The Moravian Night Read online

  He squatted down beside the empty enclosed rectangle, and it was astonishing, or perhaps not really, how he felt the presence of his grandfather, or, as he involuntarily thought, “ancestor,” in all likelihood dead for almost a century, but not that of his father, to whom he partially owed his life after all, did not feel it even here before the clear, bare geometric void, which otherwise could embody one absent and vanished person or another as little else could. He should have asked his mother after all. Now he had questions upon questions, and he had missed getting them answered, which caused a wave of bitter guilt to seize hold of him, and an anger with himself, accompanied by the thought, “Ah, my damned fatherlessness! Without a father: an outcast.”

  As if it had read his thoughts, at that very moment the awaited yellow butterfly floated down out of the blue sky above the cemetery, the brimstone butterfly of the Harz, as if just born of the air. One of us on the nocturnal boat, allegedly an expert on Japan and on Noh theater, predicted at this point in the story that as it fluttered closer it would assume human form, just as on the Noh stage, and exclaimed, when the boatmaster in fact described this very thing, “Exactly! Just as I said!” in a booming voice. Before the metamorphosis occurred, however, the butterfly fluttered up and down for a long time as the embodiment of the middle ground, though weightless. Forming a similar middle ground were the white sheets flapping on a clothesline in a garden that bordered on the cemetery and likewise, as a sound, the whistle of a train far below on the plain that stretched out from the Harz range.

  The butterfly, more yellow than ever against the brown background of the spruce trunks, worked its way from its seismographic dance to a straight line heading directly for him, and by the gravel rectangle transformed itself—“Exactly!”—into an old hag. She was ancient and heavy, and at last not a visitor to the spa but an indigenous inhabitant of the Harz region, with a walking stick, a hazel branch—what else?—which she brandished in the air instead of using it to lean on. And she promptly began to speak, roughly following the rhythm of her blows on the air, a confused babble: “Ah, yes, you damned man without a father! You think you’re invincible because you never had a father. You keep all eyes fixed on yourself, for better or worse. Make allowances for yourself, as a man without a father, that no one should make for himself. Think no rules apply to you, and if any do, then only very special ones. Rid of your father: the freest of the free? No, no, my dear fellow: no-father’s-child will never become an adult, will never ever, not through any number of forced marches, pinnacle conquests, desert crossings, become a complete man, at most an eccentric. You’re not above the law, you who thought you never needed a father; you’re an outlaw. You’ve been banished, banished not only from your father’s town but from all towns; you have no home. You put on princely airs, you fatherless man, with open space around you, but if you were a prince, then only the Prince of No Land, a prince without a country. You, fatherless one, were bound and determined to hurl yourself as a knight into the fight for an ideal, and when the moment came, you betrayed the ideal, failed to take responsibility, just as you betrayed your father from the very beginning, claiming to have no responsibility for him. As a lover, you dreamed up … You saw yourself as unique … You presented yourself as the one who … even in private, even when no one was there … Away with you, you fatherless fellow. You have no business being in your father’s town, not even here by the empty grave. You’ll never belong to the human race. If seven—or was it nine?—towns all claimed to be Homer’s birthplace, in your case nine times seven will deny that you come from them. You’ll die as an enemy of mankind. You’ll perish at the hand of a woman, an unloved woman, a hater of men. Too late will you call out for your father, asking why he abandoned you, when it was you who … Oh, dear, if only it were that simple. Maybe you can’t help it? Maybe you did search for your father at one time, here and there, with this person and that, but couldn’t find him, not to this day? And are still searching for him? Is that right? Or not? Away with you, my good fellow. You have no business being here. Srečan put. Safe travels.”

  6

  IF ON THE previous leg of his tour the former writer had given himself time in not merely princely but positively regal fashion, as he now set out for the country of his birth he suddenly felt in a hurry. He was drawn less to Austria than to what lay beyond, his home, yes, his home in the Balkans, to that boat on the Morava. He felt? thought? no, knew he was bound to the river and to the town of Porodin, knew he had an obligation to the place, even if almost no one there gave a damn about him, let alone needed him. With Austria, however, nothing in his thoughts linked him now, and that had been the case for so long that occasionally it struck him as almost sinister. His brother, to whom he felt somewhat close without their being in contact, and likewise Gregor Keuschnig, who had recently fled home from the no-man’s-bay, and Filip Kobal: these two did not constitute Austria for him, any more than did a couple of other acquaintances in that country. His native land—to which he had once been attached, which then, in a transitional period, had become his enemy, and to which he had once more become attached, and ready to defend it like a true patriot, if it happened to be attacked again, tooth and nail, from the outside, though in a way different from past attacks—this homeland had slipped out of his consciousness, for better or worse, and he did not feel altogether good about that. Not even in his dreams did his native land turn up.

  On the other hand, when he thought back to the period, mercifully short, when as a young writer he had been assigned the role of representing his country and had accordingly sometimes acted in that capacity, even today he was flooded with embarrassment, and at least it had given him a sense of freedom when he had subsequently ceased once and for all to be the spokesman for anyone or anything. Oh, not to be a public figure, not even of the sort he had sometimes been in those earlier days, more in jest than in earnest, and certainly not as a “national author.” He had escaped from all that not only by moving to the Balkans, a region under a cloud, and not only by renouncing any form of publishing. He still thought he had incurred guilt by playing along, if only halfheartedly, with the idea of being a national writer—lasting guilt. And why had he played along? Perhaps because at the time he had actually believed for a short while in something like another kind of nation, in fundamentally different nations, and had thought he could help to embody them. Fool. Village idiot. Housepost. (“Let me explain, for you houseposts,” the boatmaster interrupted his nocturnal narrative, “housepost is the Austrian expression for the feebleminded or hopelessly retarded person on a farm, someone who in every sense will never get beyond the house and barnyard but simply remain just that, a housepost.”)

  Recently, however, dreams about his native land had returned. Every night a birthplace dream, lasting all night long, with an epic breadth new for such dreams (if also with less content). He explained this phenomenon to himself, and later to us, his audience in the boat’s salon, thus: during the time he and the woman, the stranger, had been together, he had talked to her constantly about his childhood village and his ancestors, without being asked, as if this sharing, including the fact of his not being asked, were a necessary component of his enthusiasm about her and him, about the two of them. Even in her absence he continued telling her, silently, about the escarpment behind his house where on Easter eve the ring of fire, visible across the entire valley, formed by oil-fueled torches—or was the oil burning in tin cans?—glowed, and where Jesus’s resurrection was celebrated with fireworks, in the course of which an operator had once had his arm blown off, and he also described the bend in the brook where one summer he saw, could not help seeing, his mother naked for the first and last time—the last time, Mother!—as she bathed there with several others, and he described the barn out in the fields, from which he heard, as he passed it one day, the voices of a man and a woman ring out, no, sing out—and those voices were so calm, so melodic in their alternating singing, with equally calm and melodic pauses in between, the vo
ices of two people invisible behind the weathered gray planks, a dialogue that he could not make out, but more tender and intimate than he had ever heard anywhere, and not to be jolted out of this particular calmness by any incident; he went on and on, describing how things were back home, by preference talking about nothing of moment, nothing at all.

  But why was he looking to explain the reappearance of his village in dreams, he of all people, who normally shied away from any kind of explanation and responded to anyone who began offering explanations with a blank if not withering gaze? Since when did he need explanations? Since he had stopped writing? Since he no longer wrote sentences, one after the other, linked by “because,” “as a result of,” and “due to”? Ah, wasn’t this precisely an attempt on our part to come up with an explanation? Since when did we, his listeners, his friends (more or less), need explanations? Since we had ceased to be his readers? Ah, isn’t that precisely … Enough about explanations, now and forever, amen.

  Furthermore, his recent dreams were terrifying. The terror, or rather the horror, came not from the fact that his birth village no longer existed, which was quite natural, so to speak, but rather from the people there, the ancestors, who, actually dead long since, in his dreams were initially still alive, but soon fell into their death struggle, as ferocious as it was monotonous, and in the end, still dying ferociously and not wanting to die, departed from the scene of the action, leaving from then on only the former site of the village in a void as gloomy as it was poignant, nothing but the geologic formations there, or—how did one put it?—the topography, the hilltops, the gulches, the bends and three-way intersections of former roads, without the roads themselves, the circle of the tree stump in the middle of the village, without the tree, and above it the dome of the sky, without the sky.

  Now our interrupter wanted to know whether this explained why the traveler had been in such a hurry to get through his country of origin—of course he was asking only in jest. For wasn’t it clear that these dreams pertained only to the village and its surrounding area and in no way to all of Austria—that had never been the subject of earlier dreams either? And besides, during his passage through the country he was soon not in such a hurry after all, as would become clear in the course of events.

  Heading southeast from Germany, he traveled by plane, an exception on his tour, and however quickly it took off, it flew much too slowly for him. With every glance out the window it seemed as if the aircraft had hardly moved. It was a clear day, and the flight passed over the Alps, covered with snow, as white as snow can be, all the way down into the valleys. Each of the valleys, dark, narrow gashes, had more the character of an inhospitable trench, an uninhabitable ravine, a cold spot. And this desert of blinding snow below, without a single sign of life, stretched on endlessly. The pilot came on the loudspeaker to recommend looking down at the Sea of Stone, and an eternity later the Death Range. The two sights hardly differed, however. The plane merely pretended to be moving. In reality it had not “budged from the spot,” the expression he involuntarily used during that night on the Morava. Never would it land, and he would have to remain forever staring out the window, stuck at ten thousand meters, at the unchanging, glittering white mountains, which, whether the Sea of Stone or—six of one, half a dozen of the other—the Death Range, provided no variations in contour. The cloud cover in between was welcome—then furrowed by the tailfin of another airplane, otherwise invisible, like that of a shark.

  And the greater his hurry to get away from there, not merely away from the mountains but to a different country, the more time seemed to drag. The plane was supposedly zipping along at a speed close to the sound barrier, and at the same time he experienced a kind of impatience that he took for the symptom of an illness, a particularly malignant one, which he dubbed “time-sickness.” He wondered whether this sickness belonged to him alone, as something unique, his being the only case. At any rate, being time-sick expressed itself—if one was in a rush—in physical terms by squeezing the air out of one’s lungs, air that in any case was hardly breatheable in a plane jetting along, and by exacerbating ordinary everyday afflictions such as a rapid pulse, a scratchy throat, fatigue, or also merely chilled or burning feet; and as for the soul, this time-sickness that broke out as a result of excessive hurrying suggested that one’s destination was not only not closer but was rather receding farther and farther, from heartbeat to heartbeat, and above all, that it was not a destination worthy of the name, and that the people and landscapes awaiting one there, even the most beloved ones, were alien in the sense that they meant nothing—that the destination itself in that sense was alien territory.

  When the plane, after an evil eternity, landed after all, he welcomed being shaken by the bumpy concrete runway and would have been glad to be shaken even more roughly. Nothing against haste—it could be pleasurable at times and mobilize one’s vital spirits, especially if one could concentrate intently on the haste itself, have eyes and ears for nothing else. But rushing, being in a rush, should be avoided wherever possible. For the rest of the tour he had to see to it that he would never again stumble into the kind of excessive haste that came from within and inflicted an acute sense of having too little time. He reached that decision as he stood motionless for a long time outside Schwechat Airport, off to one side, as a woman’s voice repeated over and over on the public address system, “Attention: this is a tow-away zone!” Earlier, as the plane approached his Austria, flying in a wide loop over Lake Neusiedl, close to the Hungarian border, before heading west again, he had already decided to rescind the cuts he had been planning to make in his itinerary; while approaching solid ground and experiencing the plane’s deceleration, one returned to time, settled back into it in a presumably innate system, all within the space of a single second that restored one’s soul to health. And that meant that the earth below could be seen, and soon also felt, without one’s needing a bird’s-eye view: looking down, one caught sight of the reeds forming a belt around Lake Neusiedl at the same time as one felt them tickling one’s cheeks as they had long ago, and as one gazed down at the expanse of fallow fields bordering the runway, one recognized the former cart tracks, long since plowed under or leveled, and the filled-in brooks as darker strips, welts, hairpin turns, and meanders inscribed on the smooth, pale surface, went walking along one of those tracks or along one of the brooks, holding an ancestor’s hand, barefoot on a summer day before dawn, ankle-deep in the dust of the path, which shimmered in the dim first light and was still cool from the night, with scattered raindrops falling, large ones—the size of a schilling!—that dug schilling-sized craters in the dusty sand, one crater after another, and connected the cart track, the two people walking on it, and the summery predawn landscape for another eternity, with the moon above, whether visible at that time or not. No, abbreviating the itinerary “homeward” to the Balkans was out of the question. Being on the road, the expedition, had to continue in the rhythm that had guided it up to that moment. No leveling, no infilling, no beeline, no speed-up, no time-lapse effects. The round- and zigzag trip had to continue as it had begun, as a long-drawn-out tale.

  It was already long, and as he arrived in Austria it was a day shortly before the onset of spring, like the day on which he had set out from the enclave on the Morava: last patches of snow here as there, gray grass, with single fresh shoots, few and far between. It was still the middle of the day, and the sun was shining, the sun of having time. To enjoy the sun he decided to set out on foot from the airport, heading into the countryside, without a predetermined destination, letting himself be led by the roads, the paths, the shortcuts, the horizons—and of course the sun of having time—all the way to Vienna, for all he cared, though not into the heart of the city, the inner districts.

  Not that he had any specific objection to them. It was involuntary resistance. In the past he had been in his capital city often, very often, and each time it had presented itself to him as a labyrinth, unlike any of the other great metropolises
. And the center had been where he completely lost his way. If occasionally he thought he finally knew his way around, at the very next narrow side street, or after taking the covered passageway from one palace to the next, he would have no clue which way to turn. That was during the period when passersby still recognized him as the person who … and when he asked someone for directions, the person would be surprised that he of all people, in the other person’s eyes a public figure, a representative of the country—for that was how a writer was viewed in those days by not a few—could get lost there, in the very heart of the country. And it seemed inevitable that in the inner districts of Vienna he would lose his bearings from one moment to the next. Even if it was his hundredth time in a certain location, even if he had a map in his hand, he would strike out in the wrong direction and eventually be unable to find his way out of the labyrinth, or at least not without someone’s help. And in the government district he invariably mixed up the ministries and the buildings in general and introduced himself to the concierge of a theater who he thought was the concierge of the Hofburg; tried to enter the Hofburg, or whatever it was called, through a delivery entrance, and finally fled from the kaisers’ crypt, which he had never intended to visit, to an ordinary sausage stand, where he breathed a sigh of relief.