I decided to miss the train back to my Galician village and to continue my surveillance of my author’s double, or whatever he was. (I would spend the night in the city with one woman or another, or with god knows which other one.) I waited outside the fish section until he came out, the last one, through the last open door, which he locked behind him, using a bunch of keys reminiscent of a weapon, a flail. Finding the right key took him so long that I finally recognized some of his earlier clumsiness. He was alone and, if it really was the same person, had changed his clothes; he strolled eveningward in a summery light-colored suit, worn under an open trenchcoat, extra long, with a checked cap on his head that seemed utterly inappropriate for a coastal city in northern Spain, and tennis shoes. His appearance in such a disguise was almost ghostly, though also, if I had been following him with a movie camera, several degrees more distinct than that of the person he was, or the person for whom I took him in my hallucination. Incidentally, it was generally agreed that no matter what his disguise or camouflage, those who had registered his face, or merely his way of moving, would always recognize him instantly. Even in an astronaut’s suit or a Montana cowboy’s outfit, no matter where on earth his wanderings had taken him, he would be greeted by such a person, who would not have to eye him dubiously for a moment, with ‘Hallo, there, it’s you again’ or ‘I see you!’ One way or another, he could not be missed.