The Moravian Night Read online

  It was a bumblebee-dying day, characteristic of the season between winter and spring when the weather turns so warm toward noon that the bumblebees come thundering in from somewhere or other, perhaps searching for even greater warmth, staying close to the ground rather than up in the air, down in the grass, through which their heavy yellow and black bodies wend their way, not at all numerous and each one by itself, but with its sonorous buzzing creating the impression of several, or a whole swarm of, bumblebees—do bumblebees actually swarm? Then, however, when toward evening the late-winter chill returns, the buzzing and the sonority fall silent, or instead, here and there, even deeper in the grass, an abrupt hissing becomes audible, breaking off just as abruptly, a whimpering as if from a prisoner, and when you look down, you see, littering the towpath up on the dike, bumblebees on their backs, their legs still quivering and flailing, or already cricked and motionless, and the two pairs of wings drawn in against the body, with perhaps one of the transparent wings sticking out a little, these little puffed-up creatures that but an hour ago were so full of life now shrunken, a couple of them lying on their backs or, more often, tipped on their sides, uttering one more cry of alarm, but most of them already dead, dead as bumblebees, which is perhaps more vividly dead than dead as doornails, more graphic, with the cricked legs, their antennae extended rigidly into the void, their proboscises expired in the middle of sucking, and above all their bumblebee posteriors with their furry covering, meant to warm what, and how? The rain may cause the various parts of the bumblebee anatomy to glow in fresh colors, honey-yellow and bear-black/brown, but no amount of placing you bees in one’s palm and blowing on you will save you from death or bring you back to life; that was already true in one’s childhood, and nevertheless, I tell you, it was tried again and again, back then on bumblebee-dying days as today.

  Was it his imagination that he now heard the great bell of St. Stephen’s Cathedral booming in the distance, ringing in the evening and reaching him from the heart of that city of which he could glimpse only a few warehouses far off, while at his feet the rain slapped the deserted surface of the Danube, which seemed to flow faster while swooshing by smoothly? No, it really was the bell, and so three sounds mingled, the distant booming combining with the rain’s slapping and the river’s swooshing, almost roaring for moments at a time, and he then noticed a fourth sound, that of his footsteps on the path along the dike, which blended with the others. And in this way he finally found a name for himself in the story of his journey through Europe: not as a traveler, tourist, or former writer would he henceforth be known, but? as a wanderer. Yes, he was a wanderer, the wanderer. And wasn’t there a song about that? “I am a lonesome wanderer”?

  Beyond the warehouses, hundreds of years old, towering skyward, and seemingly long since out of use, there now appeared through the rainy haze a similar structure, which, instead of towering skyward, walled off the entire horizon. This was the former Kaiserebersdorf juvenile penitentiary, or whatever it was called, stretching for miles along a ridge, its thousands of windows now only gaping holes, which they might have been even when the building was still occupied, and above them a roof as massive and heavy as if from another planet, made of the heaviest material possible and itself a part of that planet, a structure such as the world, the earth, had not yet seen, which probably also explained why this bulwark against delinquent youth was still standing and not to be torn down, and high up he recognized, by an opening just under this roof, his own cell in the boarding school, recognized all of our cells, and he felt a powerful urge to go where he could be among human beings.

  Away from the stream and across the steppe toward the warehouses. Upon approaching them, in the rain, which in the meantime was pouring in classic rain style, he saw that the warehouses had once formed part of a gigantic mill complex, to which and away from which ran rusted railway tracks. In the lee of the mill towers, a rail yard for freight containers was in operation, with neon tubes gleaming in front of the two concrete barracks for the workers, but without a single human being anywhere in sight. Making his way along the sleepers, and seeing, as was always the case, bird skeletons between the ties, while the rain drummed on the metal containers, in many pitches, up and down the scale, as it were, now and then on just one note, which sounded massive and frenetic, according to the containers’ contents, whether they were more full or empty, or entirely full or empty, a jumble of colors at any rate, and with point-of-origin stickers from all corners of the globe, and correspondingly in a variety of scripts—not even the Armenian, Georgian, Thai, Malaysian scripts were missing. And on the edge of the container depot, where, after the stretch of steppe the floodplain forest resumed, appeared the inn for which he had been hoping. It had to be there; its presence had announced itself while it was still out of sight. And the name, too, could have been predicted: “Floodplain Inn, formerly Inn of the Unknown.”

  A sort of garden bay, bordered on one side by the floodplain forest and on the other by stacks of containers, surrounded the inn, with trees that were neither alders nor poplars as in the forest but were leftovers from an old orchard. They were still bare but could be identified by their bark as apples, pears, plums, cherries. Old, much older, was the house, long and single-storied with a row of small windows, all of them with their sills almost at the level of the lawn, as if one were supposed to climb in and out through them. The steep roof, as high again as the building, was covered in slate, with dormers that mirrored those of the juvenile penitentiary, if only for an alarming second. The building’s stucco was pale yellow, freshly painted, making it look more like a farmhouse than an inn. Yet it was a quintessential inn, as became clear from the smoke puffing from the chimney with such force that it pushed aside the rain, and indicating, even without cars parked among the trees, what destination one had reached; the lettering above the rather narrow front door seemed almost superfluous.

  Entering, soaking wet, or, to use a somewhat older expression, drenched. A dark, empty vestibule, unlit, reminiscent after all of an old farmhouse, and cold like one besides. Not a sound. Where to enter? Ah, there it was: Dining Room. And unexpectedly he found himself, just as he had wished, among people, among many people. Too many? No. At first the wanderer thought he had stumbled into a refugee camp—that was how self-absorbed each occupant of that one room appeared, also lost in thought, or rather simply lost. Hardly one of them looked up as he entered, except for the innkeeper, if that is what he was, you know, behind the bar—if that is what it was, you know. Occupants of a refugee camp? Reinforcing that impression, many of the many in the room were not sitting at the long tables, on the benches provided, but on the bare floor, or were even squatting there, on their heels. Packed in, almost like sardines. Contributing to the image of a reception center was the composition of the crowd, in which all races, or whatever they are called, were represented, Mongolians with Africans, among them Zulus and—or was he mistaken?—pygmies, Eskimos, unmistakable, with equally unmistakable Indians from the Andes, Tibetans, though not displaying that world-famous smile, with—was this possible?—yes, Australian aborigines, though here not wearing loincloths but suits and ties … But how to account for the presence among the refugees of one-hundred-percent-native Austrians, they, too, there on the bare floor, some of them in traditional peasant costumes—from Styria? from Carinthia? had he been away so long that he had forgotten? And what about the tall Irishman there, in an elegant ankle-length duster, red-haired, of course, who at that moment worked his way out of the crowd and mounted a previously unoccupied platform by the wall in the back of the back of the room? And how about the naturally snub-nosed, naturally Viking-blond Scandinavian in a fur-lined parka, who now followed the Irishman? And in the meantime had Japanese, North Americans, Germans, even some of us Austrians become refugees? At any rate, one after another, clearly identifiable individuals now stepped onto the stage, a beautiful Mongolian woman, a suntanned Uzbek, a Galician from the north of Spain (so here we met again).

  N
o: these were not refugees. If the many people, whether in the dining area or on the stage, were lost in thought, at the same time they were paying attention; they were lost, as one could see on closer inspection, not in their own thoughts but in something outside themselves that they all had in common. Did such a thing exist? Yes, it did. It was anticipation. Any moment now, it, whatever it was, would begin. That impression was reinforced by the innkeeper—or organizer?—who, from his spot behind the counter turned toward the new arrival and placed his index finger over his mouth. With his other hand, however, he energetically waved the drenched traveler—with such a welcoming, veritably Balkan-style hospitable smile in his eyes—over to the granite fireplace, not at all usual for a farmhouse, where a fire blazed like that of a blast furnace, sending out so much heat that in no time one would feel “dried through.”

  The lights in the dining area went out. But above the stage, over the heads of those standing there shoulder to shoulder, floodlights came on, powerful ones. A concert? But where were the instruments? None to be seen. A choral performance, a cappella, so to speak? Given the variations among the people up there, hardly to be expected. Or perhaps after all? A song cycle from around the world? Urbi et orbi? Heaven preserve us! And suddenly he knew, should have known from the moment he approached the front door. Bolted to its wood was an iron shape, not a horseshoe such as one would often find, but rather something that had to be mysterious to an outsider, though not to him, the wanderer: it was a jew’s harp. And unlike a horseshoe, this jew’s harp did not have its normal dimensions. In its natural size probably the smallest instrument in the world, this jew’s harp appeared on the door in monumental proportions, and that perhaps explained why he had not recognized it instantly.

  Who would begin, start playing the jew’s harp? Not likely that it would be the two Austrians in their traditional brown loden suits with horn buttons, the buttons on the lapels in the form of skulls. But why not? Their faces, in which their eyes were screwed up with concentration, hardly differed from those of the Mongolians and Yakuts; their foreheads and cheeks gleamed just like those of the Zulu, the Indio, the Athabascan from Alaska. All of them up there on the stage had positioned their “gewgaw,” “guimbarde,” “buzziron,” “thoughtcrusher,” or “khomus” between their lips, and one had to be familiar with the instrument to recognize them as such and not mistake them for metal toothpicks or who knows what. Who would begin? The white American from Bay City, Oregon, let’s say, in the cowboy hat and Oregon boots? No, he edged unobtrusively into the background and made himself invisible. The young woman struck the first note, the one in a white fur cap, who had eyes that looked inward yet at the same time took in the entire dining room, and menacingly flared nostrils, the Mongolian woman, come to the world jew’s-harp convention from Inner Mongolia.

  She played alone. From time to time she also sang, a vibrating that could hardly be distinguished from that of the instrument that had half disappeared into her oral cavity and was also almost covered by the hand holding it, a vibrating that responded to the instrument’s, only pitched an octave higher?—but such numerical indications did not do justice either to her voice or to the sounds produced by the jew’s harp. How long did the Mongolian woman play all alone? As long as she did, and could vary the pitch of her breath. And if initially she was perhaps performing an established, traditional tune from her native region, from the arid steppe or wherever, she forgot the tune even before it was over, abandoned the familiar song right in the middle, quite decisively, and began, equally decisively, using her breath and her finger on the trigger, to express in vibrations and sounds what was inside her at that moment, as well as in those around her—see above, her eyes taking in the entire room.

  It was as if this decisive abandoning of what had been in her head, or wherever, from long ago, or whenever, of oneself, of one’s people or tribe or anyone from before, and moving on to a different kind of playing, one without signposts, one that could be either free or also misleading, was in the nature of performing on the jew’s harp, regardless of what part of the world one came from, also regardless of the variations in the instrument from continent to continent, where it could take very different forms and be made from different materials—the vibrating tongue could be made of twisted animal sinews rather than steel. The players who followed the Mongolian woman—the Sicilian, the Turk from Konya, and so on—if they even started playing anything from their own countries, as their signature melody, so to speak, all broke off in the middle and moved on to something that could not be characterized and certainly not captured in musical notation. Even the two Austrians, who fell in at the end, together, unisono, in the rhythm of a ländler—or was it a polka?—gleefully abandoned the rhythm after the first few measures and, with eyes gleaming like those of the players before them, took up a kind of call and response consisting simply of each breathing toward the other through that one steel string between his lips, a sound beyond, or rather before speaking and music, just as the jew’s harp, if an instrument at all, was one that preceded any kind of speaking and any kind of music, a sort of tuning fork, though a very special kind, its particular sound produced not by means of striking a dead object but by activating sustained human breath.

  Yet even without a signature melody, usually struck up more in jest, one could hear an entirely different country from each performer, no matter how unself-consciously he plucked his string and breathed on it from deep in his chest. His own, his native environment, his ancestral land? Not necessarily—rather an indeterminate one—but definitely a country, a hinterland, clearly distinguished from that of the person playing before or after him. The feature common to all these very different countries turned out to be the way in which each individual performance evaporated so suddenly after it ended. How so? Listen, listen: it seemed to be a further part of the nature of playing the jew’s harp that it resisted coming to a harmonic close, a finale. If it ended harmonically, with unmistakable concluding notes, as was traditional here and there not only in Central Europe, one had the impression, as with no other instrument, of some kind of betrayal, or at least a trivializing. The secret and also obvious law of the jew’s harp went this way: there is no ending, only breaking off. A good ending is a false ending. And: the performance time must be brief, from performance to performance, from player to player, with a long gap before the next performance, that, too, in distinction to every other instrument. The jew’s harp’s time is soon up, often after just a few notes, even after just one note. But what a note that could be. What a vibrating, so long as it sounded at the right moment, beginning without end, and instead of an opening measure, just an initial sound.

  No question about it: these laws were suspended for the duration of the international convention in the inn’s dining room. Once returned to his or her part of the world, each of those gathered here would be playing alone and would continue to do so for most of the following year—except perhaps for the Central Europeans—and would observe those laws strictly. Here, however, for the few days of the meeting, of which this was the last, and their last evening together, different rules were in force. Although the players had come from all corners of the globe as individuals, not as representatives of those corners, now, toward the end, each of them struck up a melody from his or her land of origin, plucking, striking, pounding out, not just any tune but one that stood for that country, such as a national anthem, from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “Deutschland, Deutschland…” to “Allons, enfants de la patrie,” from beginning to end, through all the verses. Played on the jew’s harp, the buzziron, the thoughtcrusher, the guimbarde (its first meaning: accompaniment for the country dance), all these anthems at first sounded ridiculous, but that changed, even when eventually all those on the platform were playing simultaneously, anthems and popular songs all mixed up, you know: the Indio playing “Guantanamera,” the Irishman “Two for the Road,” the Italian “Azzurro.” To a man, or woman, they all looked frightfully ugly, their faces twisted a
nd the jew’s harps between their teeth. But to hear them …

  The only person in the dining room of the Inn of the Unknown who took this final performance by the international jew’s-harp players at face value was the new arrival, the wanderer. When he described the rest to us during that night on the Morava, he could not say whether he had actually experienced the event or had merely dreamed it. If it was a dream, it nonetheless filled him with a feeling stronger and more lasting than almost anything experienced while awake. Going off on a tangent, he remarked that more and more feelings of great and persistent happiness, gratitude, affection, and love of life came to him only in dreams.

  And what did he feel upon hearing the medley played on the jew’s harps? Rage. A rage this overwhelming he definitely experienced only in dreams. And what did he do in this rage? Or what did he dream about doing? He jumped up from his spot by the fireplace—or was it a smith’s hearth, left over from an earlier blacksmith’s shop?—and hastened in long strides to the players on the stage. While still moving, he fumbled in his hiker’s jacket and pulled out a jew’s harp, his old traveling companion, which, when he pressed it between his teeth, tasted rusty. He aimed single notes, first from below and then up on the stage, at eye level, at the miscreants, isolated notes full of rage, at intervals calculated to disrupt their melodies and rhythms. Abusing the jew’s harp to play mendacious harmonies: that was impermissible. The jew’s-harp players had no business representing the globe, urbi et orbi, but rather, if anything, the back of the world, the backwoods, the stubborn, proud, mournful backwoods existence. Wasn’t Abraham Lincoln himself, at least in his youth, the epitome of such an existence, with his own kind of jew’s-harp playing, one note after another emanating from his reflections, as he scrupulously avoided any kind of melodic demagoguery, listening first to the echo of each note, each thought, for a long, long time, and only then testing the next one in the wide-open spaces, and listening as each thought note, each sound thought, died away? Yes, indeed! Or had that not been Lincoln in person but rather the actor who played him, Henry Fonda, in Young Mr. Lincoln? So what if it had.