The Moravian Night Read online

  No one else was on the road. And if the region was karst, no sign could be seen of the characteristic jagged forms. It was an ordinary German and European landscape, possibly even more ordinary or undistinguished than your usual point of the compass. Yet he was filled with quiet enthusiasm as he walked toward the gloomy Harz Mountains and the still invisible town. For once he paid no attention to the cars, the standard makes, that passed him and for some unknown reason revved their engines and seemed to grind their gears. Enthusiasm: the effect was that everything seemed equally large. Or: nothing seemed large, nothing seemed small, and as he made his way toward the town, going overland, he engaged constantly in a process, without conscious thought, of taking in sights, sounds, and smells (including stenches, also the smell of decay, suddenly emitted by a dead stag in the ditch, its eyes wide open, mirroring the sky, still bright).

  Then the impressions he absorbed, step after step, formed a silent monologue, not a conversation with himself but one directed toward the distant “person of reference,” the woman (whose name we would really have liked him to share with us by now). Not that she accompanied him in her thoughts; she remained far away, and he reported to her from afar, transmitted to her his visual and auditory images telepathically, so to speak. Accordingly the sentences in his monologue usually began with “You know…” or “Picture this…” or “Let me tell you…” or “You can believe me…” So something like an imagined reportage? If so, not a live one, but, as already mentioned, in the past tense: “You know, on the access road to … there were potholes, not at all typical of Germany, but just like in the Balkans.” “Imagine, the first person I encountered in the Harz was really old, pushing a walker with wheels, whether you believe me or not, and it was the same with the second person, and, much later, the third…” Not to forget the archaic use of “hear this” in the middle of the monologue: “On the road, hear this, there were potholes.” “And I’m telling you, in the entire town, hear this, not a single evening church bell tolled.”

  Arrival during the second phase of dusk, the dark one, made even darker by the location of his paternal town in a bay formed by the Harz Forest, with the two sections of the town branching along hollows carved out by brooks, and the rows of rather squat houses extending like fingers into those spaces. Apparently the town was a health resort, complete with a “Spa Center,” a “Casino,” guesthouses clustered together; a scattering of mineral springs, thermal springs, mud baths, alternative therapies for god only knows what ailments. And if he encountered anyone in the gleam of the antique streetlights, in fact it was almost exclusively old and/or frail people who gazed right past him, seemingly focused on nothing but their troubles with their bodies and dragging themselves along. Likewise stricken with years were the dancers he could see through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the casino, against whose panes and walls were propped all sorts of appliances to aid mobility, not only crutches but also cross-country ski poles and wheelchairs—metal reflecting metal—surrounding the shadowy faces and bodies of the dancers, who, however, as they waltzed and played ring-around-the-rosy, radiated a carefree and almost a joyful air, at least for as long as they were dancing or being swung around by a partner. A health resort? His mother had not mentioned anything of the sort. Only that while she rested there briefly during her escape she had met his father. How? Not a word about that either, as indeed she had said not a word about herself and the stranger except that they had loved each other. Had he loved her? “What a question, you fool. Of course you’re a love child.” And then he did recall a word she had used in connection with his father: he, a good dancer, had “swooped” over the dance floor with her—that kind of outdoor platform must have been popular at the time in the town in the Harz—and the word she used seemed rather daring, given her own birth- and death-place with its somber Balkan mood.

  He spent day after day in the central German town without—what was that formula used in old novels?—experiencing anything worth mentioning. (That was not entirely true, for, toward the end of his stay in the Harz, this much he revealed to us in advance, one small event or another did occur, but no, there was nothing external happening there; see the previous reference to large or small.) And nevertheless he was amazed, constantly amazed in this place where there was hardly anything to be amazed at, and until he resumed his journey, much later than planned, he did not cease to be amazed. He was amazed for the first time, and not only for the first time on this tour but for the first time since way back, “since time immemorial.” Who would have thought that in Germany of all places, in a remote part of the country, where from beginning to end one was not entirely sure where one was—at least nothing reminded one of Europe or of any other continent—this particular, long-lost capacity for amazement would turn up, even if perhaps only for the time being?

  But was this really Germany at all? And if so, was it the West? Was it the East? No, he realized as he roamed in ever-widening circles through this town in the Harz: it was neither/nor. It was a chronic border region, through which his mother had fled right after the war; perhaps it had been such a zone even before the war, had always been one, possibly as a result of the mountainous mass plopped down in the midst of the German provinces. If what Hugo von Hofmannsthal had described a century earlier, or had experienced as indescribable, still held true—that in Germany even objects, such as a washbasin, an apple, a floral bouquet, lacked reality, lacked thing-ness—then the region around his paternal town did not belong to that Germany. Did it have to do with the aura radiating from his mother’s escape routes and ramblings, as he imagined them, or from his unknown progenitor, or in general from the not even legendary ancestors on his father’s side? He, one, had no explanation, and no desire to find one.

  Amazement and reading. For the first time on his journey he got around to reading, became capable of reading and had need of it. And as he read, the zonal area expanded after all into something that might be called “Germany,” though only because, and while, he was reading the one book he had brought along on his tour. To be sure, he had opened it earlier at random but had been incapable of letting the sentences sink in, skipping them as he also skipped individual words, as if he could anticipate them like phrases in a newspaper, and that did not qualify as reading; it showed disrespect for the book, at least this particular one. He did not want to reveal the title to us. Only this much: it was not a volume of Heine’s Journey Through the Harz, neither the one taking place in winter nor one from any other season. Amazement and reading and thus feeling that he was in Germany after all: double amazement. It was unlikely that he would have traveled through a more peaceful region than this, either previously or later. Yet in this area he encountered no one else who was reading. Either this fresh-air and mineral-bath resort had no bookstore, or, if it did—and that seemed more probable—he gave it a wide berth, as he had done with all bookstores for a long time now. And yet, in one of the many side streets of which the town largely consisted, he had come upon books, a large pile of them, amid the bulky waste put out on the sidewalk, and among them, no, right on top, was one book whose author was—guess who.

  Reading and a Germany in which objects said to be inanimate filled one with amazement, as if they had been resurrected after a century in an antechamber to hell devoid of form and color. Objects, meaning, hear this, not the omnipresent crutches, wheelchairs, ambulances, and burial racks but rather the things that blossomed in the interstices still open and probably also opened up as a result of the reading, objects that blossomed without actually blossoming, billowing, arching, asserting themselves, surviving, which included the interstices as well. Such things, for instance, could be a wooden hunting blind in the forest no longer in use, or a portable typewriter in the bulky waste, bright red, or a napkin ring separated from the rest of its set, or a bench—or was it a seat from a movie theater?—deep in the underbrush, black and shiny after the rain. And in the surrounding area such things always turned up singly—strange, strange—just as he la
ter noticed that animals and the residents of this zonal area also appeared singly. On one of the numerous sylvan ponds near the town floated a single, solitary leaf. In the one jukebox still in operation in the zone, in a tavern that looked more like a barracks that had once housed border guards and was located in a nearby village, a single record perched in the otherwise empty carousel—“Only You”? no, you wimp, “Love Me Tender.” A single horse grinned in an apple orchard. A single window still showed a light after midnight. He saw just one person using a phone booth to make a call, just as any schoolchild on his way home was always by himself. He saw a solitary workman in one of the stone quarries on the karst, a single lumberjack in the spruce forest, a single policeman in his patrol car, one female clerk in the post office, one cashier in the surprisingly large supermarket, one old lady innkeeper and one young male innkeeper in one or another of the village taverns, along with their one patron, one man on a harvester, one female engineer repairing a waterline halfway up the mountainside, one individual, believe it or not, attending Mass in a church, in addition to the priest and the acolyte, a single surveyor on the arterial road, one ballplayer on the field, one chess-player in the senior center.

  It goes without saying that time and again people also appeared in crowds, even en masse—though each time only after a fairly long uneventful period. But he did not really pay them any mind, consistent with the reputation he had acquired during his days as a writer, namely, that he tended to portray both things and people singly. And couples? No matter how he kept his eyes peeled for them in this border zone, he saw not one. Not even the magpies formed a couple, not the ducks with drakes, not the mourning doves with cocks. Even the hedgehogs, supposedly in their mating period, encountered him only singly, and when he came upon one, in the wooded area along the border, and heard from a distance its unmistakable courtship snorting and saw leaves and needles flying in all directions, it turned out that the animal was tangled in a rusted chain-link fence and was trying with its last strength to free itself—so at least once on this journey our host could play the rescuer? That was so. And yet there were some couples after all: the small, reddish-brown butterflies with dark spots that constantly circled each other in the air, so close that their wings occasionally brushed, and whose swoops made them appear like three, not merely two, which is also characteristic of butterfly pairs here in our Balkans.

  He felt safe in that region where his mother had once met his father, or vice versa. He did not see himself as threatened, either by his reveries, from which it was difficult to find his way back to the everyday common sense of time, or by any Germans. At least as far as the people in that zonal region were concerned, the individuals, there was no German people, had never been one, nor, he thought, had there been one anywhere else, or at most as an impudent fiction. (However: could impudence possibly have a more harmful effect than in a fiction?)

  He could have stayed longer in the Harz, continuing to narrate silently moment after moment to the distant woman. Safety also meant the following: for now he and time were in harmony. But precisely the sense of being in safety drew him away from there, if not immediately back to his Balkans then at least in that direction. The quivering second eluded him in Germany. The country or something else blocked it. Or kept it at bay? In this Germany he did not need his guardian angel.

  He used the last few days in the southern foothills of the Harz to prepare himself for a struggle. Some such thing awaited him, of that he was certain; what remained uncertain was only the form it would take. This struggle would demand the utmost of him. And thus he trained in every way he could, undertook what had once been called forced marches, all night long, in the rain, which he welcomed. He became a cross-country runner, sprinted up and down mountainsides in the steepest places, swam in forest ponds that had obviously been frozen over only a short while earlier, scrambled across the jagged limestone cliffs of the local karst, cut a succession of hazel branches, sharpened each one to a point, and hurled them like lances across clearings. In the town itself he hired himself out to one solitary old person or another—everywhere posters proclaimed the “Senior Spring”—to push a wheelchair, also to haul coal and chop wood (yes, in this zonal region they still had woodstoves). And above all he read, and read, and read: this constituted his primary form of preparation for the struggle, breathing practice without a specific exercise.

  Meanwhile his thoughts dwelled on the absent woman, and he conveyed to her, always in the past tense, what he experienced in the present. For instance, hear this, on a woodland path he suddenly came upon a solitary hiker, an elderly one, what else, poring over a map, but a map that showed not merely a different region but a different country in an altogether different part of the world. And in one of the abandoned quarries in the Harz’s karst, hear this, he found a similar old man standing in front of an easel and painting in oils, but the picture, almost completed, represented not the quarry directly before him but a coastal landscape, with the ocean stretching all the way to the distant horizon.

  Toward evening on his next-to-last day the town suddenly filled with young people, and then only they seemed to count, until late at night. They were very young, the majority of them still children, and they were hauling suitcases and backpacks, an endless, silent procession heading uphill. They had arrived on the last train from, let’s say, Göttingen, and they were not setting out on a hike through the Harz but were rather returning, at the end of the holidays, to their boarding school, as he realized while following them. He had overlooked this institution previously, although it was almost the only larger structure in town, located along a hollow branching off another hollow in the foothills, remote not only from the town center and the grounds of the spa, but remote from everything. One after another lights went on in the building’s hundreds of windows, several at a time on the lower floors, one at a time on the upper ones, where the windows were much smaller and correspondingly more numerous. In the courtyard in front of the building, school staff members sat at several tables in the near-darkness to check in the students, who formed long queues. Hardly a sound to be heard, let alone laughter, or had he, watching from a distance, decided it should be that way? He remained in position until the wee hours, watching. The silhouettes in the upper courses of windows did not always remain single but sometimes moved back and forth together, and it was not until late that, if any were still visible, they were by themselves, with hardly any movement to be seen. For a while the clatter of Ping-Pong balls could be heard, alternating with a flute, and very briefly a harmonica, and then only the tac-tac-tac, as even as a metronome—or was it actually one?—and later nothing at all, the windows dark without exception, the night wind around the long building carrying the smell of the communal evening meal, or was he merely imagining that? And when he finally decided to leave, as if he had seen enough, “as if one can ever have seen enough,” a pupil appeared at his side, another near-child, with a bag slung across his chest and a bulging knapsack on his back, the one straggler, or one who had postponed his arrival to the very last minute. He paused in front of the almost entirely dark school building, which stood on a slight rise. No, he hesitated, and from his mouth burst a very soft but also very shrill exclamation: “Oh, no!” He had no eyes for the adult next to him. Not a moment later this same adult called attention to himself. And how? By taking hold of the boy’s shoulders in such a way that he did not even jump, and after exclaiming “Come along!” led him away, where to and to whom he did not say, just away, away, away from there for good! But wasn’t this clearly taking place only in the narrator’s imagination? It was true, he informed our interrupter. Imagination? And what if it was? And why “only”? One quivering second had apparently manifested itself up there in Germany after all, in one way or another?

  On the morning of the last day he would be spending in his father’s hometown, he finally went to the cemetery. It lay on the edge of a forest beyond seven ridges belonging to the foothills of the Harz, and the spruces, which w
ere very tall, seemed not to have been planted specifically for the cemetery but to have been left over from what had once been a spur of the forest. It was a repetition of the brimstone-butterfly day in southwestern Europe—this species had reached the interior of the continent. His father’s grave and those of his forefathers were not easy to find, so he inquired in the nearby flower shop. The woman alone there behind the counter had an immediate explanation. Because the maintenance contract for the grave had expired and no one had taken the trouble to pay for further care, the grave had been emptied, though only recently; the spot was still free, and she showed him on a diagram the row and the (former) number of the grave, for which she had been the caretaker. A perfectly flat rectangle, not all that small, with grass growing up through the gravel and flanked on both sides by burial mounds: there it was, that was where it had been. All that remained was the empty rectangle with a stone coping. In the middle of the rectangle a blade of grass with a fluffy little feather clinging to it, still damp with dew. And the sand and gravel inside the rectangle matching those on the cemetery paths, though one shade lighter.

  No name, no burial mound, nothing to remind one of the departed. He would not have known in any case whom to remember, had no picture of his father—at most one of his father’s father that his mother had passed on to him; he had never once asked of his own accord about these German ancestors. And this picture? It showed his father’s father, unknown to him and nameless, out sledding with his wife and children, somewhere on a hill in the southern Harz region, perhaps similar to the one where the rows of graves marched up a gentle incline, and his grandfather, still young, was pulling the sled with his son and daughter uphill, stopping suddenly and saying to his wife—the only German to whom the former writer gave a name during that night on the Morava—“Lina, I’m dying,” and almost at that very moment falling into the snow. And what was strange: he now repeatedly found himself talking spontaneously with his deceased mother, whereas with his vanished father it was not possible to speak, although he felt the urge to do so.