Across Read online

  The lump of clay with the round black hiding places lay there like an abandoned primeval necropolis where nothing remains but lizards. The lamp illumined the desk, which was bare except for the four objects. The rest of the room, ordinarily unlit, lay in half darkness. In the neighboring apartments, next door and upstairs, water faucets sounded one after another. On the west and east edge of the plain, where the two railroad lines recede into the distance, a long-drawn-out whistling coupled with a rumbling could be heard at regular intervals; and on the express highway skirting the Untersberg, a roaring and a blowing of horns. Some of the apartment-house windows were open to the balmy evening air; a fat man in a white undershirt was leaning out of one of them, smoking; in another stood a clay jar, holding a papyrus plant that shot up like fireworks, its star-shaped greenery strikingly vivid against the yellow sky; in the window downstairs a caged parrot, luminous blue in the twilight, sat silently shaking its head; one of the open windows was empty.

  Why did I leave my family? Was I sent away? Was it my idea to desert the three of them? Was there any reason for the separation (which has never become an official divorce)? Did I leave for good, or only for the time being? Haven’t I got the daily routine of each one of them in my head, as though I were secretly still living with them? Whenever I run into my son or daughter in the street, isn’t their first question, put without emphasis, rather as a matter of course: “When are you coming over?”—the kind of thing one doesn’t say to just anyone. Would I live with them again someday? To all those questions I have had no answer, though I believe I know one thing: a final separation will never be possible. In any case, my name, “Loser” (common all over Austria, and also frequent in the phone books of northern Italy, especially in such cities as Gorizia and Trieste), does not in my opinion suggest someone who gets rid (los) of something, and certainly not a loser (in the English sense); it is, I believe, connected with the dialect verb losen, meaning “listen” or “hark.” In the Salzkammergut there’s a mountain called Loser, which starts as a gently rounded hill but culminates in a massive rocky dome; a seemingly unscalable fortress, with sides so steep that they remain almost free of snow in the winter, the few snowy patches suggesting false windows.

  On the other hand, I have no idea what my wife is up to, what people she sees, what kind of work she’s doing. Unlike me, she takes easily to new languages—has she become a translator? Is she going on with her studies, which were interrupted by our marriage? Is she guiding tourists around the town? (I once thought I saw her, holding an umbrella over her head and leading a group.) Is she lecturing at the People’s University? I never ask. Even before, I seldom asked her a question. That may be what led to our separation. Inability to ask questions is often my problem. And yet I’m made up almost entirely of questions. But, as a rule, I regard every question as the wrong one and I can’t get it out of my mouth. Or then again, something in me rebels against the kind of questioning that might better be called pumping.

  Yet I keep going back to the house where my family live. Though considerable time may have elapsed, there’s no great excitement when I come in; only the conventional evening greetings of people who have been going their separate ways during the day. Once, when I’d been away for six months, my son in his room just looked up briefly from something or other and said: “Well?”

  The house is the kind of place where an old-time teacher might have lived—It’s painted yellow, with pointed gables and a wooden veranda that serves as a winter garden. It’s in Gois, which lies a few fields and pastures to the west of Loig with its Roman villa. The guidebooks list Gois as a suburb of Salzburg, but it’s a good hour’s walk from the center of the city and gives the impression of a remote peasant village. The only connection with the Old City is by bus, and the last bus leaves the city before the end of the working day. The road is narrow and little traveled; for a short stretch before the village, it degenerates into a dirt path through the fields. What one sees first of the village is a scattering of farmhouses; there are few new buildings. The walls of the farmhouses are of porous, untrimmed stone in various shades of gray, inlaid with small black slag stones. The doors are made of a kind of pudding stone, and the thresholds of a reddish marble with light-colored veins and numerous ammonite inclusions. This gives the farms an old-fashioned look, as though they belonged to a different period from the one-family houses in their midst, as though they had been built before the Gothic church on the knoll. They form a kind of unit with the knoll in the flat country, a strange formation suggesting a prehistoric mound. Round about there are fields, their base lines pointing toward Salzburg. Of the city one can see only the castle, which from there looks like a bright, delicately shaped stone crown. The fields, on which more vegetables are grown than grain, seem to extend almost to the city limits, thus giving the impression of a vast plantation, capable of supplying the whole city. At dusk, the red lights in the belfry go on—warning signals for planes. On its way back to town, the last bus from Grossgmain, dark inside, stops in front of the village inn, whose curtains, as customary throughout Austria, are drawn immediately after sunset. Despite the short row of streetlamps, no village for miles around is quieter in the evening. Since the church is not a parish church, there are no evening bells. On the other hand, the stars over the fields are brighter here than anywhere else. The constellations can be distinguished at a glance; one doesn’t have to look for them. And the soft rustling of the bushes by the roadside is clearly audible. Seen from the city, Gois consists only of the red lights on the belfry, barely distinguishable from the harsh yellow row of lamps beyond it, marking the Walserberg Autobahn overpass.

  What stops me from going back to the school when my paper is finished? Don’t I need my daily work, or at least my presence there, the comfort of habitual turns of phrase? Hasn’t my place always been in an interlocking collective, each member of which, however, keeps his distance from the others? Doesn’t the public sphere, without which I am incomplete, begin at the school door? Isn’t my ride to my public existence the natural thing for me, and doesn’t it open up the possibility of a satisfactory way back? In any event, I don’t regard myself as a loner, it doesn’t suit me to be a freelancer, and certainly not an independent scholar (though, early in my studies, someone advised me to become one) . I know I should work with others, not just occasionally, but day after day. Only among others does something resembling a world appear to me, if only in the briefly flaring brown of a lichen in the Antarctic. One day perhaps a stranger from the plains, on his way to a still-undiscovered city, will approach our local castle (that forbidding hulk), and the canal at his feet will flow through timeless lowlands, or through the Chinese limestone province of Kwei-lin. Did I, for that, need a kind, my kind, of job? But now will I have another few days to myself? Won’t it soon be Easter vacation, in any case?

  I opened both my workroom windows and let the sounds in. From the north, not far away, came the ringing of the bells at Gneis, which is already within the city limits; from the west, almost as audible because of the wind, the bells of the Moos church, which was much farther away. The manager of the store downstairs was moving boxes and chalked signs back inside. A train in the distance didn’t whistle, but gave out a sound as of someone blowing into his cupped hands—a brewery locomotive on the way back to its shed for the night. High over the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, the plane from Zurich came into view with a violent blinking of lights; the runway was brightly lit to receive it; the plane went into a slow glide and its landing lights flared up; a few seconds after it put down, the din filled the whole plain.

  Now I had time. Facts and questions crystallized. This having-time wasn’t a feeling; it was a resolution: the resolution of all my contradictory feelings. It was a jolt and a widening; disengagement and devotion; defenselessness and the ability to resist; quiescence and enterprise. Its occurrence was rare. Perhaps what is commonly called a “state of grace” should be called a “state of having time.” It had its counterpar
t in a traditional paraphrase of the threshold concept as a “transition between privation and riches.” In a state of having-time, a murmur spread over the countryside, colors shone, grasses trembled, moss cushions puffed up.

  Holding my plate on my lap, I ate in the kitchen, which was too small for a table. A colony of daddy longlegs adhered to the walls, clinging to the grainy limestone with their spindly legs, which suggested clock hands. Unceasingly, they swung to and fro, giving the whole kitchen the air of a clockmaker’s workshop, filled with pendulums and silent ticking. From time to time the clocks shifted their position, or else one would stand long-legged over another, the two of them swinging together. Down on the tile floor, several of the evidently short-lived creatures lay on their backs, radial forms no longer—some with legs folded in dying, but quivering violently; others, already dead, had twined their legs tightly around their already dried-out bodies: mummylike balls, visibly gathering dust. The gaps left by the fallen were immediately taken by others, evidently newborn, brighter in color than the rest and conspicuously smaller, which joined at once in the general ticking. These creatures are known to me from excavation sites, where they often keep those working in the galleries company with their pendular motion. Here in my place they serve as household pets, as does the unidentified insect inside the ball of sand on my desk; by making me look up and pause in my work, they, like sundials, help me to “have time.” If it was possible in the past to worship (or at least to see) the sun in beetles, why not in these harmless spiders that spin no webs? These are animals which, even when they appear in large numbers, provoke no fear, but only surprise and amusement. “Daddy longlegs, patron of threshold seekers,” I said in the night-dark kitchen to the hum of the fluorescent lamp, to the ticking of the real clock (on the electric stove), to the clicking of the trolleys on a bus that was just pulling out from the turnaround down below.

  And then the ticking and swinging of the daddy longlegs tied in with the poem, from which, as usual at the end of the day, I slowly, word by word, read a few lines —Virgil’s poetic treatise on agriculture, known as The Georgics (I hope to translate it when I’m old and retired from other work): the lines from The Georgics turn time back for me, or give it a different meaning.

  The express purpose of the work, as stated at the beginning, is instruction: about the dates for plowing, binding the vines, and so on, about cattle raising and agriculture; at the same time, it is conceived as a poem. This poem can indeed teach us a great deal about the laws of nature, and its teaching cannot grow old. For instance, a vine outside our house in Gois was languishing until in The Georgics I came across a line I had disregarded up until then, to the effect that “grain” demands “firm soil,” whereas the vine requires “loose soil.” And our worry about the bay tree in the garden whose leaves fell at the slightest midsummer breeze was dispelled by Virgil’s casual remark about the pomegranate tree, which according to him resembles the bay, except that it smells different and that “no wind can tear off its reeling leaves” (suggesting that such loss of leaves was characteristic of the bay tree and not a symptom of disease).

  However, it is not from these agricultural precepts that I derive the lesson I really care about, but from the poet’s enthusiasm (never uncontrolled) for the things that still matter: the sun, the earth, rivers, woods, trees and shrubs, domestic animals, fruits (along with jars and baskets), utensils and tools. In these objects, justice, before vanishing from the world, left its trace; thus, far from the weapons that divide man from man (the usual word for “weapon” stands here for peaceable implements), every single thing in the poem, removed once and for all from history, distanced from other things and at the same time held in free association with them, gives me access to a very different story—usually invoked with an epithet: the slow-growing olive tree, the smooth linden, the bright-colored maple, the loose marl, the savage east wind, the air-clearing north wind, the dew-giving moon. Similarly, a box hedge, trimmed round or square in accordance with present-day tastes, conceals (or preserves) within itself the “swaying box tree,” which I am able to reconstruct on the basis of the epithet that does justice to the thing. Virgil, it is said, created his verses in the manner of a she-bear bringing forth her cubs, by hard labor during birth and even greater labor in “licking them clean,” so as to give his progeny its existential form. And since poetry should above all be congruent with things, these verses never cease to revive for me, the reader, the existence of the things they sing of. Goats with their heavy udders—are they not “struggling across the threshold” at this very moment? Are not cows once again “obliterating their tracks with their tails as they make their way” over some country road? As I looked up, a car from somewhere turned onto the canal bridge and, thanks to Virgil’s verses, gleamed a special blue.

  The circle of lamplight on my desk; the bicycle stand down at the bus stop (replacing the pyramid of the Staufen, which had vanished in the darkness) ; the driver sitting in the waiting bus; the dog lying in the garden of the house next door; the stacks of shopping bags in the supermarket; the birds roosting in the bushes; the dangling creepers on the Salzach meadows; the emptiness of the long wooden bench in front of a farmhouse; the crisscrossing paths on the plain; the crookedness of the quarter moon (in place of the blinking airplane that was there before); the green spirals in the vegetable gardens; the sinkholes in the Untersberg karst (an inverted pyramid); the slow rotation of the disk in the electric meter; the falling dew; the gravel banks deposited on alluvial cones; the body lying in state; the winged ram.

  Leaving the book open and the lamp lit, I went downstairs. I sat with the driver in the stationary bus. Outside, on the bench in the shelter, lay a folded newspaper; under it, a seemingly congealed puddle of vomit. When one looked at it a while, the face of the almost naked young woman on the billboard beside it became open and expectant. On the railing of the canal bridge, a couple were sitting pressed close. The man had his arm around the woman. She was wearing white patent-leather shoes which, as they kissed, protruded motionless from above the bottom crossbar.

  Now and then, the hazel catkins at the edge of the woods gave off a yellowish dust, without being visibly stirred by the wind. Many of the darker, barely nascent catkins on the lone birch were shaped like bird’s claws. The moon was tinged with red, which according to The Georgics meant storms (a whitish coloration would have foreshadowed rain).

  By then, the buses were running only at infrequent intervals. This one had stopped for so long at the terminus that it seemed to be waiting for someone. Then a young girl with a red coat and far-echoing high heels emerged from the Colony and got in; her eyes were ringed with black and she had pink circles of powder on her cheeks. During the ride she stood beside the driver, occasionally resting her hand on his shoulder and grazing him with her hip. The ground fog drifted across the road, as often happens in the evening on the plain, with periods during which one could see quite clearly. After a few stops, I got off near the illuminated glass wall of the indoor tennis courts in Gneis, still far from the Old City. The girl behind me said: “An Indian”—which was startling, because, only a short while before, a child coming toward me in the street had shouted out the same word to its mother: “Look, an Indian!”

  Behind the high, illuminated wall of the tennis-court building lies the municipal cemetery, in the darkness an elongated mass of bare trees that could be mistaken for a park; the lighted candles on the graves were invisible. The tennis courts resounded with thumped balls, shouts, and running steps. Now and then, the white shape of a shoulder or a hip could be seen on the opaque glass. The air ducts of the snack bar adjoining the sports stadium gave forth a roar of voices, suggesting an overcrowded beer hall rather than so small a room. The serried cars in the parking lot were wet with dew. The wide open field on the city side of the cemetery kept disgorging strollers and joggers, who either headed for nearby cafés or vanished into one of the new apartment houses, the biggest of which were not even as tall as the popla
rs (there is still not a single high-rise building in the entire Moos district). When the bus drove on, the overhead wires showered sparks at the crossings, and when it was gone, the wires far down the road continued to flash in the headlights of passing cars—a trail of light in the night sky, enlivened by the spiraling light-colored pigeons in the mist around the tennis-court building and the moonlit clouds between the steeples of the Gneis church. The evenings are lively in this suburban section, quite unlike those of the Old City, where the streets and squares are almost deserted at this hour and the few remaining passersby are excessively quiet when they are not shouting. There was a smell of wood fires (or was it a last remnant of the smoke from the crematorium, which during the day could often be seen rising above the treetops?). Buzzing monotonously, a single-engine airplane described an arc over the inhabited zone (this time there would be no crash; not here, at least).

  To one side, tennis courts and cemetery; to the other, the Alm Canal. At the foot of its embankment, there’s a building that looks like a home, the Canal Tavern. To reach it, one passes through a vacant, treeless field, across which the tavern’s luminous sign can be seen from far off, at dusk soft-white against the eastern sky, in the darkness glaring—an outlandish signal on the low house at the edge of the field. The café is run by a pensioner, but he has put it in his wife’s name (for fear of losing his pension). The front garden is even smaller than those in the nearby development, and the jukebox is not in the café proper but in the entrance, which has the size and proportions of a vestibule in a private house. Beside the jukebox, there is a similarly lighted vitrine with food in it.